Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, having a shrewd idea of his boss’s character, arranged for the Prime Minister to deliver his speech at a Hull firm that makes disinfectant and condoms.
Off a nearby corridor laboratory researchers were doing clever things with phials of Dettol and snap-twang Durexes. Antiseptic and greased latex: that’s the nasal knight for you.
Some 30 workers, obediently lanyarded, were corralled into a room with squashy chairs and a round table. Some were told to stand behind Sir Keir while he said ‘a few words’. The words lasted an hour.
Mr McSweeney’s efforts to make Sir Keir a dynamic orator still have some way to go. Long before the end of the event there was a palpable foot-weariness in the room.
Sir Keir was in rolled-shirt-sleeve order. For once the shirt was blue, not white. This may have been a subtle signal that he was veering to the right. He proceeded to argue that officialdom had gone mad, £45 billion could be saved using artificial intelligence instead of civil servants and NHS England quango was going to be euthanised, pronto. Hooray.
The BBC switched to solemn music. Beth Rigby’s teeth clattered to the floor. Sky’s Beth accused Sir Keir of reintroducing ‘austerity’. Sir Keir blithely claimed it was no such thing.
The best part of the speech was when he mocked bureaucratic lunacies such as ‘planning documents longer than the entire works of Shakespeare’, and regulators putting the rights of ‘jumping spiders’ over new developments.
‘We’ve created a watchdog state,’ he wailed.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer pictured on March 13 during a Q&A session after his speech
Sir Keir Starmer gave a speech on his plans to reform the civil service during a visit to Reckitt Benckiser Health Care Ltd in Kingston upon Hull today
That ‘we’ was accurate. The regulatory, risk-management classes have multiplied thanks to ‘rules is rules’ puddings such as Sir Keir, lawyers pocketing fat fees while common sense shrivelled.
For years Labour instinctively defended the Blob and howled at the tiniest impingements on its dominance. Now Labour’s Prime Minister was conceding that finger-wagging officialdom had become a bloated parasite. If he means it – a big ‘if’, admittedly – this could be a major defeat for the Left. At the back of the room I think I saw Lewis Goodall, golden boy of the Centre-Left commentariat. He was looking distinctly seasick.
And what of Sir Keir? The blinky old sausage stood there sheathed in self-satisfaction, lubed by vanity, tremendously full of himself. It doesn’t embarrass him a jot to be abandoning his life-long position. Muggins comes first and Muggins has realised that the game is up for Centrist-Dad tax-and-spend liberalism.
Hands casually jammed into his pockets, Sir Keir used the first person singular – ‘I’m issuing a new target for my government’ and ‘I am abolishing NHS England’. He leaned on the table to show how relaxed he was.
After deploring the ‘stodge and regulation’ in the health system and lashing out at ‘blockers’, he gave an aw-shucks shrug and said ‘this is just my approach to politics – I tend to look at a problem, poke it and then just change it.’ The narcissism and the fraudulence of this was magnificent. Almost Trumpian.
During the speech, the Prime Minister revealed that NHS England will be scrapped
The same Sir Keir and his human-rights mates blocked the Rwanda policy. They did all they could to kybosh Brexit. They sought to extend lockdown. They continue to wreck our economy with Net Zero and their worship of international-law bodies dominated by enemies of the West. Yet now we are expected to see him as a dynamic Dan. Now he was complaining that ministers were obstructed by unaccountable forces. He perhaps did not realise it but he was making the case for Brexit. The intellectual capitulation was remarkable.
No disrespect was intended to civil servants themselves, he kept claiming. Apparently they were as much victims of ‘the system’ as the rest of us. The pelts of the First Division Association’s pooh-bahs will crawl at that. Union leaders will chew their fists. Labour MPs will seethe and Angela Rayner will plot. Sir Keir’s conversion may not be genuine but he has given the Right licence to lance the Blob. Comrades, let us go to our work.
