QUENTIN LETTS: Keir Starmer has that accountant in a brothel look
To a tractor barn in rural Oxfordshire with that muddy-fingernailed son of cowpat country Sir Keir Starmer. Visiting Heath Farm, Swerford, the Labour leader wore black shirt, black trousers, black jacket and polished black shoes.
That may make him sound like Lee Van Cleef in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly but in fact he just looked out of place. Accountant in a brothel sort of thing.
You never saw such a tidy barn. An Islington set-dresser must have been round beforehand to make it fit for a glossy magazine shoot.
Firewood stood in neat pyramids. Faggots – I say, steady on, Marjorie – had been tied up with twine. It didn’t look like any farmyard I know. There wasn’t a whiff of manure or oil, despite the presence of politicians.
The place was so sterile, it could have been the stage for a production of Oklahoma! or a Kellogg’s Country Store hoe-down. Would Sir Keir clasp hands to manly chest and start singing a version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s I Cain’t Say No about caving in to unions’ pay demands?
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer speaking to journalists on the campaign trail at the Shoulder of Mutton pub in Little Horwood, Buckinghamshire
Starmer during a visit to Health Farm in Chipping Norton on the campaign trail just a few days before the public goes to the polls
The barn was filled by local Labour activists who had been asked to turn up without being told why. When they heard that the mystery guest was Sir Keir, excitement was not exactly uncontrolled. This part of the world is accustomed to celebrities.
Down the road was Simon Cowell’s new gaff, with Mr and Mrs David Beckham his neighbours. Lord Cameron also lives nearby. Theresa May’s dear father was once vicar in nearby Enstone but times have changed.
Today’s Chipping Norton riviera is moneyed, posh, Soho Farmhouse attracting Range-Rovers with smoke-glass windows; sometime farriers’ cottages are now sand-blasted back to their original yellow stone by incomers who work in the City.
A Labour activist claimed that owing to boundary changes this constituency, previously Victoria Prentis’s Banbury seat, was now marginal. Maybe he was right. Round here they are rich enough to afford a Labour government. As for Heath Farm, we were told that it was owned by David Barbour, the intellectual peacenik who in the 1980s painted a vast CND sign on his barn roof as a reproof to US Air Force bombers landing at nearby Upper Heyford.
Not that ‘changed’ Komrade Keir would approve of such things. Heavens, no.
Sir Keir was accompanied by Rachel Reeves and his likely Treasury chief secretary Darren Jones.
He’s the one who let slip the other day that Labour’s Net Zero plans will cost hundreds of billions. The dignitaries were introduced to the crowd by Labour’s rather nervous local candidate, Sean Somebody, who was in such a tizzy that he called Mr Jones ‘Darren Morgan’.
The Labour leader during a visit to Hitchin in Heartfordshire greeting supporters on a sunny day
In the crowd was a familiar face: Fraser Kemp, former Labour MP and cadaverous Torquemada of the whips’ office in the Blair years. He has retired nearby and could not have been more charming when I went up for a word.
Ms Reeves made a short speech, shouting a bit and staring into the middle distance. She bared her teeth. Shades of a Ford Zephyr’s grille. After handing the microphone to Sir Keir, Ms Reeves fluttered her eyelashes at him for a good 15 seconds. She’s not unpeculiar.
In this remote venue, well away from hoi polloi, Sir Keir spoke for all of eight minutes. ‘The polls do not predict the future,’ he honked. I thought that was the whole point of them. Whether or not they are accurate is a different matter. ‘This is the summer of change,’ he continued.
‘I feel we’re the only positive campaign left standing.’ Higher taxes, inflationary pay claims, lower defence spending, tougher Net Zero rules, putting private schools out of business: catch those positive vibes, people!
In another part of England, the Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey, in his latest bid for publicity, did a bungee jump.
As he threw himself into the ether he screamed ‘vote Librul Democraaaaaaa.’ Twang. Whiplash. Tongue washing his bulging eyeballs. Now there’s a proper statesman.
