With another 24 hours in the books, the Prime Minister has once again demonstrated his remarkable ability to be everything to everyone, and therefore, nothing to anyone. The latest polls suggest the public is growing weary of his administration’s “comprehensive answer or understandable narrative” on the small boats crisis, a masterpiece of political non-committal that would make a weather forecaster proud. Sir Keir’s plan, which seems to involve both “smashing the gangs” and also “fixing the foundations of a broken asylum system,” has the clarity of a pre-election pledge and the decisive speed of a snail on a sabbatical. You can almost hear him in a room, weighing the options: “Shall we tackle the problem? Or shall we… not? Let’s form a committee to decide!”
The public, bless their cotton socks, are apparently furious about the record number of Channel crossings. They’re also reportedly upset about the number of hotels being used to house asylum seekers. This has left Sir Keir in a rather exquisite bind. To please one group, he must displease the other, a political Sophie’s Choice he’s tackling with all the gusto of a man trying to reverse a lorry into a tight parking space. The solution, of course, is to do both and neither, simultaneously. Hence the new “one in one out” deal with France, a policy so bold in its simplicity that it makes the hokey-cokey look like a complex geopolitical strategy.
As protests continue to mount and the public grows more impatient, our Prime Minister remains as unwavering as a weather vane in a hurricane. His latest gaffe, a simple slip of the tongue, has already been lauded by his supporters as a sign of his humble, everyman nature, and by his detractors as proof of his intellectual hollowness. It’s a beautiful thing to watch, this dance of ambiguity. He is a man who can accidentally praise his own success in the afternoon while claiming he could have “gone on all morning,” a testament to his boundless, albeit numerically challenged, optimism. Truly, a beacon of indecision in a world that craves a firm hand on the tiller, or at the very least, a hand that has decided to hold the tiller in the first place.
Kierless Whispers 