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First light found Sir Keir Starmer in the Netherlands, in a hotel seemingly taking dictation from Yvette Cooper. A knight on a banquette with Yvette. Now there’s a phrase you need to handle carefully. Ms Cooper had a cast-iron teapot in front of her. Leaving such implements within the reach of so perpetually tetchy a memsahib is a high-risk strategy.
Labour’s crack duo were in Holland’s administrative capital to publicise the party’s bold (some might say electorally suicidal) plan to welcome 100,000 asylum seekers a year from the European Union. After Sir Keir became prime minister, we would be accepting our ‘fair share’ of immigrants from ‘EU partners’.
You thought Britain had left the EU? Denk nog eens na, as they say in Den Haag. Think again.
And yet Sir Keir, in a round of interviews, declared ‘we’re not going to re-enter the EU’. Moments later he shot inside the shiny, modernist headquarters of Europol, nerve centre for EU crime-fighters and prosecutors. A bee returning to its hive.
In yesterday’s homework, preparing for his trip to see President Macron next week, we learned that the French for Captain Hindsight is Capitaine Sagesse Retrospective. The Dutch is a more jagged affair: Gezagvoerder Acteraf Gezein. Say that a few times and you’ll need Strepsils.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper arrive at Rotterdam The Hague Airport, Netherlands
Once Yvette had been prised away from her teapot, she and De Gezagvoerder did walking shots for the TV crews. Cameras caught them striding with magnificent purpose through an apparently empty Hague towards a building whose brutalist architecture evoked the Ministry of Love in Orwell’s 1984.
The surrounding gardens offered ornamental cultivars and spiky shrubs. But where was everyone? Was it normally this deserted or had the locals done an Anne Frank, bolting for the nearest wardrobe to avoid being bored rigid by the nasal knight?
Sir Keir was on his most emphatic form. After he re-asserted that Britain was not going to rejoin the EU, an interviewer tentatively suggested that this city was an odd place to come if you wanted to convey such a message.
‘We’re going to smash the gangs and their vile trade,’ bellowed Sir Keir by way of reply.
‘The Government has lost control of our borders. We’re going to take back control. Smash the gangs! Stop the boats!’
In the course of one of his interviews, which lasted about 90 seconds, he said ‘smash the gangs’ and ‘control’ four times each, ‘vile trade’ thrice. It was a little like listening to a British prisoner of war refusing to disclose more than his name, rank and serial number.
Back in London, the Shadow Cabinet’s Nick Thomas-Symonds was holding the fort. In another scintillating cameo on Sky News, Mr Thomas-Symonds vouchsafed that Labour was going to ‘smash the gangs’, stop their ‘vile trade’ and ‘take back control’. Things were approaching the point that being clonggggged over the head by Yvette’s cast-iron teapot might have been preferable.
In the House of Commons, the Trade Secretary, Kemi Badenoch, was being whizzily go-ahead at the despatch box by using a computer tablet instead of a ministerial folder. Things went swimmingly until the tablet, and Mrs Badenoch with it, froze.
Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper arrive in the Netherlands ahead of meetings to discuss how Labour would tackle Channel crossings with Europol
‘Technical failure,’ coughed the minister. Her tablet had chosen that moment to download a Microsoft update. Such are the perils of being whizzy.
Soon, to her habitual accompaniment of swooping trombones and muted nightclub saxophones, Penny Mordaunt arrived to take business questions. Her new shadow, Lucy Powell, who in private is more charming than her sour public performances thus far might suggest, re-used Sir Keir’s gag that Rishi Sunak is ‘Inaction Man’. HMS Mordaunt let rip with her 12-pounders.
If Sir Keir himself resembled a children’s figurine, she said, it was beach Ken.
‘Beach Ken stands for nothing, on shifting sands, in his flip-flops staring out to sea. When we examine the Labour leader’s weak record on union demands and stopping the boats, we discover that, like beach Ken, he has zero balls.’
The Hansard ladies swallowed their Biros.
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