The King’s Speech. The packed House. The 330 new MPs. The fresh faces, the bright hopes invested in our new Prime Minister. Is he up to it? Who knows. New PMs are like new spouses: it doesn’t matter much whom you marry, it always turns out to be someone else. You might have thought honest, dull, capable Keir was aspiring to the condition of Clement Attlee. On the basis of the King’s Speech he looks like he has more than a dash of Oliver Cromwell.
But we on the amorphous right should probably play ourselves in before attempting any big shots. We might even allow ourselves the luxury of optimism. The audacity of hope will allow us to savor more fully the disappointment when the “government of service” collapses into a nationwide civil war (more of which below).
So – from the despatch box, our new Prime Minister offered us nothing less than something he calls “national renewal”. It is “a new era.” Workers and bosses are to unite in the great project of creating wealth. Economic stability is the foundation of it all, to which end he is going to take the “brakes off the economy.” His is to be a new way of governing – one that not only turns the page of Tory chaos but shuts the door on it forever. Because service is the essence of politics. There will be no more populism. No more wedge issues. No more party political manoeuvring masquerading as policy. There was to be patient, calm rebuilding. The work of service had already begun and he would leave no stone unturned in keeping the country safe because the road of the last 14 years had finished in a dead end with the country’s foundations unfixed. Certainly, the production of mixed metaphors has received a very welcome boost.
The PM finished with the perhaps daring proposition that “service is a stronger bond than political self interest.” He might have bidding for the position of Archbishop of Canterbury if only the church wasn’t such a political project itself.
He was very nice about Rishi whose generosity since the election had, he said, gone well beyond conventional bromides. “I thank him for that,” he said. One could feel a new political culture of civility and mutual respect growing in front of our eyes – right up to the moment he likened Tory behaviour last year to rats in a sack fighting to save their scrofulous, leprositic Conservative skins.
In truth, Keir’s King’s Speech may be the most transformational of modern times. Removing the costive influence of local communities on planning decisions has the power to transcend regional and social differences and create a new political reality.
If you can imagine how furiously the building of 1.5 million new houses will be fought, wait until 80,000 new pylons are proposed across every rural constituency in the land in the cause of Net Zero. What a coalition that will create of anarchists, idiots, environmental swampies, and middle class retirees fighting for their property values.
Never mind national renewal, this is going to be the Pylon Parliament and all we can do is sit back with our PopCon popcorn and enjoy the show.
