The Right Dishonourable

Labour’s leader Keir Starmer became an indirect victim of offence archaeology as he was pressured into apologising for a visit to the anti-LGBT church Jesus House. He also deleted the offending video, lest anybody see it again.

“I completely disagree with Jesus House’s beliefs on LGBT+ rights, which I was not aware of before my visit,” he tweeted. “I apologise for the hurt my visit caused and have taken down the video. It was a mistake and I accept that.”

The shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy used her first major speech in the role to criticise former prime minister Tony Blair. Rejecting the “uncritical embrace of economic globalisation in the 1980s”, she argued that New Labour became convinced the model was “not a choice, but a fate”.

“It ushered in an era of flexible labour markets and deregulation ‘to untie the hands of business’ as the then prime minister [Blair] described it in his Chicago speech,” Nandy told the Chatham House think tank.

There is widespread bafflement as to why some on the hard left have taken to renaming Labour’s leader Keir Starmer ‘Keith’. No less than the Financial Times’ Sebastian Payne called it the “most bizarre Labour meme I’ve seen today”, presumably in a competitive field.

“Any explanation?” he asked. Well, the insult surely explains itself. As the very public sociologist Phil BC answers, “it annoys some people.” More importantly, it expresses the dismay of Labour’s left in being led by a drab middle-aged man who is trying to win power in a conventional way.