After Starmer’s casserole of clichés, I’m off to curry favour with Vatican

The magnificently mad Lords’ ceremony leaves underwhelming Commons debate in the shade

It’s a fresh term at Westminster High, and though Labour ought to be jolly happy after winning the local elections, it was the Prime Minister who had a spring in his step. “Did you have a good weekend?” he asked Sir Keir as they walked to the Lords for the Opening of Parliament. Childish, but funny.

Prince Charles’s first Opening – he was giving the speech in place of the Queen – happened to be mine, too. I had never even been in the House of Lords before and the view from the press gallery on this august occasion was stunning – a Where’s Wally? collage of ermine, turbans, wigs ( judicial and vanity), fascinators and one ancient peer careering between benches on ski poles.

The ambassadors get the best seats in a box next to the throne – yet stuck up in the gods, one row back with a view of absolute zilch, was the Vatican ambassador. Feeling affronted on behalf of the entire Catholic communion, I made a pledge to find him after and give him a great big kiss.

The chamber fell silent. We could see on TV screens that the Crown, Prince William and Charles had each arrived outside in three separate cars, while the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas, being interviewed by the BBC, looked furious (no doubt she was rabbiting on about the emissions).

“Why does the Crown have to come by car?” a foreign journalist texted me. I replied: “You don’t know London. If someone carries it on foot, it’s liable to get nicked.”

The Royal party was ushered in by some men dressed as playing cards and took their seats under a giant gold canopy. The Prince then unveiled the year’s parliamentary legislation in a dispassionate voice, as if reading aloud from the Yellow Pages.

It’s all magnificently mad, reminding us that there is more to the state than Boris v Keir, more to British history than what one can remember from last week.

In fact, the bit of the ceremony that Left-wing bores call silly was easily more serious than what came next, as MPS wandered back to the Commons to debate what they had just heard.

First up, two “funny” speeches from the government benches, which the Tories were obliged to pretend were hilarious and Labour that they were deeply inappropriate. Sir Keir’s run-in with the cops over a curry came up: “Never,” said Tory backbencher Graham Stuart, channelling Churchill, “has so much karma come from a korma!” Fay Jones, a youngster from Wales, said she felt she had won the “lottery of life” when she won her seat (myself, I’d rather win the lottery), but that during her victory speech, her father had circled his finger in the air, telling her to wind up fast.

Sir Keir affected to be amused by this while his comrades sat, armsfolded, sucking a collective lemon. The thing is, they didn’t lighten up when it was his turn to speak. The poor man bombed. It was a casserole of clichés; his tone was flat.

As his MPS turned to their phones to find out what was going on in the Johnny Depp trial, the Tories began doing “wind up signals” of their own. He then handed the PM a gift by declaring that what Britain needed was a “government of the moment”. Boris called him “the leader of the opposition of the moment”, which is exactly what he looks like.

The Prime Minister was also underwhelming – until he took an angry intervention from Labour’s Sarah Owen and turned into the Incredible Hulk, labelling Labour “great quivering jellies of indecision” (Ms Lucas tried to get a question in at this point, no doubt to suggest the royals ride bicycles).

But the Labour benches didn’t wobble. They didn’t even move. They displayed the same stony silence that the Tories gave Boris when he was first put under investigation over his birthday cake. As long as the police are looking into Keir, it

Labour’s benches displayed stony silence – as long as the police are looking into Keir, enthusiasm is suspended

seems, party enthusiasm is suspended.

So, too, was time, because Boris was followed by the SNP’S Ian Blackford, who stood up with a pile of papers that looked longer than War and Peace and proceeded to drive everyone out of the chamber with sheer windbaggery (finally, Lucas got a question in: it was about insulation). Keir and Boris were forced to hang around out of politeness, though, as the Scotsman entered the fourth hour of his witless oration, the Prime Minister tapped his watch irritably and mouthed “Come on!”

As for me, I made good on my promise to the Vatican ambassador. I cornered him in the lobby of the Lords, fell to my knees and planted a kiss on his hand. He looked as surprised as everyone else.

Did he enjoy the Opening? “I could see nothing!” he said in his beautiful Italian accent. “I shall have to watch it back on television.”

