Depraved New World: Please Hold, the Government Will Be with You Shortly by John Crace

Author:John Crace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

With Liz Truss in hiding, Labour was living its best life. Previous party conferences had been marked by back-biting and division. Now everyone was falling over themselves to agree with one another. And not to smirk too broadly at the pound being in freefall, thanks to Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget. For the first time in years, Labour actually believed they might be a government-in-waiting.

Not a hint of a heckle for the least Labour thing you’ll see at a Labour conference

25 September 2022

Stick to what you’re good at. It’s in the nature of things – especially during a party conference – that opposition leaders find themselves put under the microscope for character flaws. For reasons why they may never make it to prime minister. Keir Starmer is no exception. No matter that he has been consistently ahead in the polls for months now, or that Liz Truss has spectacularly failed to secure the traditional new-prime-minister bounce – she seems to be taking her desire to be unpopular extremely seriously – as she tries to crash the economy. Starmer gets it in the neck from left and right. He’s too timid. He’s too vague. He never says anything.

Except that over the last few weeks we’ve found something at which Keir genuinely excels. In fact, he’s probably one of the best, if not the best, in the business. He’s just an exceptional mourner. Were I to pop my clogs in the not too distant future, I hope that my family fall to their knees and beg him to organise the 10 days of national psychosis. There would be tears. There would be pomp. There would be circumstance. Chopin’s funeral march on repeat. And more and more tears.

When the Queen died, our lantern-jawed superhero with the sensitive, middle-distance stare suddenly came into his own. Come the tributes in parliament, he was note-perfect. While Librium Liz couldn’t even connect with herself, in a drab, monotone speech that said everything about her and nothing about the Queen, Starmer was emotionally literate enough to convey the nation’s feelings. He touched us. He held us. Acknowledged our loss. And then, during the rest of the ceremonies over the next nine days, he was strong and silent. Present but unobtrusive. Not trying to game the situation for his own political advantage. If one of the pallbearers had fainted, Keir would have been the first to step up.

All of which goes some way to explaining why this year’s Labour Party conference began with the singing of the national anthem. Now anyone in the Commons last Friday for Kwasi Kwarteng’s asset-stripping suicide note would have realised politics was well and truly tribal again. You’d have needed a heart of stone not to have enjoyed the sight of free marketeers not quite grasping what a free market actually means as the pound sank without trace. Not so much Britannia Unchained as Britannia Unhinged.

No matter. Starmer wanted to get the conference off to a good start – he’d navigated the traditional leader’s interview on

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