I’VE rarely been able to sit through an entire speech by Keir Starmer.
The Labour leader’s dreary finger- wagging tones at PMQs and party conference lecterns can be guaranteed to put a life-long insomniac into a deep sleep within minutes.
But our new Prime Minister’s latest speech in the Downing Street Rose Garden has brought me to new depths of despair.
He warned about a “painful” autumn Budget ahead, telling voters we would have to “accept short-term pain for long-term good”, while Labour attempted to “fix the foundations” because, he said, they had inherited “not just an economic black hole but a societal black hole” too.
To say his oratory was downbeat doesn’t do it justice.
This wasn’t a speech — it was a funeral march to mark the death of any last vestige of hope in the future of our country.
It’s not just that the smoothness of the Prime Minister’s tongue fails to match the gloss of his Brylcreemed hair, it’s that he delivered a message so bleak that you’d think he was starring in a Hollywood thriller about a deadly asteroid hurtling towards Britain and certain catastrophe.
This wasn’t just good ol’ tough talking, this was a pessimist’s charter.
Sir Keir Starmer has metamorphosed into the Morrissey of Whitehall.
Heaven knows we’re all miserable now.
Speaking in Berlin yesterday, Starmer attempted to sound a bit more upbeat, vowing to “inject some hope” and “clear out the rot”, likening his “plan” to improve public services and public finances to refurbishing a mouldy house, saying “it’s usually better if you strip it down, get rid of the damp and the cracks first, rather than painting it in five minutes”.
What a delightful image, huh?
This was all a far cry from 1997, when Tony Blair promised that things can only get better.
Instead, in 2024, we have Keir Starmer saying that things are about to get a whole lot worse, painting a soul-destroying picture of the state of our nation.
What sort of hapless leadership is that?
Imagine the England football team being led into a World Cup tournament with coach Starmer at the helm!
Or soldiers being led into battle by General Starmer.
They wouldn’t stand a chance.
And neither will we with this sort of doom-mongering from the man at the helm. That’s not what this country needs.
Does he plan to tax us into prosperity?
What does he actually intend to do to tackle the mouldy, rotten and crack-ridden foundations of our island home?
Does he just plan to tax us all into prosperity?
Or maybe he hopes to keep enacting more and more authoritarian laws and legislate us into higher growth?
Who knows? But you can’t tax your way out of economic stagnation and into a fast-growing, dynamic economy.
And you can’t reunite a deeply divided nation simply by making it a non-crime hate incident to speak your mind.
No one seriously believes that, at the end of this Parliament, our country will be miraculously healed and united, our economy thriving and our standard of living on the up.
Not even Starmer himself believes that.
He can keep blaming the Tories for the mess we’re in (and, let’s face it, most of the electorate does too) but at some point Starmer will have to DO something to make things better.
The British people are crying out for real leadership, for someone at the helm who believes in our country, who values our history and wants to unite us around a shared future of hope and prosperity.
I don’t want a PM with rose-tinted spectacles — whether they are paid for by a Labour donor or not — because we need our leaders to be hard-wired with realism.
But a little optimism and self-belief wouldn’t go amiss too.
We can but dream.
WE all know those little clues when you come back from holiday and you’ve put on a little too much weight.
Your waistband gets rather tight and there’s a lot of huffing and puffing going up the stairs.
But I reckon the biggest clue must be when you need 39 firefighters to be called out for six hours to help you get out of bed and into an ambulance.
That’s exactly what happened to a 50st man suffering from a heart attack last year.
And he wasn’t alone.
Firefighters were called out a shocking 2,169 times last year to help shift obese people out of their homes – and we taxpayers were forced to pay every single time.
How on earth does anyone eat themselves into such a state? It’s beyond me.
But if they can afford that much food then they can afford to pay for the emergency services they need to deal with the aftermath.
THE country is now divided into two kinds of people: Those who think Kirstie Allsopp was crazy to send her 15-year-old son and his mate off Interrailing across Europe for a few weeks, and those who think she’s a heroine.
I’m a bit of both. I love that Allsopp isn’t a helicopter parent who wraps her kids in cotton wool, but I’m also not sure I’d have let my teen do the same trip at that tender age.
That said, we’re all different.
Some kids are wise souls at 12 while I know some 30-year-olds I wouldn’t trust to pop to Tesco, let alone go backpacking across the Continent.
What is completely insane is social services investigating Allsopp when she has done nothing wrong.
Molly-coddled kids, unprepared for independent adult life, are a far bigger problem than a child trusted to make his own way on and off a few trains.
SPENCER MATTHEWS, the former Made In Chelsea star, has just completed a record-breaking charity challenge to run 30 marathons in 30 consecutive days.
And to make it just that little bit harder, he had to do it in 40C in the desert.
The star was greeted by proud wife Vogue and two of his three children as he crossed the final line.
I don’t want to run ONE marathon, let alone 30 in a row.
And definitely not on rock and sand.
Yet I’m in awe of people who can put their bodies and minds through such gruelling ordeals.
People who trek to the North Pole or row across the Atlantic make the world a better place – and that spirit of adventure helps to drive human discovery and exploration.
But I do sometimes wonder whether they can ever just relax and enjoy a Netflix series over a nice cuppa.
It’s far less effort – and you don’t spend the next week finding sand in all the wrong places.
EXACTLY how many arrests and how many people need to be stabbed before we start asking whether an event should go ahead or not?
This year’s Notting Hill Carnival saw eight stabbings and 334 arrests, many for knife possession.
Is that too many or not enough?
Other music events and festivals don’t see violence on anything like that scale.
The carnival has long outgrown the residential streets of West London where it began and costs millions in security, taking days to clear up afterwards.
Isn’t it time to move the event to Hyde Park where police can keep everyone safe?
THE People Who Would Ban Everything Brigade are back – and this time they want to outlaw flavoured and brightly coloured vapes aimed at kids.
We know there are health concerns over vaping, but we also know it’s a darn sight better than smoking cigarettes and has helped millions to quit.
And, yes, it’s obvious the bubblegum colours and flavours are cynically aimed at kids to get them hooked early.
But instead of banning them, couldn’t we simply try enforcing the laws we already have?
It’s illegal to sell vapes to under-18s. Wouldn’t a guaranteed £20,000 fine for any shopkeeper caught selling them to kids sort the problem?
THE news that the Gallagher brothers are to reunite for an Oasis stadium tour has sent the country into a tizzy.
Many years ago, when I was a young news reporter, I was sent along with half of the British media pack to doorstep Liam Gallagher’s North London home amid rumours the Oasis frontman was planning to secretly marry his then-girlfriend Patsy Kensit.
I got there at 6am and left at 4pm. It poured the entire day and the couple didn’t once leave the house.
And in all those rain-drenched hours, we got one quote after we rang the doorbell, only to be told by Liam: “Get off my f***ing steps”.
Maybe Liam’s menacing tone was just a joke, but we definitely did as we were told!
