Posturing Sir Beer’s mess is entirely of his own making
LABoUR leader Sir Keir Starmer, the former director of public prosecutions, is supposedly a law-abiding and morally upright figure. ‘He’s Mr Rules. He doesn’t break the rules,’ Shadow Cabinet member Lisa Nandy piously insisted to Sky News at the weekend.
Yet, as his tortuously woven web of dissembling, double standards and alleged dishonesty over ‘Beergate’ unravels, Starmer now faces being known instead as ‘Mr Rules Are only For The Rest of You’.
An official Labour document obtained by the Mail has confirmed that, despite the repeated denials from Starmer and his team, their curry-and-beer event with local activists in Durham in April last year – when restrictions on social gatherings indoors were still in place – was at least as rule-breaking as Boris’s ten-minute birthday party in Downing Street.
We now know that the Labour leader’s get-together included a pre-planned 80-minute dinner rather than a spontaneous meal break taken during a busy day of campaigning.
And, contrary to Starmer’s insistence that the group merely grabbed a quick bite before getting back to the grindstone, we know that no further work was planned after the curry and beer had been consumed late on that Friday night.
The ‘visit programme’ also confirms that everybody knew deputy leader Angela Rayner would be there all along. The repeated claim that Labour officials simply ‘forgot’ about her flame-haired presence always seemed about as unconvincing as Starmer the metropolitan London lawyer posing as a friend of the North East working classes while sipping a bottle of Spanish lager.
Mrs Rayner is not generally thought of, after all, as a forgettable wallflower or shrinking violet. Then again, if some of them do have foggy memories of that night it could be because, as one Labour informant has claimed, local MP Mary Foy and her team were there ‘just getting p ***** ’.
Like all politicians who try to strike poses on the moral high ground, from John ‘Back To Basics’ Major to Tony ‘I’m A Pretty Straight Sorta Guy’ Blair, Starmer’s ethical posturing has come back to bite him. Having loudly insisted that Boris Johnson must resign or be sacked over Partygate in Downing Street, he now faces calls to step down over Beergate at the Durham Miners Hall.
If Starmer had exhibited a more rational response to Partygate, and not called for the Prime Minister’s resignation over the crime of having a birthday cake in a tupperware box, he would be in less trouble now.
But, by being so harrumphingly hawkish about Boris, Sir Keir has got himself into a complete mess – one entirely of his own making.
As Labour Party leader, Sir Keir might have had limited success to date. But he can now point to at least one remarkable achievement – he has made many people suspect that he is at least as untrustworthy as the notoriously shifty Boris. Indeed for some, Starmer’s hyprocrisy over breaking lockdown rules is, if anything, even worse than Mr Johnson’s.
Boris always looked like a reluctant lockdown PM, giving in too easily to the safety-first-and-last experts of Sage before looking for an early-ish way out.
By contrast, Sir Keir was the high priest of lockdown zealotry. Labour’s only attempted criticism of the Government’s authoritarian Covid laws was to insist that the Conservatives should have locked us all down earlier, harder and for even longer.
FoR those of us who believe the bigger lockdown scandal was the imposition of such irrational and feardriven rules in the first place, Labour’s fanatical authoritarians were always a large part of the problem. To find that Starmer and Rayner were partying in defiance of the lockdown laws they championed reveals a level of hyprocrisy which we might have suspected but had not previously seen.
Should Starmer have to resign over an illicit beer and curry – even if Durham Constabulary dig up enough evidence to fine him? of course, he should not – any more than Boris should be forced out of office over a ten-minute party and a £50 fixed penalty notice.
Police should surely have more important crimes to investigate and our political leaders should certainly have bigger issues to debate. We are living, lest anybody forget, through a cost of living crisis, with many worried about whether they can afford the price of a pint or a cake.
Inflation is spiralling out of control and economists are beginning to mention the ‘R’ word as many predict a recession further down the road. And then, of course, there is the bloody war in eastern Europe that has many Ukrainians worrying about whether they will reach their next birthday – never mind how they might keep the lights on for any future late-night ‘work gatherings’. So obviously there are many more serious issues for our leaders to focus on than the essentially petty bunfights over Beergate or Partygate.
But that does not mean Sir Keir, or indeed Mr Johnson, can simply brush these things off like leftover crumbs. Because the Labour leader’s troubles now transcend curryeating and beer-drinking. They concern the central political tests of trust and honesty.
