How the sausage is made

As she minces Keir Starmer's Labour Party conference speech, let's analyse the ingredients of an Allison Pearson column.

Previously: A Very Familiar Performance
A Very Royal Scandal — the second dramatisation of Newsnight’s Prince Andrew interview in six months — offers an equally smug perspective.

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You can imagine the grin spreading across Allison Pearson’s face as Keir Starmer stumbled in his Labour Party conference speech yesterday, referring to “the return of sausages” in Gaza instead of “hostages”. There was the hook for her column; a chance for her to do her wurst.

Starmer’s speech was bad but Pearson’s conclusion was set before he took to the stage. The day the Daily Telegraph cheers a Labour Prime Minister’s rhetoric before the faithful is the day the ravens desert the tower. The column’s headline and intro are the entry point to Allison’s alternate reality:

Starmer’s slip-up shows how little he cares about Israel’s hostages

The Prime Minister’s call for a ‘release of the sausages’ was more than just an unfortunate slip of the tongue — it was unforgivable.

The usual cry from columnists is that they don’t write the headlines so you shouldn’t judge their output by them. In this case, the subs have accurately boiled down the substance of Pearson’s position. She opens the column by writing about one of the Israeli hostages — 23-year-old Romi Gonen — whose mother, Meirav, she interviewed last week. She exploits the horrific details of Romi’s kidnap to transition into her review of Starmer’s speech:

Today, Romi Gonen will have been held captive in a tunnel in Gaza for 355 days. Yesterday, the Prime Minister of our country called for a ceasefire in Gaza and for the “release of the sausages”. Some will say it was just a slip of the tongue. I say it’s unforgivable.

Keir Starmer was too busy feeding red meat to Labour’s pro-Palestine bloc with his demand that Israel bring about a halt to the war (never mind that it is Hamas that refuses to agree to a ceasefire) to care much about the words that came after.

A bit of hollow grandstanding, play to the Islamist sympathisers who pose an electoral threat to Labour while making a token reference to the Jews. Huge applause in the hall, cheers. Job done!

The moment in the speech where Starmer, challenged by a protestor in the audience about Gaza, rolled out his now familiar line that “while he’s been protesting, we’ve changed the party” and joked that the heckler must have “a pass for the 2019 conference” doesn’t get a mention from Pearson. That’s because his ongoing support for Israel and tepid calls for a ceasefire don’t fit with the image she wants to paint of man in hock to “Islamist sympathisers”.

Having seized on Starmer’s slip of the tongue, Pearson puts her conspiratorial mind to work and offers her theory on why it was more than a mistake:

That’s why Starmer was distracted, why he faltered and made that awful blunder, confusing one of the most painful words in the language (hostages) with one of the silliest.

After picking through the many clumsy cliches in Starmer’s speech, Pearson delivers some false nostalgia for Labour Prime Ministers past:

Tony Blair would never have delivered a speech that censorious, stolid, patronising or downright pompous. “I will always treat you with the respect of candour.” You what? 

Starmer managed to make me nostalgic for Gordon Brown and the intermittent rictus grin, flashing like a demented lighthouse on the blink, after they told him to smile more…  Whatever you thought of his politics, Gordon Brown was a man of genuine intellect and passionate conviction. He had read Locke and Hume and would not have stooped to phrases like “mission-led”. His party has fallen to adenoidal mediocrities.

That’s the same Gordon Brown she described in a 2009 Daily Mail column as “a man behaving like a toddler about to have his train set taken away at 20 paces… a human tantrum”. Starmer need only wait 15 years for Pearson to use him as an example of statesmanship versus some future Labour leader.

Then comes the inevitable joke about Angela Rayner’s intelligence:

Because we’d listened to all that guff about fixing the foundations, Starmer treated us to a couple of minutes of joy and humour towards the end. Music, creativity was important, he ventured. “Shostakovich!” The camera alighted on the features of Angela Rayner. “Shostakovich? Didn’t she win Wimbledon last year?”

Remember when Rayner dared to watch some opera and was castigated by the same columnists for having ideas above her station?

During its brief lifetime, Starmer’s government have given the likes of Pearson so much ammunition. In her penultimate paragraph, she pulls together those mistakes into one long howl:

You know, I’m starting to wonder if Keir Starmer will be the first PM in our history to be booed at the Cenotaph. By November, he may well have killed off a few veterans with the removal of their winter fuel allowance. As he peered through his cool spectacles at the autocue (“sausages?”), you thought, “How much did those cost, then, and who paid for them?” This is the new Britain we are building; where you look upon Labour ministers and wonder if they bought their own clothing. 

The references get mashed together like a kind of meme sausage. She doesn’t need to provide any analysis because she’s relying on the reader’s recognition: “See, I’m just as angry as you are.”

Inevitably, Pearson quotes George Orwell earlier in the column, dipping into his essay Politics and the English Language to bolster her rickety rhetoric with something a little more robust. He might have been writing about Pearson when he observed:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy.

Pearson knows the lines her readers and editors expect to hear from her and she delivers them robotically each week to deadline. It’s appropriate that the human equivalent of a mincing machine should be so triggered by the word ‘sausages’.

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