How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
The Labour government's woeful first 90 days is quite something.
An amusing feature of my morning commute involves the jabbering of patent lunatics. Londoners, they say, are never over six feet away from a howling madman.
No, reader, I’m not talking about the legions of unhoused lost souls as progressives so helpfully moniker them. Nor am I talking about those whose ‘care in the community’ apparently serves them and us better than humane, psychiatric treatment in a secure, safe facility—treatment for which they routinely cry out. Allowing the unwell to go untreated and unmolested informs the virtue of our feel-good and do-nothing times.
The madmen I am referring to don impeccable suits. Just sitting opposite such soigné specimens provokes pangs of inadequacy. Am I a mere bumpkin?
That’s at least until they open their neat, intricate little mouths. On the Piccadilly line into central London, it is common to see dewy GQ-reading acolytes thundering along to their jobs in the City in which they helpfully trade made-up derivatives and screw lesser people out of their fortunes.
Every moment, it seems, a lurid celebration of their ever-perfecting selves. What’s bizarre about them? En route, they steel themselves for their legalised larceny by reciting self-help mantras. Believe it. Achieve it. Believe it. Achieve it. It's as if Colonel Kurtz has read How to Win Friends and Influence People.
A key tenet faithfully held by self-help types is the first ninety days. Those crucial first three months of any endeavour, they say, tell one all one needs to know.
For example, if in the first ninety days, your new colleague habitually shuffles through the door past 9 a.m., pleads to ‘work from home,’ or knocks up Natalya from accounts, then you get a rather lucid picture of the next nine-hundred days.
This rule transcends the social landscape. For instance, if you and your new girlfriend, in the flourish of those first three months, drain time bickering over fresh air, or if she launches pint glasses at your head, the chances of a scar-free relationship are unfavoured by even the most impish of gods.
The ninety-day rule is a solid barometer of the future. Why, then, don’t we employ such a rule for newly elected governments?
Keir Starmer’s first ninety days resemble the syphilitic death throes of an eighteenth-century man of leisure.
Not only has Sir Starmer milked £100,000 in football tickets, Taylor Swift concerts, Soho apartments, and designer spectacles, but so too have his most trusted minions. His deputy, Angela Rayner, forgot to mention her mate joined her on a lavish weekend in New York. Rayner also pays £70,000 a year for a professional photographer. Four legs good. Two legs better.
Not to go all Juvenal. But the freebies are not the point. We’re all human. And we have rather sophisticated ways in which to kid ourselves that we deserve the freebies wafting before our nostrils.
The genuine issue is hypocrisy, vanity, humbug and conceit—a full house in satirical bingo.
Back in the Boris days, Labour’s leading lights resembled a brigade of hairshirt miserablists who’d wince at every pound coin seeping out of the treasury. They nary missed an opportunity to preach and prattle like Presbyterians before the Rapture.
They were the hard-boiled, exiled public servants eager to drive the decadent late Roman Tories from the Forum, every inch of which wobbled in the Tories’ greed-flecked slime.
Fast forward three months. Their decadence would make a Roman senator blush. Their vibe is that of the sub-continent. Tribal victors ransacking ancient palaces, lighting their pilfered cigars off of smouldering great paintings. Shamelessly they parade, dripping with the spoils of war.
Perhaps I exaggerate. And yet, even the broadcast media has asked a few questions. Usually, that same media bungs its ears, blinds its eyes, and glues its hands whenever Labour sneaks into office. Labour's cosmic arrogance is that of a fifteen-year-old boy who has, for the first time, unclasped a bra unaided.
Perhaps they’ll settle into a serious machine now the warring tribes have decapitated the irksome Sue Gray. But the woeful first ninety days suggests otherwise.
Why, then, must we—the captive and paying audience to this botchy platoon of fourth-rate HR managers—endure another 1,171 days of scatological downpour?
Why must we strip pensioners of their winter fuel payments, forego smoking in public, and endure five years of turnips and casserole whilst these quack doctors stuff their gaping grins with gold?
A true democracy would print a ninety-day money-back guarantee on the front of every ballot.
Better yet, the Swiss—the richest, slimmest, happiest Europeans—go one better. The Swiss understand human nature. They understand the lures and temptations of power. Our Swiss friends can veto any and all bills. And introduce their own.
The result? A democracy in which the politicians cannot mark their own homework, let alone lavish themselves in orgies of pseudo-celebrity and conceit.
Mercifully, for Labour, we are not a proper Swiss-style democracy. If we were, they’d be out on their arses. And deservedly so.
It's quite staggering to me (even a few thousand miles away) that he has made such a f*** up of everything.
As someone who used to interview self-help authors for (the Australian iteration of) GQ, this one hit me where I live. (Very impressed with "Keir Starmer’s first ninety days resemble the syphilitic death throes of an eighteenth-century man of leisure," too – I'm going to have to lift my game!)