Last Wednesday, the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, said this of Rishi Sunak in prime minister’s questions: “He doesn’t get Britain”. The context of what Starmer was saying was clear. He was describing the prime minister as being out of touch with the general public. This is barely an insult. It is affirming that you are more aligned with the interests of British voters than the political party you are trying to replace in power. It would be strange if Starmer didn’t think Sunak was out of touch.
Nevertheless, a statement from Downing Street said that Sunak was as “British as Starmer”. But Starmer did not say Sunak is not truly British, and it is disingenuous to suggest he did. Yet the MP Nadhim Zahawi still felt emboldened to moan to the Daily Express: “I flinched when I heard the leader of His Majesty’s most loyal opposition trot out the sort of line that I’ve had to deal with all my life.” He is making Starmer, the man otherwise demonised as a north London, lefty lawyer, sound like Bernard Manning.
Claire Coutinho, the secretary of state for energy security and net zero, said she was willing to give Starmer “the benefit of the doubt”. How kind of her. But she also told Times Radio: “Only he will know what he’s implying. But the one thing that I would say is if that was the other way round, and a Conservative politician had said it about a Labour politician of colour, I think we’d have had no end of the confected outrage.”
This is not true. Anyone not acting in bad faith knows what Starmer was saying; and it was not a dog whistle. As to her second point – that if a Conservative had said something similar to a black or brown Labour politician, the Tory MP in question would have been denounced – so what? This fair criticism of the left, that it invokes dog whistling too easily to stigmatise people on the right, is not helped by those on the right legitimising this tendency by doing exactly the same to protect the prime minister from criticism. Let us go back to real politics, not the shallow game of gotchas.
Bring ‘peak Greggs’ on
I do not accept that I am in a British high street unless I see a Greggs. I was in Glasgow last year for the first time, and I didn’t accept I was still in Britain until I saw one. Whenever I enter Greggs, I see everyone from the visibly rich to the nakedly destitute, the very old to the infant, and every conceivable racial or ethnic complexion; it reflects a genuine cross-section of British society.
This is why I am delighted to learn that up to 160 new shops will be opening this year. Its sales rose by 19.6% last year, but the chief executive, Roisin Currie, has said we have not yet reached “peak Greggs”. I look forward to that moment. But I go to Greggs now for the humbler comfort of a warm sausage roll, nothing more, nothing less, just a quick bite to brighten my day.
Der Kaiser of the pitch
Like many of the best football players, Franz Beckenbauer, who died last week, eluded simple categorisation. Was he a defender? A midfielder? He played as a striker when he was young, and later pioneered the position of a libero; a defender who carries the ball out and dictates the tempo of the game for his team.
He was the first person to win the World Cup both as a player and then a manager for West Germany (in 1974, and in 1990). And the first defender to win the Ballon d’Or (the award for the best player in Europe at that time).
His nickname, der Kaiser, was fitting: it reflected the authority and gravitas he commanded on the pitch and off it.
It is poignant that he died only a few months after the death of his great rival from the 1966 World Cup, Bobby Charlton – another technically gifted and tactically flexible player.
• Tomiwa Owolade is a contributing writer at the New Statesman
