Don’t Panic! Don’t Panic! Over the weekend the newly promoted Darren Jones, Keir Starmer’s very own Keir Starmer tribute act, was out and about on the airwaves trying to convince everyone – himself included – that the government was not in crisis.
What do you mean, chaos, he said time and again as the questions kept on coming. Each time sounding slightly more chippy. He’s not a man who takes kindly to even a hint of mockery. Darren takes Darren extremely seriously.
It was perfectly normal for Angela Rayner – the housing secretary, deputy prime minister and deputy leader of the Labour party rolled into one – to be forced to resign after failing to pay the correct stamp duty. The kind of thing that could happen at any time to any cabinet minister. Hell, the Tories did that the whole time.
Darren even had Rayner’s exit pencilled into his government spreadsheet. A deputy leadership election was just what Labour and the country wanted. It would be great for all the candidates to make the case for how well things had gone over the past year.
It was perfectly normal for Starmer to have conducted an extensive reshuffle after just over a year in office. One that was basically an admission that most of the cabinet had been given the wrong jobs first time round. That half the cabinet had been fairly hopeless but needed to be given another chance in a different department because all the other MPs would be even worse. Besides, they would all be more of a liability to the government mouthing off their resentments from the backbenches.
So, everything was about as great as it could possibly be. Hell, Labour had been given a five-year term, so it was perfectly OK to waste the first 12 months by getting things wrong. No one expected the government to hit the ground running. Everyone should just chill out a bit.
Keir now had the women and men in place that he had really always wanted. And if the Labour government had tilted a bit to the right, then so be it. After all, it wasn’t as if there was any significant threat to Labour from the left, was there?
All was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. We should be more grateful to the government for what it was doing, rather than complaining from the sidelines. If people didn’t have something supportive to say, then they should just keep quiet. Stop moaning about things they don’t understand. Keir had a plan for delivery. And what he was planning to deliver was no less than delivery itself. You should applaud the burning sense of mission. Not try to understand it.
Fair to say that not everyone was onboard with the new reality. Not even all Labour MPs were trying to pretend everything was hunky dory. Previously loyally silent backbenchers were now becoming more vocal about the government’s direction.
So it was no surprise on Monday that Stella Creasy used an urgent question to highlight the 800 people who had been arrested for protesting about the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Surely the police had better things to do with their time than locking up peaceful vicars, retired grandmothers and hospital consultants?
Ideally it should have been the new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to reply for the government. But she was away at the Five Eyes conference damning her predecessor with faint praise: Yvette Cooper had done an OK job, she supposed, as far as she had gone. Which wasn’t nearly far enough.
It was left to the security minister, Dan Jarvis, to take her place. Dan is a decent bod. There isn’t anyone on either side of the house who dislikes him. He always does his best to try to do the right thing and be nice to everyone. But he’s not the sharpest and if he has a fault, it’s that he’s always too willing to believe what his superiors tell him. Which, as far as Labour are concerned, makes him an ideal person to be junior minister. He can be trusted to repeat the party line for as long as it takes. He knows that thinking for himself is well above his pay grade.
It was like this, said Dan. No matter that the Ministry of Defence had at first declared the damage Palestine Action had caused to planes as vandalism. Dan had now been informed that they were an extremely dangerous terrorist organisation. Worse than al-Qaida. Worse than Islamic State.
The country was on the very brink of collapse. And it was pure ageism to suggest that because so many old people had been on the march that they weren’t a danger to the fabric of society. Geriatrics were the most lethal of all terrorists. Because they had so much less to lose than the young, old people would happily blow themselves – and us – up without a second thought. Nobody should ever trust a pensioner ever again. Using their triple-locked payments to fund extremism.
“The country should trust the government,” said Dan. It knew what it was doing. The people understood. Except they didn’t. Not even the Commons was in agreement. Just about the only person fully behind Desperate Dan was the synaptically challenged Chris Philp, who would happily lock up his own family if he thought there were votes in it.
Almost everyone else, Labour, Tory and Lib Dems, were minded to think the government had made a bad call. Conservative Julian Lewis put it best. Palestine Action supporters were almost certainly violent and criminal. But that didn’t make them terrorists as well.
That just left Richard Tice. The Reform deputy leader wasn’t bothered about any niceties. All this nitpicking about the definition of terrorism was pure woke-ism. As far as he was concerned we should be locking up anyone who was even loosely associated with Palestine Action. If all these pensioners with too much time on their hand hadn’t done anything wrong yet, it was only a matter of time before they did.
At which point you wondered why Dicky had never called for Lucy Connolly, the darling of last weekend’s Reform conference, to be re-arrested. Surely calling for migrants to be burned alive must fit his definition of terrorism.
