Winter of discount takes: Johnson libels Kermit, Starmer writes an essay and columnists go back to the 70s...
As shortages spread and energy prices 'soar', look forward to more cold comfort from hot takes.
It’s a curious wrinkle of history that one of my favourite tweets of all time…
I hate the muppets bcuz of the Pig girl, she was disgusting, i hate her with my life, she doesnot leave the lizard alone
… has, without any intervention from the anonymous author @jawbroken, whose account is now locked, inadvertently become a piece of political analysis.
Little did @jawbroken know when they wrote those words on November 7 2010 that almost 11 years later the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland — himself looking like Jim Henson creation abandoned on taste grounds — would evoke Kermit and Miss Piggy at a speech to the UN.
In an address whose theme was ostensibly that world leaders should “grow up”, it was ironic that Boris Johnson, whose development is so arrested it may never get off remand, reached back to the television of the long-70s1 for an example. Johnson told the U.N General Assembly:
… when Kermit the Frog — Kermit the Frog — sang, ‘It’s not easy being green’ — you remember that one? — I want you to know that he was wrong, he was wrong. It is easy. It’s not only easy, it’s lucrative and it’s right to be green — he was also unnecessarily rude to Miss Piggy, I thought… but it is easy to be green. We have the technology, as we used to say when I was kid.
He slipped another 70s reference in there at the end — which appears to have passed most political hacks by — to The Six Million Dollar Man, a show that went off the air when Johnson was 14 (“We can rebuild him. We have the technology…”) Adjusted for inflation, the cost of rebuilding Steve Austin, the titular Six Million Dollar Man, would be around $37 million (roughly £27 million). That’d be less catchy but it would be just under half the money Boris Johnson wasted on the unbuilt Garden Bridge while Mayor of London.
It’s appropriate that Johnson — a man whose political career is built on a combination of playing it dumb and wild, boosterish optimism — should try to hijack the good feeling of The Muppet Show and the “everything’s wrapped up at the end of a 50-minute episode” attitude of The Six Million Dollar Man.
The man who was the boy who wanted to be “world king” still sees himself as the protagonist of the universe and remains convinced he can wrap it all up in the end. Where David Cameron was the essay crisis Prime Minister, finally caught out by his inadequate revision during the Brexit referendum, Boris Johnson is a man for whom crisis is a permanent state.
In May, Dominic Cummings — the Mekon if he were less obsessed with space rays and more enamoured by the ramblings of Silicon Valley wingnuts — claimed the Prime Minister had told him:
Chaos isn’t that bad, it means people have to look to me to see who is in charge.
Well now, with shortages increasing and an energy crisis spiralling out of control, people look to see who is in charge and find him traducing Kermit the Frog and basing his future strategy on half-remembered Six Million Dollar Man episodes.
The Six Children (Probably) Man has no answers beyond appeals to nostalgia (Blue passports! The return of Imperial weights and measures! A government subsidy for Space Hoppers!) even as the media — including his most loyal outriders — starts to conjure less cosy images of the seventies.
In The Times today, James Forsyth — a human Speak & Spell jerry-rigged to repeat government lines with increasing monotony — writes a piece headlined The spectre of the Seventies haunts the Tories.
Of course, Forsyth, best friend of Chancellor risky Rishi Sunak since their school days at Winchester, is truer and bluer than Poppa Smurf locked in an industrial freezer, so the 70s spectre that he’s on about isn’t the party’s widespread tolerance of noncery during that period or the retro racism it seems determined to bring back but “inflation” which is a horror story Tories have long used to make naughty backbenchers eat up all their swan and slope off to bed with their own wives for once. He writes:
Inflation holds a particular fear for the Tory party. Margaret Thatcher always used to argue that governments could survive high unemployment but not high inflation as that hit everybody, with the old — a key Tory voting bloc — bearing the brunt. Hence Norman Lamont’s infamous declaration that unemployment was a “price well worth paying” to control inflation.
One cabinet minister argues that these parallels are overdone, pointing out that today’s world economy is far less dependent on gas than the global economy of the 1970s was on oil. They argue that the Tory approach should be more Macmillan than Thatcher, accepting that a certain level of inflation is a sign of (dare one say a “price worth paying for”?) a rising economy.
Forsyth recalling Lamont’s lizard-like coldness in calculating that unemployment was a “price well worth paying”, leads me to recall a far more recent set of quotes from Allegra Stratton, the journalist-turned-government-flack who also happens to be his wife.
