BORIS JOHNSON: I wager Maggie’s portrait is glad to be gone

So, in case you have forgotten, here is what Sir Keir Starmer was saying about Margaret Thatcher only a few short months ago.

He was singing her praises. He was reminding us of her epoch-making achievements. He said she had ‘dragged Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism’.

She was one of the few modern leaders to deliver ‘meaningful change’, said Starmer, in a speech about Labour’s economic plans for the country, which was clearly intended for the ears of this country’s naturally conservative majority.

We rather gathered that he was going to model himself on the Iron Lady, follow in her footsteps. He seemed so generally enthusiastic about Maggie, and so fawning about her legacy, that you half expected him to turn up for his next speech with pineapple-coloured hair and an electric blue handbag.

That was Starmer in December 2023, before the General Election. And what does he say now?

Well, blow me down, but it turns out that he can’t even bear to look at her portrait. He was sitting in the Thatcher Room – her former office on the first floor of No 10 – and his eye was drawn to the excellent oil painting commissioned by then prime minister Gordon Brown. He looked up to where she hung above the fireplace, draped with pearls.

He met her imperious gaze. He shuddered, and confessed that he found it ‘unsettling’ even to be in the same room as her – and now, poof, she has gone. Britain’s first female prime minister has been banished from her own former office, and all because she gives Starmer the collywobbles.

At which point, we are entitled to ask: which is the real Starmer?

Is he a Thatcher fan, or a visceral Leftie?

The answer, my friends, is now clear: not just from his petty decision to remove her picture, but in everything he is doing in government.

He didn’t ever approve of Margaret Thatcher. He hated the way she took on and defeated the unions. He despised the culture of aspiration and opportunity that she encouraged – and he had no interest in the millions of people she helped buy their own homes and their own shares, because he is and always was a socialist.

There is simply no other conclusion to be drawn from what he is now doing to our country.

He isn’t remotely concerned about ‘setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism’. Of course not. Listen to what he has said about the forthcoming Budget, which promises to be a riot of completely unnecessary tax increases – clobbering investment, clobbering home ownership, clobbering pensions.

How, exactly, do you ‘set loose’ Britain’s entrepreneurs by whacking up capital gains tax? Apart from setting them loose to go to America?

How do you help business by imposing a huge new raft of workers’ rights, including – if today’s headlines are correct – the right to a four-day week?

He and Rachel Reeves have been completely exposed for the lies they have told about the state of the UK economy – which, in spite of the bilge from Starmer, has the fastest rate of growth in the G7.

There is one reason, and one reason only, why taxes are going up – and that is the catastrophic economic policies of the Labour party. They have given the public sector unions above-inflation pay rises – so generous that I am told the union negotiators were amazed – and yet asked for no increases in productivity.

They are content to see a continual expansion in the size of the state, abandoning the Tory plan to trim 66,000 Whitehall jobs. This isn’t following Margaret Thatcher – it’s the complete abnegation of everything she stood for.

He has got rid of Margaret Thatcher from his office because, in spite of what he said, he is determined not to build on her legacy but to destroy it.

By attacking the aspirational middle classes, by putting up taxes, by kow-towing to the unions, Starmer actually wants to reverse many of the most important gains that were made under Margaret Thatcher – and that is why she has been taken out to hang by the dustbins.

So why did he say that stuff, back in December? Why did he flatter to deceive? Dear, gentle reader: he said it because he wanted your vote, and because he is turning out to be a chameleon.

In the run-up to the Election, Starmer’s natural hue was basically a bollardy pinky-grey, with a hint of blue, a hint of green, a hint of yellow, depending on the circumstances. After the Election, of course, the need for camouflage is over. He is turning out to be as red as the scarf of a Komsomol young pioneer.

In fact it is only now that we are seeing the real Starmer. Before the Election, he refused to admit that he was going to put up taxes. Now listen to him, bragging about the ‘pain’ he is going to inflict.

Before the Election, he whanged on endlessly about how he was going to restore propriety to public appointments – and now look at him.

This is a man whose very glasses have been paid for by a Labour donor – a businessman called Lord Alli – who was given a pass, after the Election, to come and go in No 10.

This same Alli gave £10,000 to the campaign of one Liam Conlon, who is now the Labour MP for Beckenham and Penge. Liam Conlon is the son of Sue Gray, Starmer’s chief of staff.

So there is a serious question to answer – how and why, with whose knowledge and by whose authorisation, did Alli get a Downing Street pass? Let me tell you: these passes are very hard to come by. Most senior Cabinet ministers do not automatically get them.

Did Starmer know about it – even though he had received an eye-watering £2,485 from Alli for his specs, not to mention £16,200 for his suits?

Did Sue Gray? When are we going to be told? Did Labour give passes for glasses?

Before the Election, Starmer presented himself as a kind of spluttering saint; now he is revealed to be the only prime minister in history to look at the world through sleaze-tainted spectacles.

After Margaret Thatcher won her second landslide victory in 1983, there was a number one smash hit by Boy George’s band Culture Club, which now needs updating: Ladies and Gents, after the Karma Chameleon, behold the Starmer Chameleon.

Thatcher was the polar opposite of this fellow. She believed in free markets, in liberty and democracy around the world. She believed in thrift and effort, and low taxes. She believed the state should allow people and families to get on with their lives. She stuck to her beliefs. She got things done. She changed this country for the better.

Starmer is not fit to loosen the latchet of her shoes. In fact her oil painting is probably relieved it no longer has to share an office with him.

Starmer Starmer Starmer Starmer Starmer Chameleon, goes the song. He comes and goes. He comes and goes.

If things carry on like this, the sooner he goes the better.

Dictionary corner:

Komsomol: A Communist youth organisation in the Soviet Union for members aged 14 to 28, which was established in 1918