Celebrating the marionette monarch

The King's Speech and the media response to it remains one of the weirdest British constitutional traditions.

Previously: All the benefits of martyrdom

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In his introduction to the King’s Speech, a spectacle that involved a man arriving in a golden carriage to pop on a golden hat before reading the government’s buzzword-splattered plans in a dusty RP accent, Keir Starmer wrote that the “era of politics as performance” is over. As I sat down to write this edition, the Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh, popped up on the radio to comment how “amazing it was to hear the King talking about buses”.

While this was the first Labour-written King’s Speech from a new government since 1945, the oddness of the whole exercise with its kidnapped MP, Harry Potter-esque inventory of special items (the sword of state, the cap of maintenance), and Black Rod door knock fuckery is so familiar from the years of Queen Elizabeth II headlining the show that we’re expected to see it as basically normal. We’re told again and again that this is the pageantry and tradition that Britain does so well, the pomp the whole world envies [citation needed].

Media coverage of state openings of parliament follows a familiar pattern. There’s the oohing and aahing over the uniforms, followed by the Kremlinology about the way the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition seem to be getting on as they make their way through Parliament. Where the understandable frostiness between Corbyn and Johnson was once the focus, it’s now about how chummy Starmer and Sunak seemed to be. MailOnline called their conversation a “bromance” while the Daily Mirror said they were “caught gossiping” as if they were a pair of high schoolers on their way to the dinner hall. Inevitably a lipreader was brought in to decode their chat.

Predicting how the individual papers would respond to the speech didn’t require any special skills. The Telegraph has a scary story for its readers warning that Starmer has handed power to three of their greatest boogeymen — “unions, workers and tenants”. Its tame ex-Labour MP columnist Tom Harris had his contribution wondering if the measures outlined in the speech would “do more harm than good” out so quickly that he must have had it written well before Charlie had left Buckingham Palace:

There was plenty to occupy commentators who rail against the nanny state, which is very thoughtful of ministers. Smoking, junk food and smiling too much (probably) will all be tightly restricted in future by new legislation.

The man knows how to get his fellow Telegraph harrumphers excited.

The Daily Mail continues its campaign to make Starmer’s resolutely neo-Blairite government sound like a Bolshevik wave by branding the announcements “Keir’s red revolution”. VAT on private school fees is “class warfare” while the paper pretends that opposition objections to Labour’s planned planning reforms will represent any kind of threat given the government’s massive majority.

As the right-wing attempts to make the King’s Speech sound terrifying, the Labour backing papers stretch to find something exciting in the announcements. The Daily Mirror writes excitedly about Starmer “[beginning] to rebuild Britain” while The Guardian trumpets the Prime Minister’s claim that he will counter “the snake oil charm of populism” and delights in a “packed speech”.

For the i, Kitty Donaldson says it’s clear that Starmer will lead an “interventionist” government. Elsewhere the publication dedicates plenty of space to listing the things that were absent from the speech, including measures on migration and benefits (they’re saving the truly depressing policies for another day). The Independent takes the same approach asking, ‘What was missing from the King’s Speech?’ with Andrew Grice calling the continued cowardly refusal to scrap the two-child cap “a hole at the heart of the King’s Speech” and John Rentoul stating the bleeding obvious by saying that it’s delivery that will “make or break Starmer”.

The instant columnist responses to a speech crammed with the promise of 40 bills are as much part of the pageantry as King Charles’ robotic recitation of them. How they see the government’s agenda taking shape is refracted through the prism of their publication’s established stance. The Mail isn’t going to suddenly line up behind Labour but The Sun’s late-in-the-day election endorsement means it is straining to find sunshine where it would once have predicted disaster.

The Sun headlined its King’s Speech story Grand Designs and it includes a graphic highlighting “a pay rise for workers” and the hope that a “pensions boost could add £11k to retirement pots”. But head to the analysis boxout from the paper’s political editor Harry ‘Bunter’ Cole and you’ll discover that the title’s support for Starmer is still superficial at best. He writes:

Britain bumps around flatling growth and the NHS continues to be an almost insatiable money pit. Will reams more red tape, fewer vapes, more strikes and more quangos really do anything to help that? I'm not so sure... 

If the new Labour government had hoped for the hyperbolic rush of support that the old New Labour government bought from News Corp, it’s clearly out of luck. While The Times offers a more equivocal verdict (“Sir Keir Starmer has eschewed populism in favour of practical measures, but some policies may be contentious.”) the fact that Rupert Murdoch, that other elderly king, wanted his papers to back the winner doesn’t look like it’ll translate to ongoing cheerleading.

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