Back in May 2012, Stratton, then working for the BBC’s Newsnight programme, produced a package on housing benefits and ‘welfare reform’, in which she interviewed a young woman called Shanene Thorpe. Stratton clearly had an agenda during her short interview with Thorpe:
Stratton: You’re on housing benefit, you get help from the state for your housing, don’t you think you should have possibly lived at home until the point at which you could support your own house?
Thorpe: Well, I find that living at home with my mum just wouldn’t be an option space wise… there’s not enough space for…
Stratton: How big’s her flat or house?
Thorpe: She does have a two-bedroom flat.
Stratton: It doesn’t sound to me like your house and your mother’s house… your mother’s flat is a bad place. So it’s a choice you’re making and it’s a choice that comes with a price tag attached.
Thorpe: Yes, it’s a choice but at the same time, you know, I don’t think living in my mum’s house would have been constructive.
Stratton: But I mean we both know people who are living with their parents, they don’t have a job, and they have fights. That’s what happens. But they don’t have a financial choice.
Thorpe: I think that’s the difference because I’m asking for help towards, I’m not asking for a free handout.
In another part of the interview, which was not broadcast, Stratton asked Thorpe if she thought she should have had her daughter.
Thorpe, who at the time the interview was filmed was working for Tower Hamlets Council, was claiming housing benefit simply because the rents in the area were so high, wrote:
I got a call from my supervisor asking if I’d be happy to be filmed at work to show the side of the working single parent/young person…
I did not expect to be personally scrutinised, have judgements made about my choices and asked why I didn’t choose to get rid of my child.
In September 2012, after Thorpe organised a petition that received over 27,000 signatures, Newsnight broadcast an on-air apology to her.
Stratton sailed on, moving first to ITV News to be Robert Peston’s side-kick then to Number 11 to work for her husband’s best mate Sunak before being poached by the Prime Minister to front TV briefings that never happened. She’s now safely ensconced as the spokesperson for the COP-26 conference.
It’s clear to me that Stratton’s 1970s views are in line with Forsyth’s. When he writes about what the Tory Party fears, he is writing about himself2. The dividing line between him as a journalist and the politicians he writes about, including his best pal Sunak and The Spectator editor turned Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is functionally invisible.
Would The Times — where Janice Turner made jaunty jokes about feeling like a Soviet housewife yesterday and Rod Liddle wrote nostalgically of Toast Toppers and David Owen a couple of weeks back — have been so lenient to a hypothetical Jeremy Corbyn administration if it had presided over a disastrously high Covid death toll followed by food shortages and an energy crisis? Or might the insinuations it made about a military coup if Corbyn had ever become Prime Minister have taken on a much harder edge if he’d actually done it?
I rather suspect the kind of 1970s nostalgia we’d be getting then would be for the alleged 1974 coup plot against Harold Wilson and a lot of people nodding to A Very British Coup, former MP Chris Mullin’s 1982 novel3, not as a satirical thriller but a handbook.
Instead, The Daily Telegraph — Boris Johnson’s once and future home — is publishing articles like today’s by Judith Woods (Dial it down, Generation Z – and embrace ‘jumpernomics’ instead of overheating your homes) in which the predicted escalation of the energy crisis this winter is presented as a chance to grab some retro knitwear. Woods writes, presumably with a straight face, that:
I’m no ExxonMobil stooge, but let’s face it, unless we start wrapping our homes in Welsh wool or have them entirely sealed in plastic by those blokes at the airport, this sort of change will take time.
So might I suggest in the intervening period we – drum roll, please – begin by insulating ourselves. Ta-dah! How radical is that?
Let’s call it jumpernomics; the pullover pathway to economic prosperity, one cosy layer at a time. Because even if you can afford to keep your downstairs loo at Club Tropicana temperatures all year round, why would you? Far better to embrace British hygge, albeit without the triple-glazed, argon-filled windows and airtight heat recovery systems beloved of the Scandinavians.
In truth, there’s nothing new about this sort of wrap-up-and-get-on-with-things approach. It’s a way of life for owners of draughty stately piles the length of the land who may have a priceless van Dyck in the great hall and a Canaletto in the garderobe, but can still see their breath in the morning.
Our hothouse flower children may laugh aloud at this, but once upon a time, everyone could see their breath in the morning. And we survived. People were also a lot slimmer in the 1970s, although that possibly has as much to do with smoking as moving about to stay warm…
“My ‘I’m no ExxonMobil stooge’ t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.”4
Again, can you imagine for one moment that The Daily Telegraph would run a column telling readers and their recalcitrant teens to put on a pullover when it gets cold if a Labour government was in power?
