Sir Keir Snorer chose the village of Lancing for the first ‘big speech’ of the campaign. A provocative location. Lancing is famous for its private school, run by the Woodard charity.
First thing you see of Lancing, miles across the West Sussex flats, is its chapel standing proud on the horizon like a grounded galleon.
Under Labour’s plans, Lancing college would be whacked by tax. The school that gave us Evelyn Waugh and Sir Tim Rice, not to mention Left-wing illuminati such as Tom Driberg, Trevor Huddleston and Sir David Hare, is thus staring at the muzzle of Sir Keir’s class warfare.
Not that the nasal knight gave a stuff. His mood was one of dull nonchalance. It was all about him. Twenty points ahead in opinion polls, little else mattered.
As he absorbed the applause of Labour activists at Lancing Parish Hall on a Bank Holiday morning, he beamed through his new designer glasses and proceeded to speak about himself for half an hour.
Pure narcissistic glue, and less genial than it looked.
He offered an account of his childhood in Surrey. Cue the Hovis advert music. Sir Keir’s depiction of early 1970s Oxted (a feeder town for Croydon, though that went unmentioned) was worthy of a Thomas Hardy novel.
Young Starmer had played football alongside cud-chewing cows. He earned his first groats by picking up stones from a farmer’s field. He knew ‘rolling pastures and the beautiful chalk hills of the North Downs’.
‘This England’, he said, voice tremulous, ‘has always felt far removed from Westminster.’ This England! We were lucky he didn’t fly into a rendition of John of Gaunt’s speech from Richard II.
All this from the most constipatedly urban of Remainers, a Camden Town state prosecutor who previously gave every indication he would mistake a cow pat for a dollop of harissa hummus.
As a tub-thumper Sir Keir is a stubborn, undizzying proposition, the product more of imagemakers than his own character, whatever that might be.
All you really notice is the fashion sense: the sticky-uppy hair, those trendy specs, a smart grey tie and white shirt with sleeves fastidiously rolled.
Labour spin doctors have made him resemble Colin Firth from the Kingsman films, although Colin has more eyebrow and stronger lips. Successful as the cosmetic revamp has been, it has come at the cost of Sir Keir’s inner self.
Floating voters will struggle to get past the constructed facade. You may end up asking, ‘but what’s he really like?’, and discern merely a vacuum. Whole parts of his performance here were lifted from past speeches.
His best moment came when he teased Rishi Sunak for getting soaked in Downing Street the other day. ‘The idea of a man standing in the rain without an umbrella saying he’s the only one with a plan,’ said Sir Keir.
Labour did have a plan, he averred. It was a plan to win the election. This is not the same as having a plan to govern.
The two Labour policies specified were votes for schoolchildren and the assault on independent schools. He ‘respected the aspiration’ of private-school parents but he was still going to blast them off the face of the earth.
The state sector, you see, needed more maths teachers. ‘When we have wrecked the public schools, we can nick theirs,’ he didn’t quite say. Someone has told him to deploy an avuncular chuckle.
Talking about people-smugglers, he said, ‘I have never, ever accepted that these vile gangs can’t be broken up’ – and started laughing. On changing the Labour party, he said ‘that is my mission’ – and again started doing this fake chortle.
On his lectern was the word ‘CHANGE’. Behind him on the back wall was another ‘CHANGE’. Yet the way the 50 or so activists growled wolfishly at his class-war plan, this Labour party did not feel terribly different from the Corbynites.
If Labour gets in, Lancing’s job centre could be in for a busy time.