The then Chancellor Gordon Brown was asked about what music he liked in an interview in 2006. To widespread incredulity he claimed he woke up to indie band the Arctic Monkeys.
A few weeks later he was asked if he could name a single one of the tracks on their most recent album.
He admitted he couldn’t, before stating ‘they’re very loud’.
This week we are being subject to the excruciating spectacle of Keir Starmer and his colleagues experiencing their own Arctic Monkeys moment.
Though this time the locus is not the Britpop new wave, but the British flag.
On Monday the Prime Minister was asked about the Operation Raise The Colours movement, which has seen hundreds of Union Jacks and St George’s Crosses hoisted on lamp posts and motorway bridges, and painted on roundabouts across the country.
‘I am a supporter of flags,’ he replied, before going on to claim he has a St George’s flag proudly displayed in his Downing Street flat.
A day later Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was asked the same question.
Not to be outdone, she claimed to be flying more flags than the United Nations.
Apparently, she has Union Jack bunting on her garden shed. She’s got St George’s flags. She’s got St George’s bunting. She’s got Yorkshire rose bunting. She’s got Union Jack flags. She’s got Union Jack tablecloths. She’s even got Yorkshire Tea bunting, ‘which is probably taking things a bit far’, she conceded.
Yes, it is. The attempts of Labour ministers to appropriate and ingratiate themselves with the campaign to raise the flag are self-debasing, shameless and cringe-makingly inauthentic.
It’s true that politicians of all persuasions love to wrap themselves in the flag. Sometimes literally.
In 2011, the then Tory Party chair Sayeeda Warsi appeared at a tea party in Downing Street to celebrate the Royal Wedding dressed in a Union Jack saree. The same Baroness Warsi, incidentally, who a few months ago compared ‘Islamophobia’ in Britain to the Nazi anti-Semitism of the 1930s.
But at least Warsi was going with the cultural grain of her party. Flag waving is in the Tories’ DNA.
It isn’t in Labour’s. On Monday Starmer attempted to further boost his patriotic credentials by reminding his interviewer: ‘I always sit in front of a Union Jack. I’ve been doing it for years, and it attracted a lot of comment when I started doing it.’
But he hasn’t been doing it for that many years. He’s only been doing it since he was elected leader of the Labour Party.
And that wasn’t as a result of instinctive patriotism or a devotion to his country, but because of political expediency, and a desire to win a general election.
And the whole country knows it. Just as they know – because they saw it on their TV screens during Labour’s conference in 2018 – Sir Keir’s activists are more comfortable flying the Palestinian flag than their own.
When they were asked to sing the National Anthem in 2022 to mark the death of the Queen it was an exceptional, highly choreographed moment – one that Starmer’s senior aides admitted had them holding their breaths. And every Labour gathering still ends with a lusty celebration of the Red Flag of socialism. None of which means Labour is not a party that cares about its country.
But it is not a party that enjoys overt displays of patriotism and English nationalism.
And by adopting the pretence his ministers regularly return home to living rooms bedecked in Union Jack bunting, the Prime Minister is taking the British people for fools.
It is also reinforcing the impression of Sir Keir as a man with no meaningful belief structure. In 2020, when the Black Lives Matter movement was all the rage, Starmer dropped to his knees in his parliamentary office to show solidarity ‘with all those opposing anti-black racism’.
Now it’s Operation Raise The Colours that’s capturing the headlines. So suddenly Sir Keir is expressing his allegiance to those shimmying up flag lamp posts to express how they are ‘a group of proud English men with a common goal to show the rest of the country of how proud we are of our history, freedoms and achievements’. Who does the Prime Minister think he’s kidding?
If the PM genuinely thinks a single person involved in Operation Raise The Colours is going to look at his pronouncements and proclaim ‘Oh, Starmer’s got a St George’s Cross in his flat – he’s got my vote’, he’s even more deluded and out of touch than I feared.
There is something staggeringly patronising about the way Starmer and others in his administration seem to think brandishing the flag will somehow turn their political fortunes. As if this is what the voters in general, and working people in particular, are crying out for from their Government.
It isn’t. They don’t want more flags. They want secure borders. They want safer streets. They want an end to the rising cost of living.
And they couldn’t give two hoots if their Prime Minister has a St George’s flag in his window, or if their Home Secretary has a Union Jack draped around her shed.
At the start of this week Starmer announced yet another relaunch. It was dubbed as ‘phase two’ of the Government.
Senior aides stated it was an attempt to seize back control of the political agenda.
But all the frenzied flag-waving that has accompanied it shows the extent to which Starmer has actually lost control. Of his administration. Of his political project. And of the country he was elected to lead.
The real national agenda is now being set by Reform, who have dominated the airwaves over the summer. It’s being set by the residents protesting outside the migrant centres they believe are a threat to their communities.
And it’s being set by the self-styled patriots daubing St George’s Crosses on zebra crossings and roundabouts.
Sir Keir is merely being swept along by the tide now. Or, rather, swept away by it. Flailing, grasping, desperately trying to obtain some sort of grip on events.
But he can’t. And he never will if he attempts to mimic Gordon Brown’s Arctic Monkeys style of politics.
To give her her due, at least Emily Thornberry was honest. When she sent her infamous mocking tweet of a Rochester terrace, with its white van and St George’s flags – for which she temporarily had to resign – she was accurately projecting what a large proportion of her party’s colleagues and activists feel about acts of ostentatious patriotism.
If the next election is going to be decided by who manages to unfurl the biggest flag, then the Prime Minister may as well walk away now.
He should just hand the keys of No 10 to Nigel Farage. Or the ubiquitously online Tory MP Robert Jenrick, who can’t currently walk past a lamp post without scrambling up it to demonstrate his love of country.
Samuel Johnson famously wrote ‘patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’.
But it will provide no sanctuary for Keir Starmer.
