Notes from the Underground with David Aaronovitch

The public eclipse of one man and the sunrise of another is a rich quarry for the mining of metaphor. As I think I have just proved. Some are visual. The New Statesman magazine, which practically launched the Starmer Out, Burnham In campaign last September, chose yet another Bayeux Tapestry take-off for its Starmer resignation cover. Naturally Andy Burnham was William the Conqueror and Keir Starmer was Harold and, tellingly, the Norman Conquest had become the Northern Conquest.

MG to his companion, Derek: Let me look at the pic. The smile and the pint! Just like you-know-who and I think my smile is a bit better now, don’t you? A bit more authentic. And it hurts less than it used to. So (opens site on his phone) I’ll post it on X and Facebook. Just needs a clever message. Something patriotic and ordinary working bloke-like as well as having a funny dig at poor old Two-tier. Types on his phone. MG reads: “When England’s playing and Keir Starmer just resigned”. Perfect.

For sixty years Israel has enjoyed an almost militant goodwill in America. The reason has not been the all-powerful Israeli lobby, though of course there is one just as there is an oil lobby, a Saudi lobby, a tech lobby, and most murderous of all, a gun lobby. To US administrations Israel represented an occasionally infuriating ally in a strategic but alien region.

In three weeks’ time, in the local, Scottish and Welsh elections, the government will get hammered and the commentating class will demand a leadership challenge to the prime minister, the line between commentator and campaigner becoming increasingly blurred. Perhaps this will stir up the necessary 80 Labour MPs to back a challenger to Keir Starmer, but if I had to put my money where my cursor is, I’d bet against it. Fortunate in opposition, Keir Starmer has not been a lucky prime minister.

Three weeks ago a notice appeared in my inbox. Pusey House, an Oxford institution founded, according to its website, to “promote theological study and holiness of life, and to provide spiritual counsel and support to members of the University”, was holding a conference which it obviously thought I might be interested in. I was. The title of the two-day event was Christian Revival: Our Post-Liberal Hope?

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice”, wrote Karl Marx in his 1852 essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, “He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. But what about the third time? Or the fourth? This week, watching the missiles fly and the principal author of their launching streaming his consciousness to the world, was to realise that tragedy and farce now co-exist.

With apologies to Caravaggio If you remember your Bible (and if Reform comes to power and its new director of policy, James Orr has his way, your children may be tested on it), young Saul of Tarsus fresh from approving the stoning to death of St Stephen in Jerusalem and breathing out “threatenings and slaughter” against the early Christians, sets out for Damascus to see who he can persecute in that city.

It was all there in the first Trump election. In 2016, with a choice between a highly qualified woman candidate and a male TV celebrity whose history of sexually predatory behaviour was already well known, the voters, via the Electoral College, chose the predator. In 2024 – and despite knowing even more about his proclivities – the plurality of US voters did it again. Given that, nothing in the Epstein files relating to the repulsive attitude of him and his buddies towards women should surprise us.

Of those two destroyers of character, money and charm, Peter Mandelson lacked the first, so traded on the second. I put that in the past tense, because there’s no coming back from this week’s revelations about his buttering up his friend, Jeffrey Epstein, with inside information when he was in government. Peter M with beard, To his right, Tom Shebbeare It’s a half century this year since I first met Peter Mandelson.

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