Jeremy and Piers have rather different views and yet avoid criticising each other. Maybe there’s something in it…
For any news outlets hoping to catch the reader’s eye, it’s been a very difficult week. The Labour party conference was always going to be a vertiginous drop-off in spectacle after the Chelsea flower show, but coinciding with the national petrol shortage has been an aesthetic disaster for the media – all lanyards and tarmac and recrimination, with only Daniel Craig’s figure-hugging puce smoking jacket to relieve the monotony, like a lone pimple in the middle of a corpse’s back.
Keir Starmer’s team did their best to help out by arranging a pleasant snap of their boss on the balcony of his Brighton hotel room, suited but tieless, perusing his conference speech with the sea behind. Over his left shoulder hover the ghostly remains of the west pier, crumbling and cut off from land, as inaccessible as a Commons majority. Perhaps it was meant to be a subtle signifier of the decay Britain has been reduced to by Boris Johnson, though, since the pier closed under Harold Wilson, it may be one of the few of the country’s woes that genuinely have nothing to do with Covid or Brexit.
