Tox Report 56. Falstaff in Islington

A new dawn has broken (even if it is a bit murky)

The evening before the election, I went to see Player Kings — Robert Icke’s clever, funny, pacy working-together of Henry IV parts 1 and 2. At the end I watched Hal receive the crown and, in his new person as Henry V, repudiate Falstaff, just as he has always promised to do. “Presume not that I am the thing I was,” says the new king, cold and unmoved by his old friend’s begging. How lucky, I thought, to be making theatre about the transfer of power this week of all weeks. Icke’s plays often bounce slyly off current events, but this was surely more relevant than he could ever have imagined it would be during rehearsals: a play about the difference between waiting to lead and actually leading, about the brutal transactions of political alliances.

“Presume not that I am the thing that I was” is a not-bad rule for Starmer watchers. He has — either cannily or creepily, depending on where you sit — executed a series of shameless reversals. The most blatant of those is probably the turn from calling Jeremy Corbyn a “friend” in 2020 to saying three years later they were, in fact, not friends. Abstemious Corbyn is an unlikely Falstaff, but there he is, held close by Starmer until actual power beckons and then cast out. Exiled from the court, Falstaff dies: in Player Kings, this is represented by him standing, head bowed, on the stage as the new king speaks. It could be a scene from an election count.

Not the count in Islington, though, where (alas if you’re a still-bitter centrist like me) Corbyn held his seat. It was a strange election for me, because while I got the headline I wanted, many of the individual results were very depressing. The Reform wins. The conservative Muslim independents. The Greens (I desperately want environmental issues to have more representation in parliament, and I can’t think of a worse advocate for them than the Green Party). The abuse of Jess Phillips at her count, and of Thangam Debbonaire at her hustings. Having got myself set up to watch the results all night, I suddenly realised that I didn’t want to see the Bristol Central count — that whatever joy I would get from seeing Rees-Mogg and Truss fall, it would be outweighed by the Labour loss in Bristol. So I went to bed.

The next day felt anticlimactic. I thought more about the worrying trends than the huge Labour majority, more about the near misses (Wes Streeting’s CLP has a big fight for next time) than the narrow gains. More about the subplots of rising extremism than about the main story arc, which is that the electorate rejected a fractured, delinquent Tory Party in favour of a sane, grown-up Labour. Tentatively, I think things can only get better.

Admittedly that’s in part because it would be very hard for them to be worse after the chaos and maladministration we’ve been through. Over the next few months, it’s likely that a scattering of new Labour MPs — not many, because I think vetting has been quite sturdy for this election, but a few — will be caught doing stupid things incompatible with office and wind up being booted. And it will not make any difference, because the bar the Tories left behind was so low, Labour can clear it at a casual stride.

Labour has already had one significant piece of luck: the result of the French election puts Labour in a much better position to reach cross-channel cooperation on the small boats, which means it will be in a stronger position to see off Reform at the next election. That’s assuming Reform is even in a position to fight and hasn’t gone the usual way of things involving Nigel Farage, and exploded in a mess of ego and bitterness. A hallmark of Starmer’s Labour is that it doesn’t assume. It is deliberate — sometimes too deliberate (moving too slowly to bin off Fazia Shaheen as candidate for Chingford was a mistake and probably cost them the seat by leaving her in a position to split the vote, while Starmer was painfully tardy in correcting his comments on LBC about Gaza), but rarely guilty of treating a win as inevitable.

This is not an election that is easy to sell as a victory for anyone’s ideology, even if it is obviously a big victory for Labour. The results suggest a lot of anti-Tory protest voting (benefiting both the Lib Dems and Reform); the excited talk of a “left uprising” in the independent successes requires a definition of “left” that is solely about Gaza and very much not about social liberalism. Vote share talk is tiresome under FPTP, but equally, you can’t take Labour’s vote share or the turnout figures as evidence of huge public enthusiasm for the party. I would have loved to see Corbyn personally punished for leading Labour into irrelevance and racism, and I will have to live without that.

But Labour did not run on ideology. Unlike in 1997, it didn’t even really run on hope — what worked in the nineties would be a tough platform today, when the geopolitical order is tearing itself to pieces and the economy is ropy. It ran essentially on a platform of “better than despair”, rather than the appealing but facile idealism Corbyn offered. Competence was enough to win power, and power means Labour can change lives. So what that there are people in Islington who still want to fool around with an old clown?

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Gimme, gimme more…

• More on the new government for UnHerd: this wasn’t the GC election some hoped for, but Labour still needs to solve its woman problem.

• Something for you summer reads lists: Griffin Dunne’s The Friday Afternoon Club is half Hollywood kid memoir and half true crime. Funny, wise, honest and a complete delight.

• Katy Wix on not forgiving the best friend who bullied her.

• Extremely weird profile from New York Magazine about an astrologer who killed her husband, her child and herself (one child survived), which appears to take the idea of hexing seriously? “Mclaurin was among several to accuse Johnson of attempting witchcraft, culminating in multiple car crashes, especially directed toward industry rivals.”