I’m finding the angles on this quite hard to keep up with, but the general vibe of his No 10 operation is the sort of snakepit you may expect to find in the Kuntsevo Dacha 15 minutes after Stalin was discovered on the shagpile.
Can someone gift the prime minister a designer spade? He wants to keep digging. If Keir Starmer were a celebrity, this week we’d be looking for the black hole in his publicist’s brain. Alas, these are mildly testing times for anyone who bought into the always ridiculous idea of No Drama Starmer. The prime minister has officially graduated into his Some Drama Starmer era, and – like all prime ministers ever – is on the ineluctable journey towards his All Drama Starmer era. This journey is of variable speed, of course – sometimes it takes 11 years, and sometimes it takes 44 days.
The PM is never going to be Loves the Drama Starmer, though, judging by his amusingly defensive response that it is basically essential for him to be by far and away parliament’s biggest receiver of hospitality and freebies, as well as being one half of the sort of couple on a combined salary of over two hundred grand who can’t buy their own clothes, and also a guy who has a weakness for multiple pairs of designer glasses. Forgive me – “luxury eyewear”, with a value of £2,485.
I sympathise with his football security issue but can’t quite keep a straight face over the hammy melodrama of the statement: “… never going to an Arsenal game again because I can’t accept hospitality is pushing it a bit far”. We could be mere days away from an explanation that accepting £4,000-worth of Taylor Swift tickets off the Premier League is a basic human right. (I’m afraid my reaction to the phrase “£698 of Coldplay tickets” is: how many thousand Coldplay tickets is that?)
Nor did Starmer completely nail the tone when addressing the full-spectrum briefing war currently being waged between his chief of staff, who now gets paid more than him and is fine with that; internal enemies of his chief of staff, who get paid less than they were expecting and are not fine with it; his senior adviser and political strategist; lesser spads; and – I think? – the cabinet secretary….
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After the truth-shower 