Karl Marx probably didn’t have takeaway curry and a few San Miguels in mind when he said “history always repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce”. But as Keir Starmer delivered his press conference on Monday, pledging to resign if Durham police issued him with a fixed penalty notice, I realised Marx might have been right about something after all. We’re trapped in the farce portion of history, and are struggling to escape it.

The Labour leader said some preposterous things as he justified his position, the kind of sentences you’d associate with the high-water mark of lockdown weirdness. “No rules were broken. I simply had something to eat,” he pleaded, staring down the camera. Broadcast journalists once again pored over surreal minutiae. Did the presence of beer disqualify this from being a “work event”? Was this a spontaneous curry or a premeditated one? It’s quite clear why they are doing this: to demonstrate even-handedness, having performed similar contortions with Johnson, Sunak and that infamous cake. (Had it been opened, like some Chuckle Brothers rendering of Chekhov’s gun, or merely remained in its box as colleagues sang Happy Birthday?)

But the biggest takeaway (pun intended) from all this is, or ought to be, just how absurd the rules were in the first place. Alongside the misery of the pandemic, some particularly bonkers moments shone through – as when This Morning presenters Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield hugged each other through a plastic sheet, or when debates sprang up about the diameter a Scotch egg would need to constitute a “substantial meal”. I’d hoped we might be past the excesses of that time, but here we go again, in the Dali-esque Covid world, a land of tiers, support bubbles, and arguments about whether people should be allowed to sunbathe in the park. Only this time it’s happening in the midst of a war and the biggest cost of living squeeze in recent memory.

Starmer might have reflected on the stupidity of criminalising social interaction among work colleagues in the first place. The rules were incomprehensible, ever-changing and it was all too easy to break them – even unwittingly. He might even have considered how his own sermonising had compounded his problems. Instead, he took on the mantle of public moralist. He was “a man of honour and integrity”, he insisted. Labour MPS flocked to Twitter to reiterate this line, using almost identical wording. In truth, the statement seemed as much Covid theatre as a matter of honour. Offering to resign may well be the only course of action left to Starmer, but this isn’t because this punishment would fit the “crime”. It is because Sir Keir embraced Witchfinder-general mode at the first opportunity, leaving a paper trail of sanctimony in his wake.

“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” some declare. My own position is rather different: I’m gagging to hear a dose of contrition for the rules themselves, (voted for by virtually every MP in the Chamber). A growing body of evidence has shown that another way was possible, preferable even. Take the recent World Health Organisation figures on excess deaths, which vindicate Sweden’s decision to avoid coercive restrictions and fear-mongering. Yet the closest we’ve come to this was when Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, admitted that closing the schools was a historic mistake.

During the pandemic, legions of curtain-twitchers showed remarkably little sympathy for those who lost pieces of their lives under lockdown. Miserable young people were scolded for self-indulgence and told that their struggles paled in comparison with those of their grandparents during the Second World War. Even following the rules wasn’t enough – you were expected to do it nobly and without complaint. Worse still, these selfappointed moral guardians were clearly getting a Puritanical thrill out of it, a bat squeak – or more likely a full-throated roar – of finger-wagging delight.

This may be a little unfair on the real-life Puritans, who lived in perpetual anxiety about their own spiritual state, and preached a philosophy of rigorous self-scrutiny and introspection. They founded colleges and hospitals. Nowadays, you don’t actually have to do anything to justify your righteousness; a tweet is all that is needed to serve as a moral indicator, or in the case of the Labour leader, a high-minded public statement.

Perhaps Sir Keir has made integrity the keystone of his political personality because he has little else to recommend him. Beyond banging the drum for a windfall tax on energy firms, it’s far from clear what policies his party is proposing to tackle the major problems of the day. And alongside all the tut-tutting, society feels increasingly incapable of dealing with crimes, sexual violence and other genuine moral transgressions. Halo-polishing is easy, and becoming a substitute for action.

Amid the Cavalier pageantry of the Queen’s Speech – though sadly, lacking Her Majesty’s presence yesterday – was a salutary reminder of the opposing forces increasingly taking centre stage. Watching the procession troop past the statue of Oliver Cromwell in Parliament Square, I wonder if the Puritans might have had the last laugh after all.