PETER HITCHENS: Is Starmer simply an empty no one unfit for the highest?

Is it possible that Sir Keir Starmer simply isn’t up to the job the Labour Party tried so hard to get for him? Anyone who observes modern politics knows that many who now struggle to the top of the greasy pole are deeply unwonderful. I am always amused by journalists who boast of their conversations with ‘ministers’, as if such people are especially intelligent, informed or talented. Most of them are dullard careerists who hope for an easy route to wealth and status.

How could Sir Keir, for instance, not have realised that his childlike readiness to accept shiny gifts was a danger? Honestly, free suits for him and free dresses for his wife? VIP seats at concerts and football matches? This would be a very cheap price to accept for your soul, if you thought you had one, as he doesn’t. Perhaps the free glasses failed to improve his vision and made him unable to spot approaching disaster.

‘I’ve many times drawn attention to Sir Keir’s past as a wooden-headed, hard-Leftist, revolutionary dogmatist,’ writes Peter Hitchens

We are always told he is the great prosecutor, but really, is heading a staff of trained lawyers, with all the prestige and money of the state on your side, so hard? I’d be more impressed if he were a penniless defence counsel who won his cases against the odds.

I’ve many times drawn attention to Sir Keir’s past as a wooden-headed, hard-Leftist, revolutionary dogmatist. He doesn’t actually disown this past, though nobody has ever properly questioned him about it. He’s still an atheist, perhaps the flattest and most boring world-view known to man. It is empty of hope or depth, based on the view that the universe is nothing but a cosmic car crash in which nothing can therefore matter very much.

Amazingly (to me anyway) he confessed before the election that he does not have a favourite book or a favourite poem. Some people say he was afraid of getting into trouble if he revealed such things. But I believe him. He acts at all times as if he has no imagination, and no poetry. It is in the imagination that we work out how our actions will affect others, and with poetry we surprise ourselves by finding out what really moves us.

We also know he has an unfavourite work of art, a painting of Margaret Thatcher that so got on his nerves that he had it put in some (as yet unidentified) boxroom. This is in the same class as the leaden decision of his equally colourless Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to tolerate no paintings in the State Room in 11 Downing Street, except pictures of or by women.

When he felt safe to do so, he used to call for the abolition of the monarchy, another crude and unpoetic opinion. Now that this position would lose him votes, he mumbles vaguely nice things about the monarch and accepts various honours from the Crown. But I haven’t heard him say he actually prefers a constitutional monarchy to a republic. He has also followed the Blairite practice of displaying Union Jacks everywhere, in the hope that this will fool people into thinking Labour is a traditionalist, patriotic party. But what do you think he really thinks?

And this is why he is making such a mess. He has long-term dogmatic aims – his Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, for example, is pursuing those with vigour and spite. But he only ever wanted to be Chief Commissar and Chief Bureaucrat. The ancient splendours of Downing Street, as the King’s First Minister, as heir of Pitt, Wellington, Disraeli, Gladstone, Lloyd George and Churchill, mean little to him. He is an uninteresting man, scuttling about in vast echoing halls and chambers built for far bigger people.

• Lucy Letby has now been in prison for 398 days, without hope of release, for crimes she may not have committed. You may wish to hear me debate, on a special Reaction podcast, against Christopher Snowdon, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, who believes Ms Letby was properly convicted. Our discussion, civil and informative, can be found on Spotify or Apple.

Boris’s border bungle will please Putin

Whoops! Our former premier ‘Boris’ Johnson has unintentionally urged Nato to recognise Vladimir Putin’s conquest of large chunks of Ukraine.

The blond genius suggests Ukraine could be given instant Nato membership for all the land Kiev still controls (but not the land it doesn’t). This would involve ‘reaffirming the absolute right of the Ukrainians to the whole of their 1991 nation’, without actually getting it back. He says: ‘We could protect most of Ukraine, while simultaneously supporting the Ukrainian right to recapture the rest.’ Because Mr Johnson suffers from the propaganda fantasy that Moscow seeks to reconquer most of Europe, he doesn’t realise that such an arrangement might well be very attractive to the tyrant Putin, with its worthless paper promise of reunification as a figleaf.

Mr Johnson really needs to understand this conflict better, and I once again offer to discuss it with him in proper adversarial style, in person or in print.

Peter Hitchens’ picture of the ‘fly-tipping enforcement’ sign and the e-scooters left all around

A notice promising ‘fly- tipping enforcement’ has been gathering grime in an Oxford suburb for months. Recently a deceased oven appeared in the grass nearby as if in mockery. 

Then, last Friday morning, it was surrounded by the hideous, garish clutter of e-scooters and an e-bike. If you cannot keep the place tidy, don’t pretend you can. 

Aslef could stop the BBC’s runaway train

Joe Cole in Nightsleeper, the new BBC drama, where the action is much more pleasant than that which runs on Britain’s ruined railways

I have, against my will and better judgment, been gripped by the ludicrous BBC drama Nightsleeper (was there ever a Daysleeper?) This is purely because it takes place on a train. And trains, as thriller writers well know, are wonderfully cut off from the outside world once the doors close and the wheels begin to turn. I especially love long journeys for the escape they provide from normality.

And the train in this drama is also far pleasanter than anything that really runs on Britain’s ruined railways, with a lavish buffet car of a kind that long ago disppeared. But oh dear, the plot!

The characters endlessly surprised by predictable twists; the cyber-drivel. And above all the unreality of a train that is never held up by a points failure, a signal failure, a bridge strike, leaves on the line, cows on the line, trespassers on the line, or any of the other excuses that dog my daily train rides.

Why, I keep asking myself, as security geniuses try to stop the runaway express, do they never ask for help from the RMT and Aslef unions, who can generally stop anything on rails?