Starmer's Van

The Marquis

By the Marquis

There was not one provincial antique dealer in the country who did not let out a low hum of recognition at the sight of the removals van that reversed so gracelessly through the gates of Number 10 to collect Starmer’s effects last Friday afternoon. The bright canary yellow. The name, ‘Bishop’s Move’, which sounds like the name of an episode of Inspector Morse about the murder of a gay country vicar. The choice of fonts; a stately, self-possessed Times New Roman for the company name, and a flowing, brasserie-menu cursive for the words ‘Fine Art Services’ in the lower left corner - per the slightly wet-brained, befuddled approach to marketing of the aging small-town-small-trader, these are luxury words, and deserve an appropriately luxury font.

The kind of font that says words like ‘Crepe Suzettes’ and ‘Duck à l’Orange.’ Yes, the whole picture has the decisively dawdy, mothball odour of the petite bourgeoisie of Britain’s cathedral and market towns; Hebden Bridge. Rye. Tetbury. Long Melford. That van is a Lib-Dem Tory swing voter. We are quite safely in the creamy, mock-Tudor world of unpaid VAT bills, of murano glass ashtrays and Edwardian mahogany bureaus with piles of costume jewellery rattling in the bottom drawer. The world of brown furniture. As one pictures dealer I sent the video to put it:

‘Saw van. Harold McMillan. Like him all the more.’

McMillan is exactly right. That van belongs to the world of the archetypal Conservative voter of the last century, the Home Counties grammar school boy cum small businessman. A van known for its pragmatism, wit and unflappability. A van that belongs to the part of Starmer that was raised in Surrey, and not the part that feathered his nest in Kentish Town.

Human rights lawyer; pescatarian; spent his youth in a minor Trotskyite faction; a secular Jewish wife - so far, very Kentish Town: tick, tick, tick and tick. But Starmer has never belonged quite so obviously to that patch of North London as neighbours like David Aaronovitch or Will Self. For one, the love of football is very slightly too earnest. An archetypally ‘Kentish Town’ man watches football for the same performative reasons Fergus Henderson’s St. John serves ‘Jam Roly-Poly with Ice Cream’ - a working class institution, ‘culturally Labour.’ Starmer watches football because he straightforwardly enjoys watching football.

Starmer can’t name a favourite novel or poem; again, that’s a point against. A man like Giles Coren, while obviously stupid, would feign some kind of continuity with the more literary generation that occupied this corner of the world toward the third quarter of the last century, the likes of David Sylvester or Kingsley Amis, and could probably pull a few lines from Larkin out of his hat under duress.

Finally, there’s Starmer’s choice of pub. The Pineapple, which with its bright teal exterior, the fake bookshelf wallpaper and cheap Thai food, veers slightly in the direction of the sort of ‘fishbowl glass of Pink Gin and Tonic’ pubs that cling to the Western bends of the Thames, out toward Richmond and Chiswick. No, no, that’s not very Kentish Town at all. The standard line of the Kentish Town middle class is (falsely): ‘There’s some rough bits around here, you know, but we get along.’ A real Kentish Towner would have told us he goes to one of the few slightly dingier pubs that still count the remnants of the area’s older Irish working class among their clientele, and insisted it’s the only place in the neighbourhood that does a ‘proper’ Guinness.

Yes, there is something in Starmer that seems to belong more properly to a place like Ealing, or Kingston upon Thames, or indeed his native Oxted; the leafy world of Côte Brasseries and ‘posh hot dogs,’ where people aren’t so ashamed of owning a television. A world that is so well summed up in the decals on Starmer’s moving van.

An occasional dealer myself, that van summons up all the frumpy, leather-jacketed hawkers and peddlers the antiques trade has brought me into contact with over the last few years. Maybe this is the direction Starmer, post premiership, will find himself moving in - something a bit less ambitious, less flashy, more ‘everyman’, than the usual roster of Silicon Valley speaking engagements. Maybe I’ll spot him hopping the fence to get into the Newark Antiques Fair at 5 in the morning, maybe he’ll try to sell me a beat-up Regency sofa that’s ‘good for reupholstery’. In either case, that van looks like a rare moment of contact between his life and mine - that van that belongs to a world of men who prefer cash and only pay half their taxes and, frankly, it warms my cockles. So from one petty hustler to another, let me take this opportunity to wish Keir a very slightly less frosty goodbye than I might have otherwise.