Brace yourself for Keir Starmer’s puritan war on life’s pleasures

This is how the Conservative world ends, not with a bang but a flutter. The Tories in office were gamblers, shaggers, nutters and clowns, but at least they were funny – and their wrist too limp to grasp power entirely. Now the cavaliers are leaving the stage; here come the roundheads. Brace yourselves for a war on joy.

The most significant moment in this campaign was when Keir Starmer got angry about people laughing at his hundredth recital of the “daddy was a toolmaker” line. He couldn’t grasp that they were laughing at him, not his father. Though some will assume his fury was concocted to save face, what little we know suggests it was 100 per cent real.

The Tories have never understood the man. They call him Corbyn in disguise, a commie dressed as a Blairite – and thus every attack line fails because voters can sense it’s not true. He’s a hawk on war; a tough guy on security. There’s no grand plan to redistribute power and wealth. Keir’s character is conservative: calm and honourable, concerned less with method of government than style, with shades of Ted Heath’s “to govern is to serve”. He likes beer, 1980s music and football. He had a strained relationship with his dad, which fascinates touchy-feely media types but is familiar to those of us whose fathers were “present but not involved”. And he self-defines as working class to emphasise he’s the very opposite of Corbyn, that while the radical Left is motored by ideas, he is all about biography – a “lived experience” that super-rich Rishi could never understand.

Starmer is exciting, says Labour, because he is boring. So boring he could be an android. In a recent interview, he said he didn’t have a favourite novel or poem, and wasn’t afraid of anything as a child. Asked by a journalist desperate for colour what he dreamt of last night, he replied, “I don’t dream” (not even of electric sheep). He goes to bed at 11, passes out and wakes around 5am.

Want to know how he’ll govern? Look at how he’s silenced and expelled the Labour Left. Listen to his highly personal attacks on his opponents: Rishi is a liar, Boris was “a pathetic spectacle of a man”, “without shame” and “ridiculous”. His preferred tone is sanctimonious, which in No 10 will quickly become tedious.

The Left is always over-earnest. It can deploy humour as a weapon, but the reason why its efforts at satire are never truly funny is because they are uni-directional, the gags at service to a crusade that is almost unconsciously religious. “Joking aside,” they’d like to say, “the Tories are pure evil.” And one must never discount the possibility that the old crone at the edge of the village really is a witch.

See, the great divide in British history isn’t Right v Left but cavalier v roundhead, a historic war between those who think life is a mess but we should try to enjoy it versus those who see it as a deadly serious struggle to build heaven on earth. Starmer looks unoriginal because he’s not here to start a revolution, he’s here to complete one. For decades, perhaps centuries, we’ve been eradicating our traditional order to build something egalitarian, bureaucratic and politically correct –though we’ve hitherto permitted a little bit of extra wealth or freedom or Ruritanian camp as a nod to how things used to be. Those are the relics that Labour’s puritans find most offensive. They are what will be swept away.

The Lords has no teeth anymore, but it must go. Foxes cannot be chased, but even drag hunting will end. Private schooling is already exclusive, but Starmer will make it prohibitive (grammars and home-schooling will be next). Gentlemen’s clubs will be encouraged to admit women. Shrunken heads will be returned with a letter of apology. The CofE can bumble on because it’s Labour at prayer anyway, but the last vestiges of Christian ethics will be erased from the law books – abortion decriminalised, suicide to be assisted – as a new moral paradigm is clinically entrenched. You know what’s coming: rainbow flags everywhere, ministers reeling off pronouns, the Equality Act expanded, gender nonsense endorsed.

The next government will also go to war on the car, declare a climate emergency, discourage meat, scream at smokers that they’re going to Hell, and chip away at property. No, Starmer won’t raise the big three taxes; that would hurt productivity. But he implied in his definition of “working people” – those who cannot write a cheque – that idle wealth is a decadent luxury.

Charles I collected Van Dycks. Cromwell sold them off. And, if the Labour super-majority were so inclined, it would ban maypoles and Christmas puddings.

If you want a vision of the future, remember lockdown – an attempt to make the country do the “right thing”, with the noblest of intentions but demoralising and destructive. And absolutely no laughing at the back.

Whatever gimmicks are tried by Labour, no matter how comically they go wrong, critics will be accused of frivolity – of insufficient concern for the public’s welfare. The second most significant moment of the election campaign was when Sunak admitted to a diet of Haribo and Twix, and an angry caller demanded to know why he was making light of tooth decay.

Britain is going to be run by people like that for five long years.