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As minister after minister deserted the embattled prime minister of Britain last week, Labour leader and Leader of Opposition Keir Starmer quipped in the House of Commons that this is “the first case of sinking ships fleeing the rat”.In history, fiction and historical fiction, great leaders have risen to the pulpit and the occasion. Mark Antony, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, asks “friends, Romans and countrymen”, “What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?”, after Caesar’s assassination. Then there’s Winston Churchill, promising Britain and the world — after the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940 — that “we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”. Closer home, in the hallowed halls of India’s Parliament, Jawaharlal Nehru made a newborn country proud of its tryst with destiny, poverty and Partition notwithstanding. In 2022, though, the era of the inspiring speech seems long over.
As minister after minister deserted the embattled prime minister of Britain last week, Labour leader and Leader of Opposition Keir Starmer quipped in the House of Commons that this is “the first case of sinking ships fleeing the rat”. With a single turn of phrase, he managed to call Boris Johnson a pest, while implying that the top leadership of the Conservative Party, including those who are now frontrunners as Johnson’s successors are disloyal and themselves in decline. In an age of oneupmanship and cutting remarks in 240 characters, Starmer’s statement stands out for its brevity and wit. But that’s all.
The perfect punchline pointed to the missing story. Perhaps, in an earlier time, before everyone had a voice and each one had a lot more to say, Britain’s Leader of Opposition might have made a speech that befits the crisis — an erosion of political trust in an economy still reeling from a once-in-a-century pandemic — one that inspired even as it derided. But in a world of diminishing attention spans and polarised politics, a smart one-liner, it seems, is the best that the politician can summon, on either side of the aisle.
This editorial was first filed in the print edition on July 13, 2022 under the title ‘Of ships and rats’.
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