Those who say the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Keir Starmer, is a vapid automaton good only for platitudes are wrong. He felt something once, but it wasn’t in England.

It occurred on the island nation of Jamaica, where he had the privilege of visiting some death row inmates. He claims he was “horrified” by their living conditions – and threw a fit, maybe “where are their Orlebar Brown swimming trunks” or “WHERE IS THE BLOODY CHAMPAGNE – AND NOT JUST ANY CHAMPAGNE, TATTINGER – GOOD YEAR AN’ ALL”.

He didn’t manage to get the men complimentary IWC Pilot’s watches, but he did succeed in saving a few from old sparky – which is fine, considering that some of these men had only disembowelled girlfriends and shot up taverns. Not like they questioned on Facebook whether the head of the Metropolitan Police was a cross-dresser or anything like that.

The first battle Keir Starmer won was his easiest. Riding shotgun with Jeremy Corbyn into opposition in 2015 were a bunch of posh boys – privately educated Humphreys and Tarquins, who would spend their weeks demanding that Britain’s corporations hand over their jewels to their workers immediately, before retreating to their country piles.

Momentum

At some point this movement, named Momentum, was told that Britain’s problems were actually caused by Jews. Ah, they said, that’s what’s wrong, so they began intimidating some Jewish Labour MPs, and when the Jewish MPs complained, the notes were flushed down the loo by Corbyn’s assistant (a young lady from a family of “communists” who just so happened to own real estate in Mayfair – and a Picasso).

Corbyn gets trounced in 2019’s elections and Starmer, a former head of Britain’s equivalent of the NPA, rocks up. Thanks to Corbyn’s little militia, the party has a burning anti-Semitism issue, but the poshos aren’t tough guys – nowhere close to the level of thuggery that accompanied the likes of Tony Blair or Thabo Mbeki into power – and they’re not exactly bright either. Starmer, a “proud” London “lefty” lawyer married to a Jewish lady, rounds on them and it’s a simple case of Barnaby-Bunny-Hugh – into-my-office-now-you’re-a-bloody-disgrace-you’re-fired etc.

Then it is summer 2020. No other politician in the world encounters the fortune Starmer does: the government is bumbling through – what we’re told to believe is – a health crisis. The scientists  advising it are ideologically twinned with him and his party, the Jew-baiters are finished, and just when it couldn’t get any better, another current thing surfaces.

Starmer is in his parliamentary office one day when an assistant scurries in and explains that in America, there’s a whole bunch of kneeling going on, so kneel. But the cameraman hauled in to document the moment the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition goes voodoo captures something else which partially explains why he’s now enduring a crisis of accepting expensive couture from a donor. In that now infamous kneeling photo, he’s wearing black shoes with thick rubber soles – the kind (Former Trade & Industry Minister) Rob Davies used to wear. Those shoes aren’t Westminster. They’re General Secretary of the Worker’s Party of Korea, or Laos.

Easiest run

He has the easiest run of any opposition leader in living memory. Across the aisle are clowns, snorters, and tech bros – all he has to do is pick apart their weekly excuses about the failure the Conservatives are bringing on their office and country. When campaigning for the election of July 2024 starts, someone recommends that he speak about his father, so he does, and at 23 documented events throughout the season, he utters the words: “my father was a toolmaker”.

The words are striking, because everyone up until now has always seen him as aloof, but that changes to the sequence of a man dragging a sack of chisels back to his wretched tenement covered in lead-based paint, where he can hardly afford to eat, let alone buy his son thick rubber-soled shoes.

Despite millions of imaginations being lit up, Rodney Starmer wasn’t really a toolmaker like that. He was the factory-owning, Companies House director kind – who could send his son to fee-paying schools, then accept invitations to receptions on Buckingham Palace’s lawns.

Fewer people voted for Keir Starmer than for Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. It should be clear to him that the country doesn’t really like him – that they were just disgusted by 14 years of Tory profligacy, sleaze, and incompetence – but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Riots

No sooner has he entered Downing Street when riots consume parts of England, sparked by the murder of three little girls. There is some profound, granular detail here – about a nation’s identity crisis, the failures of local government, a two-tiered society reflected through media, policing, and justice, the vanishing of aspiration – but he doesn’t want to hear a word of it. It’s thick rubber sole time and everyone is “far right”.

He jails hundreds of rioters, addressing the lack of space in jails by setting free actual criminals, some of whom re-offend within the first 24 hours. He then withdraws election promises by grounding granny’s winter petrol supply – but is smacked in the face with claims of freebies. Two-tier Keir becomes free-gear Keir. He’s not alone. His deputy, Foreign and Education Secretaries are also revealed to have been recipients of Lord Waheed Alli’s largesse. Hopes that the country will climb out of the hole it’s in are dashed. More likely is that it will collapse on its way out.

At the time of writing, Keir Starmer has been humiliated at his own party conference, the faithful unanimously voting against his granny torture scheme. His Chancellor, Brick Top, is seething, making up numbers in her head then spitting them out with the fury of someone about to feed human body parts to a pig.

Some weeks ago, a few women came forward with allegations of sexual assault by the late Mohamed Al-Fayed, former owner of Harrods. Just as in the failure to prosecute the notorious paedophile Jimmy Savile when he was alive, the Crown Prosecution Service appears to have failed these women too. Who was the boss during this era of depravity? That would have been Keir Starmer.

So, here’s the deal, England: if you want to chase away your black dog of depression, fill your boots with free shit – you won’t find any better advice than from your Daily Friend. Either you start planning what atrocities you can visit on Jamaica – barbecuing a few folk is one idea, or becoming a deranged television host, or buying a department store and going the full Josef Fritzl. Won’t be long before you hear the sound of communist soles racing to your cell.

The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.

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Image: UK Prime Minister’s Office via Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/53839153838


contributor

Simon Reader grew up in Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2001, where he was an energy entrepreneur until 2014. In South Africa, he wrote a weekly column for Business Day, then later Biznews.com. Today he manages a fund based in London, is a trustee of an educational charity, and lives between the UK and California.