It Can Never Be You

I have never laboured, so to speak, under the delusion that the Prime Minister might one day be a mixed-race, disabled, state educated, non-Oxbridge, unmarried, childless Catholic who had been born abroad before having spent almost his entire life in County Durham.

But there are people who meet at least some of those criteria and who go into politics, generally Labour politics, because they believe that they ought to be Prime Minister. In anyone, that belief strikes me as a form of mental illness, but quite a lot of them are so far gone that they regard it as inevitable that one day they really will be.

Well, in the course of the most recent Labour Leadership Election, absolutely no one questioned the proposition that an Oxonian public schoolboy was more "Prime Ministerial" than a white woman from a state school and a non-Oxbridge university, and far more "Prime Ministerial" than a mixed-race woman from a state school and a non-Oxbridge university. The votes reflected that.

Keir Starmer's school went private while he was there, and his degree from Oxford was his second degree. But he was the most "Prime Ministerial" candidate available this time. In 2024, when Labour will have fewer than 200 seats and will have taken fewer votes than all other non-Conservatives put together, then its new Leader, who might very well be a new MP, will have gone straight from public school to Oxford. As will all subsequent Leaders of both parties.

There are all sort of reasons to be politically active. Mine never had anything to do with wanting to be Prime Minister, much less with imagining that one day I might be. But if yours do, then did you go straight from public school to Oxford? No? Then it can never be you. Do you own 10 million pounds' worth of Surrey? No? Then it can never be you. It can never be you.