QUENTIN LETTS: Sir Keir, a person who makes Eeyore sound like Ken Dodd

After you with that hemlock, Socrates. Sir Keir Starmer and his gang spent another day predicting plagues, boils and squalls of hot pitch. Raising their voices a few notches, they added that it was ALL THE TORIES‘ FAULT.

Sir Keir, who makes Eeyore sound like Ken Dodd, plodded off mid-morning in the direction of London‘s Oxford Street, there to make a glum speech to the King’s Fund, a public-health think-tank.

Superior medical types abounded. Sort of people who take one look at you and tell you not to eat so many biscuits. Serious faces, pursed lips, hushed voices. Could have been a convention of snooker commentators.

Sir Keir was introduced by a tense woman. She spoke in one of those down-beat, pitying, playschool-presenter voices that drain the fluid from life and make you fret you haven’t been to the potty.

Turned out she was the fund’s chief executive who once worked for lung-disease charities and has a side interest in mental health. Not easily mistaken for a Butlin’s redcoat.

Sir Keir explained that former New Labour peer and surgeon Lord Darzi had knocked up a document which found the NHS was in a perilous condition. His lordship’s speed of composition, worthy of a late-edition football reporter, was commendable. It just shows what the establishment can do when it wishes. Lord Darzi should be put in charge of the Covid Inquiry. He’d have it done and dusted by All Souls’ Day.

Anyway, the NHS was in a dreadful state (according to Brother Darzi). From envy-of-the-world to knacker’s yard in a few short leaps. Sir Keir sounded downcast but gloom is his thing. The nasal voice and petulant consonants lend him a fatalistic air.

In the Commons, we had a statement on the same subject from Wes Streeting, Health Secretary, who is less good at hand-wringing

Punching opponents is more his forte. He shouted that the Conservatives had ‘doused the NHS in petrol, left the gas on and Covid just lit the match’. Sir Keir would never have made such a claim because, after all, he wanted lockdown to last much longer.

Mr Streeting tried to pull on a mask of despondency but he can never quite hide his zeal for the fray. He’s one of life’s bouncy balls, which makes me suspect he’s not really a Left-winger.

Victoria Atkins, shadow minister, replied circumspectly for the Tories but Wes was still itching for a fight. In a point of order later, the Conservatives’ Mims Davies said Mr Streeting needed to improve his bedside manner. He even tried to box back at that.

Sustained aggression was underlaid by a hint of awareness that it was all a little ridiculous.

If you mated Wes with Angela Rayner, the baby would swing a fist at the midwife and glug back the last of the delivery room’s surgical spirit. 

More typical on the Labour benches was an air of moaning misery, both in this session and during business questions that preceded it.

Unfair prices for hydrocortisone tablets, child poverty, low morale, food allergies, suicide prevention, special educational needs, breast cancer, free school meals, child poverty again, food support, pancreatic enzyme insufficiency, homelessness, child poverty for a third time, knife wounds, minor injuries units, antisocial behaviour and late-delivered birthday cards: all were raised by Labour backbenchers in a unremitting tone of drudgy moroseness.

Many of these problems were laid at the door of Rishi Sunak’s government.

Where that was not alleged, the questioners tended to expect the state to solve the problems.

Being Left-wing or Right-wing is not really a matter of detailed policy beliefs.

It is more a state of mind, a question of whether you think it’s a zip-a-dee-doo-dah day or, like Chief Vitalstatistix in the Asterix books, you are convinced the sky is going to fall on your head tomorrow.

For all his anti-Tory pep, I am not convinced Wes Streeting is in the right party.