Just how low public trust in our political leaders has sunk was demonstrated by last week’s local elections. The results reflected a widespread ‘none of the above’ attitude – a distinct lack of enthusiasm for any of the major parties.
Even by the poor standards of local elections, voter turnout was damagingly low – an estimated 34 per cent compared with 67 per cent at the 2019 general election.
The ‘Gate’ scandals can only make things worse. The results also show that Starmer and Labour are still not benefiting from the Tories’ troubles as much as might have been expected.
Labour certainly consolidated its dominance in London, but there is little sign yet of a serious revival in the key Red Wall seats of the North and Midlands which it lost to the Conservatives in 2019. Given that Durham Constabulary did not announce their decision to open an investigation into Beergate until a day after Britain went to the polls, Labour’s performance is more disturbing still.
It’s also worth recalling that the infamous Beergate gathering took place during campaigning for the 2021 Hartlepool by-election. Labour lost, with Hartlepool electing a Tory MP for the first time since the seat was created in 1974. It is tempting to think that, if Starmer and Rayner had spent more time campaigning than currying, Labour could have done better. But maybe not.
The signs are that working class voters in the former Labour heartlands find Starmer a pallid, uninspiring figure. Many of them voted for Brexit and are also not daft enough to forget his role as Labour’s leading Remainer.
Starmer’s main appeal for support so far has simply been ‘I’m not Boris Johnson’. But the more he becomes mired in allegations of hypocrisy and dishonesty, the less convincing even that line becomes. I suspect many people would still rather share a curry with Boris.
We need feel little sympathy for the stiff Starmer, undone largely by his own self-righteous posturing. or, as Shakespeare might have it, hoist with his own petard.
AT the lowest point in his career, a penniless and homeless Ncuti Gatwa would borrow cash from friends just to travel to auditions on the Tube.
But after landing one of the most coveted roles in television as the first ‘full-time’ black incarnation of Doctor Who, Gatwa now has the power to travel anywhere in time and space thanks to his Tardis.
It is a far cry from the horrors of his younger days when he had to flee war-ravaged Rwanda as a child, was targeted by racist bullies at school in his adopted home of Scotland, or coping with bouts of depression while pursuing his acting dreams.
The 29-year-old has described his journey from refugee of a bitter genocide to one of the UK’s best-loved and highest paid television stars in what has been a remarkable story.
He has spoken openly about his struggles to square his mixed Scottish and Rwandan upbringing. He said recently: ‘My accent has given me the biggest identity crisis of all time. I don’t know what I sound like to people. I remember definitely feeling like, “Oh my god, I think I might be the only black person in the world”.
‘We came to the UK because of the genocide that happened in Rwanda in 1994. It affected my family greatly as it did every Rwandan.
‘I’ve always been a bit scared to say that I’m Scottish because it’s almost as if people wouldn’t believe me. There were no black Scottish role models.’
Gatwa will take over from the first female Doctor – Jodie Whittaker – to become the latest in a long line of distinguished names to play the 900-year-old Time Lord, following on from three other Scots – Sylvester McCoy, fellow Royal Conservatoire graduate David Tennant and Peter Capaldi.
Three-time Bafta nominee Gatwa certainly drew on his life story to play his biggest role to date, that of a confused black school pupil coming to terms with his homosexuality and his Nigerian heritage in the hit Netflix series Sex Education.
In a 2019 BBC documentary Black and Scottish, he shared his story of racist abuse, which he said was the norm while he was attending senior school in Dunfermline, Fife.
‘It was so normal to have racial abuse spat at you,’ he said.
Born in Kigali, Rwanda, on October 15, 1992, Gatwa was educated in Fife and Edinburgh before attending the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow, where he gained a BA in Acting.
But it was at school where he learnt how to mask his feelings.
He said: ‘When I moved to Dunfermline, there were a group of boys who ended up making up a racist social media page geared at me.
‘I came home that day and told my mum about it and it wasn’t the most empathetic of responses - it was like, “Get on with it”.’
He took the advice to heart, and after studying drama at the Conservatoire, he began his career as an extra on the 2014 sitcom Bob Servant. In 2016, he played Demetrius in a production of A Midsummer’s Nights Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe.
His big break came when he was cast in Sex Education as Eric Effiong, a young gay British-Nigerian who is best friends with Otis, the show’s lead character.
