Charisma? No thank you, 

dull Starmer is the ideal antidote to barmy Boris

I’ve had it with charisma (and vice versa, the wags will say). I just don’t think it has any place in a Prime Minister’s persona.

 

I want my PM to be serious. To look as though he knows what he is doing, even if he doesn’t. The very antithesis of Boris Johnson, in fact.

 

Boris, running fingers through his unruly blond thatch, would bumble and bluster as though he hadn’t a clue. He was both Laurel and Hardy at the same time.

 

This was the Silly Ass Stratagem, no doubt invented by public schoolboys, perfected and monetized by P G Wodehouse in his Bertie Wooster novels.

 

The ruse has been employed by generations of spies, salesmen and politicians to deflect suspicion. It was Boris’s way of disarming or wrong-footing opponents.

 

World leaders, Emmanuel Macron especially, found it irritating and unprofessional, perhaps even deceitful – because they knew Boris was a clever man.

 

So, I am warming to Sir Keir Starmer. He’s serious. He’s dull. He’s seriously dull. If you doubt it, try to find the interview he did with Channel 4’s Cathy Newman.

 

“Tell us one interesting or surprising thing about yourself,” she challenged him.

 

“I did violin lessons with Fatboy Slim back in the day,” he answered.

 

See what I mean? It is neither interesting nor surprising. Just magnificently dull. Like telling us he once filled in his tax form in 24 minutes. Good Lord, is that the time? (as our esteemed Editor would say).

 

With the state the country is in, we don’t need star quality in our leader, we don’t need brilliant but erratic; we need someone dedicated, focused, a safe pair of hands.

 

I felt encouraged when I saw Starmer greeting leaders at Blenheim Palace, birthplace of Winston Churchill, for a gathering of the European Political Community, hosted by King Charles.

 

The Prime Minister looked relaxed, affable, confident – perfectly at home in the company of fellow dullsters (though naturally I don’t include Italian PM Giorgia Meloni in that description).

 

And he has got off to a good start. His “patriotic mission” to bring key industries back into public ownership is necessary, especially for the railways and, I would argue, the water companies too.

 

We have seen how bosses have bled these industries by paying themselves fortunes in salaries and bonuses, giving shareholders hefty dividends and all the while squeezing investment.

 

The bonuses were justified not by a better train service, but by a better bottom line. The only losers have been the paying passengers.

 

I believe in capitalism but this is the phoney sort. Capitalism only works if there is fierce competition, and risk to go with the reward. The charlatans who run these industries face no competition at all. Their firms are monopolies.

 

I had high hopes for the new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who has an advantage over some of her predecessors. She is a former economist at the Bank of England. I’m all for expertise in those to whom we have granted high office.

 

I have never understood why ambitious and ideologically driven politicians are given charge of the nation’s finances with only a degree in history or PPE to guide them. Brainy Gordon Brown had a history degree – and sold our gold reserves at a rock bottom price.

 

Reeves talked a good game in the run-up to the General Election (still less than three weeks ago). She spoke of decisions being taken in the context of the fiscal situation. She promised not to raise taxes.

 

But there are signs that those promises are already fraying. Reeves is getting ready to pay the 5.5 per cent wage rises recommended for teachers, nurses and other public service workers.

 

It would leave an £8 billion black hole, which could only be filled by more austerity … or tax rises. Reeves has ordered a review of public finances, which some believe she will use to justify higher taxes in an Autumn Budget.

 

She will not touch income tax, or VAT or National Insurance. But just watch your council tax bill rocket.

 

It is why, even though I despaired of the Tories, I could not bring myself to vote Labour. They can’t help themselves, it’s just what they do. The honeymoon is nearly over.

 

*****

 

Matthew Parris, a columnist on The Times for 36 years, has decided, aged 74, to put his feet up. He proves it by allowing a valedictory piece in the Saturday magazine to be illustrated with a picture of him reclining in a hammock.

