STEPHEN GLOVER: Why did our PM rush to be patted by a pop singer?
Much has rightly been made of the police blue-light escort that was exceptionally laid on for the singer Taylor Swift in August.
Sir Keir Starmer’s then chief of staff Sue Gray had taken part in lengthy discussions with Ms Swift’s mother and manager, Andrea. Many will find it hard to believe that No 10 didn’t lean on the Metropolitan Police to provide an escort suitable for a monarch.
Now we learn that the Prime Minister and his family were granted a private audience with Taylor Swift after the concert they attended at Wembley on August 20. Tickets and hospitality worth £2,800 had been supplied by Ms Swift’s record company.
This is yet another example of Sir Keir’s eagerness to accept freebies, which is bound to create obligations. The old adage that there’s no such thing as a free lunch is true.
It has emerged that the Prime Minister and his family were granted a private audience with Taylor Swift after a concert they attended at Wembley in August
But there’s another objection. Why did the 62-year-old Prime Minister of Great Britain rush like a puppy dog to be patted by an American pop singer?
His wife and two children may have egged him on. However, it’s clear that Sir Keir was star struck. Why else would he have attended not only the Taylor Swift concert on August 20 but also another one for which he was given free tickets?
Am I being a fuddy-duddy? I don’t think so. On the whole I think we should try to be understanding if a man in late middle age develops an enthusiasm for a young female pop singer. It’s harmless enough.
The trouble is that this particular man in late middle age happens to be our Prime Minister. It is unbecoming for someone in his exalted position to behave in such a way.
I’m worried too that his preoccupation with Taylor Swift – who, for all her qualities, can’t be spoken of in the same breath as, say, the great opera singer Maria Callas – reveals a certain narrowness. It suggests what we had already suspected: Sir Keir’s hinterland is restricted and rather arid.
Here is a man, we should remember, who in a pre-election interview admitted he didn’t have a favourite novel or poem. Surely he should have come up with something. He also disclosed that he doesn’t dream – not even, it seems, about his idol, Taylor Swift.
Is it possible that Keir is an oddly unimaginative chap, and a bit of a philistine into the bargain, despite having been to a good school (where to his credit he played four musical instruments) and a decent university?
Sir Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria at another of the pop singer’s concerts in London in June
Further evidence is supplied by his enthusiasm for football in general and Arsenal in particular. There is, of course, nothing wrong with grown men liking football. I confess to having wasted countless hours looking at Match Of The Day, and I sometimes accept invitations from an old friend to watch, as it happens, Sir Keir’s club.
Yet it’s surely a question of degree. Sir Keir is besotted with Arsenal. It’s a kind of religion for him (conventional religion having no attractions). Since 2019 he has accepted free tickets to 29 different football matches, worth more than £35,000.
Few would begrudge his sessions in Arsenal’s agreeable hospitality box if there were some indication of a fertile inner life. I would be overjoyed to learn that Sir Keir had been a member of a book club or even a flower arranging group, but he seems to lack outside interests.
We should hardly be surprised that when he appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2020 he chose, of all things, a football as his luxury. I suppose some people may be touched by the image of a lonely Keir kicking a football along a hot and sandy beach, and thinking – he doesn’t dream, remember – of Arsenal.
The only cultural freebie that the Prime Minister appears to have accepted recently is an outing to the National Theatre to watch a play about the post-War Labour firebrand, Nye Bevan. That amounts to taking coals to Newcastle.
Maybe I’m old-fashioned but I’d like our leading politicians to be better than the rest of us – wiser and deeper and more widely read. One of the most attractive aspects of Harold Macmillan, Tory PM from 1957 to 1963, was that he spent a lot of time in No 10 reading Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen.
Tickets and hospitality worth £2,800 were supplied to the Prime Minister by Taylor Swift’s record company
The great 19th century Liberal prime minister William Gladstone is reckoned to have read 20,000 books in his 88 years on this earth. I wonder how many books, setting aside the dusty legal tomes to which he was required to refer as a lawyer, Sir Keir has pored over. Very few, I fear.
How ironic that Gladstone’s portrait has just been banished by our prickly PM from No 10, along with those of Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh. In a properly ordered world Keir should be gazing at ‘The Grand Old Man’ in wonder, trying to glean something from him.
We live in different times – very different times. The Taylor Swift-obsessed, football-mad, non-bibliophile Sir Keir Starmer is far from being the only member of the Labour Cabinet with strikingly demotic tastes.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner recently made a spectacle of herself by bopping in an Ibiza nightclub like a demented teenager at four o’clock in the morning, even though she’s a grandmother. If Starmer demeaned himself by paying court to Taylor Swift, so did Angela Rayner with her behaviour in that discotheque.
I’d like to say that Foreign Secretary David Lammy brings gravitas and dignity to his office but I can’t.
Here, after all, is a man who chose the boxer Muhammad Ali as his specialist subject on Mastermind.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves appears a more serious character. She is the author of a book on economics, published last year. The trouble is that it contained more than 20 unattributed examples of other people’s work, including material lifted without attribution from Wikipedia, the Guardian newspaper and remarks made by fellow Labour MP Hilary Benn.
Doubtless Labour harbours a few substantial figures, though it’s hard to know where to find them. Sir Keir, by the way, isn’t the only Cabinet aficionado of Taylor Swift. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson and Health Secretary Wes Streeting all received free tickets to see her perform.
Compare such lightweight figures with the Labour government of 1964-70, which was crammed with people with first-class Oxbridge degrees, and boasted a smattering of ministers who had excelled in the university of life.
And what of the Tories? I daresay they have their ‘Swifties’, though not a single Conservative MP is known to have accepted free hospitality to watch the singer, compared with at least 11 Labour MPs.
God knows, the Tories have produced their disappointments, but the likes of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – and even David Cameron and George Osborne – seem rounded characters compared with most of Labour’s current crew.
Looking at the Labour front bench, and taking into account the extraordinary limitations of Sir Keir Starmer, is it any wonder that we’re already in such a mess?