THE Netflix show’s three series document Eric’s growth as he deals with his family’s acceptance of his sexuality while he embraces his Nigerian heritage. He also falls in love with Adam, who bullied him in the first series. The role made him one of Britain’s best-paid young actors, with accounts for his company Gemini Moon Limited revealing earnings of £772,000 last year.
Yet this apparently meteroric rise has not been all plain sailing.
Writing in The Big Issue in May 2020, he said he ended up homeless after running out of savings in the months before he landed his role in Sex Education. He has spoken of having to borrow £10 from friends so he could afford the tube fare for auditions.
‘Being a 25-year-old man with no money or job affected my sense of self-worth,’ he wrote. ‘Rejection became unbearable. Auditions weren’t just acting jobs, they were lifelines.’
He continued: ‘One friend gave me money towards paying off the prior month’s rent and offered to let me move into their
spare room rent free for a while. Great, I thought. An opportunity to get back on my feet and start paying people back. On moving-in day, he changed his mind. As I was standing on the street with my suitcases, one thought came into my head: “I’m homeless”.’
Gatwa started to lose weight because he could not afford to eat properly.
‘To the outside world everything seemed fine. I was temping at Harrods,’ he wrote. ‘I’d wake up from the double bed I shared with my best friend, leave the house without a hair out of place in a slicklooking trench coat and polished brogues. I would get compliments for looking so presentable. When I lost weight due to eating only one meal a day, people told me how lean and healthy I looked.’
In reality, Gatwa had developed depression, though he kept it from his friends out of fear of being a ‘burden’, adding: ‘My mind became my biggest enemy.’
It was landing the role of Eric which gave him his big break and the means to turn his life around. The role of Doctor Who, however, eclipses everything that has gone before, something not lost on Gatwa, who has had to keep the news quiet since February.
HE has admitted to feeling ‘deeply honoured, beyond excited and of course a little bit scared’ to have been chosen for the role. The series creator, Russell T Davies, who will be back at the helm of the show in time for Gatwa’s debut, said he had no such doubts after seeing him audition.
In fact, Davies admitted: ‘It was the most blazing audition, it was our last audition, it was the very last one, we thought we had someone and then in he came and stole it!’ Davies said: ‘When you see him you don’t know what you are going to get. And I fell in love, frankly. He is stunning.’ He added: ‘I think when you cast the Doctor you cast for potential. I can see him for years exploring the part and taking it somewhere new. That’s what I felt. I felt in my heart that we can go anywhere with this.’
The Scot has admitted he has big shoes to fill as some of the best known names in British TV have played the iconic role.
He is the latest to become the Doctor since William Hartnell first hit the screens almost 60 years ago.
He will become the fourth actor from north of the Border to take on the part as the Time Lord from Gallifrey, which has been a BBC hit since it was first broadcast in 1963.
Sylvester McCoy was the first iteration of the Doctor to hail from Scotland, portraying the character between 1987 until 1989.
He was the seventh and final Doctor in the original run of the series before it returned as a TV film in 1996 and then finally in 2005 as a series again.
MCCOY famously used his Scottish accent in the role, and while he had initially portrayed the character with a degree of clown-like humour he developed into a darker figure as the series continued.
In 1990, readers of Doctor Who Magazine voted his version of the Doctor to be the best over Tom Baker who was seen as the favourite.
Bathgate born David Tennant was the second Scot to take up the roll as the time travelling adventurer in 2005, some 18-years after McCoy.
Unlike his Scottish predecessor, Tennant previously said that he was asked to drop his natural Scottish accent by series producer Russell T Davies.
He rose to fame in the role and went on to star in larger film productions including one of the Harry Potter films, and the Academy Award nominated ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ series.
The last Scot to take up the role before Gatwa was Peter Capaldi, who later revealed how important watching the series was to him as a child. Growing up in a tenement block in Springburn, Glasgow, he said watching the sci-fi show was ‘like a fairytale’.
His parents Gerry and Nancy ran an ice cream delivery business from a cafe on the ground floor while he pored over the TV.
Capaldi previously said: ‘It had that quality of darkness that you find in a Grimm’s fairy tale. This strange creature of a man who takes you on all these adventures, but who always keeps you safe.
‘That’s absolutely what I want the children who watch my version to feel.’
After taking up the role he also revealed that his mother, who has since passed, sent him a Doctor Who annual every year, well into his childhood.
And now the latest regeneration of the most enduring characters sounds like he will enjoy taking up the mantle as the 14th Doctor.