 

It’s an entertaining read that begins with his awful realisation that he was 39 and had only a string of failures to look back on.

 

Then Charlie Wilson, the Editor who brought The Times kicking and screaming into the 20th Century, offered him a gig writing the political sketch.

 

He took it but declined a staff job, to the bemusement of the Managing Editor. It was risky and insecure but it allowed Parris as a freelance to take on other work, notably for the Spectator.

 

His first outing as a sketch writer for The Times took him to the 1988 Liberal conference where delegates debated what their party’s name should be. Red meat to a columnist.

 

Day two did not go so well. Bored by the proceedings, he failed to file. At around 5pm, Parris reports, the desk called him from The Times’s Wapping HQ. Where was his column? Nothing worth writing about, he said.

 

“The silence was thunderous,” writes Parris. “A fundamental truth about journalism was explained to me in a few choice words: There was now a hole in the newspaper where my sketch was supposed to be. Never mind if you have anything to write. Write.”

 

Parris expounds with wit and candour on the columnist’s craft. But as a former sub-editor, the bit I liked was where he posed the frequently asked question: Does a columnist write the headline?

 

“No. Nor should we. The sub does. They’re better at it. Our own attempts would be lengthy, lugubrious, full of cautious qualifications and unreadable.”

 

Parris is not giving up entirely. He will still write a Wednesday notebook and a new monthly column.

 

*****

 

A friend tells me a story that I would have included in last week’s piece about Jeffrey Bernard if I had known it then.

 

Bernard, it seems, used to go to watch the play Keith Waterhouse wrote about him, called Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, when it first opened with Peter O’Toole starring.

 

Once, he slipped out of the stalls for a drink at the bar. “We’re closed,” the barmaid told him.

 

“I’m Jeffrey Bernard,” he said.

 

“Don’t be stupid,” the barmaid said, “I’ve seen the play and you look nothing bloody like him.”

 

*****

 

Comedian Bob Monkhouse hosted The National Lottery Live show on BBC from 1996 to 1998 and came up with the catchphrase: “I know I’m a sinner, but make me a winner”.

 

His opening gag routine apart, it was a terrible show. The high point was when a machine randomly plucked out the winning numbers. Oh, the excitement!

 

But occasionally Monkhouse would redeem it with a flash of improvised genius. Once, when his autocue failed, he did a whole routine off the top of his head, a feat that few comics could have matched.

 

Another night the machine that picked the numbers failed. Unfazed, Monkhouse turned to the camera and said: “Mystic Meg’s been predicting this all day.”

 

His quick wit made him a regular on chat shows and eventually they gave him his own. Naturally enough, he invited his mates on – and his comedy heroes and emerging comics such as Robin Williams.

 

He regarded it as on-the-job training and wrote to a friend that it was “utterly absorbing and a hell of an education in what works and what doesn’t with the chat show format”.

 

His letter, reproduced in Bob Monkhouse Unpublished, by Dave Ismay and Chris Gidney, went on: “What an extraordinary mob of humans we comedians are! Megalomaniac, modest, eager, haughty, over-confident, shit-scared, sharp-witted and pickle-brained … no two alike.”

 

Monkhouse then offered his thoughts on the stars who had joined him on the show. “The most impressive in person, both off- and on-stage, were Bob Hope (of course), Sid Caesar, Joan Rivers and Steven Wright.”

 

But if critics thought the show generally too fawning and oleaginous, in private he gave a caning to some famous names.

 

“I discovered again,” he wrote, “that Norman Wisdom is the world’s greatest arsehole (how had I forgotten?), that no amount of stroking and affection will win cooperation from Spike Milligan, that Warren Mitchell doesn’t eat pork because he’s a pig, that performing causes Kenny Everett to turn translucent with funk...”

 

None of which surprises me very much. Isn’t that funny?

 

*****

 

And so is this… “I spilled some stain remover on my sleeve. How do you get that out?” – BM.

RICHARD DISMORE

23 July 2024