And, of course, this being The Daily Telegraph we’re meant to forego the heating because it’s what those poor, put-upon owners of stately homes with running costs far beyond their means do. “If it’s good enough for the real toffs, it’s good enough for you wannabes…” is one of the enduring Telegraph editorial rules.
Similarly, the determination among Telegraph columnists and their editors that members of the younger generations must be to blame for everything leads Woods to seem to genuinely argue that Generation Z is full of softies who have ditched the great British past-time of waking up cold, going to bed cold, and being snapped from your slumber by the hiss coming off someone else’s piss as it hits a freezing toilet bowl.
Woods even offers up her own spin on the Four Yorkshireman sketch, explaining:
I grew up, one of five girls, in a three-bedroom house “heated” by a single coal fire in the sitting room. Frost etched on the inside of the bedroom window was a given, chilblains were the norm. I studied for my A-levels with a hot water bottle on my lap.
She had to walk fifty miles to school, backwards, while being pelted with rotten pilchards — which was the style at the time — before sitting in a bucket of ice for the duration of her morning lessons, being hosed down with freezing water at breaktimes (“as a livener”) then, after walking home through a frozen bog, she was made to do her homework while defrosting a walk-in-freezer… every night. You try to tell that to Generation Z and they won’t believe you.
Away from my fevered — or should that be hypothermic — imagination, Woods concludes her piece by saying:
Imagine it. Youngsters can virtue-signal their concern for the planet while saving cash. I guarantee that pleasing circularity will generate a greater glow than any radiator.
Ah yes, wanting to be warm in your own home is a failure of virtue-signalling. Because obviously, it’s the millennials and Gen-Z who are to blame for a broken energy sector, a failure to prepare for this crisis, and rented housing of all kinds that is insufficiently insulated by landlords who couldn’t care less if your toes drop off and you have a permanent icicle hanging from your nose.
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s contribution to the retro-70s mood is to produce a pamphlet for the Fabian Society — 14,000 words in which clichés abide and policies are only a faint flavour, like the mustiness in a badly-made cup of tea.
Into an attention economy dominated by streaming services, the bite-sized brain dazzlers of TikTok and, for a lot of people picking up books, the new Sally Rooney novel, Starmer contributes prose so stolid, so airless, so lacking in style, wit or charm that each sentence feels longer than a prison term slapped on someone for stealing a bottle of water.5
The Guardian practically severs its spine bending over backwards to explain that Starmer’s essay is good actually. In an editorial headlined Keir Starmer essay sets Labour on course for centre ground, Heather Stewart and Jessica Elgot, claim that his pamphlet:
Keir Starmer has set Labour on a decisive course toward the centre ground in a 35-page statement of intent that emphasises the values of hard work, contributing to society and partnership with the private sector.
Labour leftwingers are likely to see the 14,000-word document – entitled The Road Ahead – as marking a shift away from the Corbyn era’s radical spending promises, such as the large-scale nationalisations of the railways, water, Royal Mail and broadband providers.
Yes, it represents a shift away from — whatever your view of Corbyn — Labour saying it will do specific things that it believes would improve people’s lives towards a policy of statements so vague they couldn’t even be used for a corporate mission statement. It’s great news for “hard-working families” but bad news if you’re only moderately hard-working, don’t have a family, can’t work, or otherwise don’t fit into the white picket fence dream Starmer is hawking.
Elgot and Stewart write sentences that mimic the emptiness of Starmer’s rhetoric while attempting to persuade the reader that he’s really done something:
In Starmer’s essay, that focus has been swept away and replaced by a declaration that, “the role of government is to be a partner to private enterprise, not stifle it.”
A Labour government would allow the public to “take back control” of their lives, Starmer wrote, making good on the promises made by Brexiters five years ago and building a “contribution society,” that rewards hard work.
In the pamphlet for the Fabian Society, designed to defy critics who have bemoaned his lack of ideology, Starmer pledges to “repair the public finances”.
Nothing says, “I have a clear ideology” like a series of bland slogans which could equally have come tumbling out of Boris Johnson’s mouth in between references to 1970s kids TV and some Latin thrown in to impress the most gullible of the political hacks (“He did a Latin! He truly is a genius polymath who doesn’t brush his hair because he’s too busy thinking and not simply because it’s a trick to make him seem relatable…")
Despite lines like “the role of government is to be a partner to private enterprise, not stifle it,” The Independent’s chief political commentator and most undead employee John Rentoul told Times Radio yesterday that while he had positive things to say about Starmer’s essay it was “not quite Blairite enough [for him].”
