Over in Clacton, Nigel Farage’s campaign is actually selling tickets to see him on Tuesday night, at an event for voters billed as “Meet Nigel Farage”. At £3.41 a ticket (some still available at the time of writing), this clearly represents an exciting entertainment opportunity for those unable to afford the £71 that the Reform leader charges on Cameo, where he has continued filming personalised videos for fans and ironists throughout the general election campaign. Nigel seems to have spent a good chunk of Father’s Day filming lucrative Happy Father’s Day videos for other fathers, which – how to put this delicately? – is surely what it’s all about.
As a performing artiste, Keir Starmer’s market value is probably somewhat below the £3.41 a ticket price point, though Tuesday morning found the Labour leader free-to-air on LBC, for a listener phone-in hosted by Nick Ferrari. This particular venue has been the scene of previous flounderings for Starmer, most notably on Israel being entitled to cut water and power supplies to Gaza, and sex-based rights. But that was then! This is Starmer something-point-zero – the one who is markedly more confident and has a series of endlessly rehearsed defensive plays on pretty much every question. As he put it to Ferrari: “I’m enjoying it, Nick!” And if you enjoy watching the bus get parked, then these are the games for you.
Probably his opponents’ best shot on target was the section on whether Starmer would have served in Jeremy Corbyn’s cabinet had the latter won the general election in 2019. “It’s a pure hypothetical,” hypothesised Starmer. “It didn’t cross my mind because I didn’t think we were going to win.” At this stage in the polls, I’m not sure we can classify the Corbyn issue as a “vulnerability” – but it is a trap Starmer arguably walked into in this campaign by repeatedly describing the Conservative party manifesto as “a Jeremy Corbyn manifesto”, where “anything you want can go in it but none of it is costed”. Ferrari told him that James Schneider, Corbyn’s strategic comms director, had informed LBC that Starmer had been in the room when the 2019 Labour manifesto was signed off, and had approved it all. “I was responsible only for the Brexit section,” claimed Starmer, with the air of the guy who honestly just did the flower arrangements for the treaty of Versailles. “It was Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto.” It is somewhat hilarious that Starmer should now be claiming to have been – what’s the expression? – present but not involved for the ceremonial laying of the 2019 Labour manifesto.
As indicated, Starmer interviews are not necessarily events you could sell tickets to. Yet will any of the British people end up paying one way or another for the privilege, for instance on their council tax? “We’re not going to be raising taxes on working people,” non-answered Starmer to repeated questions on this front. “There we go,” concluded Ferrari, who promptly sought to nail down the definition of one of the most bandied terms of art in this election and any other. “What is a working person?” he inquired. “A working person,” said Starmer, “is someone who works for a living, and uses our public services.” That could mean Simon Cowell, countered his host. (Ferrari seemed to judge the Britain’s Got Talent maestro to be his listeners’ Platonic ideal of a rich person.)
Clarifying eventually, Starmer said the working person was of the type who “doesn’t really have the ability to write a cheque when they’re in trouble”. Could people who do have that ability to write a cheque expect tax increases not detailed in the manifesto? Again, let’s not rush into any straight answer. Once we’d hacked through a thicket of phrases such as “getting our economy going” and “review of the pension landscape”, it was marginally clearer that Simon Cowell ought not imagine his tax bill is going to be the same, should Starmer win the cash prize and the spot in the Royal Variety Performance.
Much, much clearer are Starmer’s thoughts on Labour frontbencher Thangam Debbonaire’s eye-catching suggestion that Labour was looking at a 10% tax on Premier League transfers. “Let me just kill that one … let me just kill it dead,” said Starmer, with the air of a man who would obviously not nuke his notional future culture secretary for even suggesting such a thing – but might well consider threatening her with nukes.
So there you have it, though arguably this sort of crystalline clarity only throws the woolly answers into even sharper relief. Judging by the tenor of some of this morning’s questions, the public can see Labour are not offering a huge amount of cake in these straitened times – yet they clearly suspect Labour would quite like to eat some of it too. As for which particular bits, it seems they will just have to wait and see.