The only way Starmer could be sufficiently Blairite for John Rentoul is if he, in a Nicholas Cage in Face-Off style scheme, stole Blair’s features, grafted them onto his own skull and then declared that he was going to start a big, beautiful new war, this time with Iran. In that case, Rentoul’s excitement would splash all over his Tony Blair bedspread, bedsheets, and commemorate Blair pillowcases.
Far be it from me to defend Starmer — I’m not here to praise him or to bury him but to laugh at him as despair rises in my stomach — but Matt ‘Chuckles’ Chorley, on whose Times Radio show Rentoul made his appearance, spent the morning yesterday undertaking a pathetic exercise at the Labour leader’s expense. He and his production team had a synthesised voice read out Starmer’s words throughout the programme — the gag was worn out by the second time around — and included a section about Starmer’s mother’s chronic illness and how that had affected him as a young man.
It was a pathetic move and one I again seriously doubt Times Radio or Chorley would have done it if the passage about a politician’s dead mother had been written by a Tory. In fact, I’m fairly certain they would have found a way to be impressed with the effort if Boris Johnson had penned 14,000 words, possibly obsessing over one or two cheeky references.
That approach was evident during the Times Radio ‘Brighter’ Breakfast Show earlier in the day when the newspaper review pitted Stephanie Bolzen of Welt — who was distinctly unimpressed with Boris Johnson’s gag-filled appearance at the UN — against animatronic colostomy bag, Quentin Letts — who spent the segment telling Bolzen, a serious, considered journalist, to “lighten up”, while Stig Abell chuckled in the background.
That said, just as Johnson’s jokes were not even remotely as funny as client journalists pretended they were, Starmer’s essay was not nearly as worthy of serious analysis as hacks with the hots for him were willing to give it. While Rafael Behr grumbled about the pamphlet in The Guardian…
…two cleverly chosen words at the heart of Starmer’s pamphlet stake out a viable position. The problem is in the other 13,998, which suffocate decent ideas with platitude and entomb them in boilerplate.
… he quickly back-tracked on Twitter, in a reply to a tweet6 that claimed that “Starmer’s essay is actually quite good and shows interesting progress. I’m glad we now live in a country where the Labour leader would rather write an essay setting out his views than go on countless marches and rallies with Communist sympathisers.” Behr replied: “Sets the bar low, but I think this fair.”
There’s more retro-70s thinking for you: Going to marches, meetings and working with trade unions is just hanging out with “Communist sympathisers”. Much better to write a pamphlet for the ‘right’ people.
For The Spectator, Sam Leith is understandably able to savage Starmer’s deathly prose, comparing it to a tabloid prank:
Many years ago, a tabloid newspaper played an unkind prank on the author of a very long and much talked-about literary novel. They sent a reporter to various bookshops to place a slip of paper into copies of the book 50 pages or so from the end. The slip said that if you phoned a particular phone number, the newspaper would pay you a fiver. Gleefully, some weeks later, they reported that nobody had telephoned to collect their prize – from which they deduced that despite its sales figures, practically nobody was actually reading the book to the end.
About halfway through reading Keir Starmer’s new pamphlet for the Fabian Society – The Road Ahead – I wondered idly whether a similar prank had been played. Somewhere in italic type, halfway through a paragraph on the penultimate page, perhaps there was a message: ‘The first person to call 1-800-KEIR gets to be Shadow Home Secretary.’ It’s the only explanation – that the document is a loyalty test aimed at a very small handful of close advisers – that I could see for such a thing to be published.
His conclusion is correct, despite the vehicle for delivering it:
If, as it’s reported, Sir Keir has toiled and agonised for months to produce this cobblers, God help him and the party he leads.
We are living in a nation cursed by nostalgia for a 1950s that never existed and the politics of a 1970s that has been boiled down to a series of clichés and campaign attack lines. It is the Dominic Sandbrookification of history and has become endemic as both major parties seek to appeal to brains addled by Facebook memes about the halycon days when the binmen were hard, milk came in glass bottles, and far fewer people had a say in the world.
The Muppet Show ran from 1976 to 1981
Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph has effectively filed the same column as Forsyth, more inflation scare stories for his desiccated audience.
Which I’d call a product of the long-70s.
To riff on another of my favourite tweets.
Can’t think what led me to that analogy.