Did Nobody Think to Tell Starmer that the Sequel’s Always Worse?

SEAN WALSH

If you’ve seen it, you’ll know that A Prayer for the Dying is the worst film ever made. If you haven’t then you’re just going to have to trust me. Its awfulness is incommunicable even by critics far more articulate than this one.

You might get a sense of it if I tell you that Mickey Rourke is an IRA gunman with a heart of gold and an accent which would embarrass the professional decoders of Bletchley Park; and that Bob Hoskins plays an SAS trooper turned priest with a blind niece. And not just a blind niece but a very blind niece.

A niece so blind that in one (torturingly) memorable scene he is shown ironing in front of her while he is in a state of near undress, a clever narrative trick, serving to emphasise just how blind of a niece the blind niece is.

There is no A Prayer for the Dying: Part 2. But if there were, and if the usual mathematics of the film sequel were to apply in this hypothetical instance (plot quality decreases at a compound or geometric rate with each iteration of the original, as Euler famously put it), it still wouldn’t be as bad as this government’s newly released and already cancelled Starmer’s Game: Phase 2.

Just a few days ago, the Prime Minister was telling the dozen or so people not spiritually bankrupted by the financial and psychological damage inflicted by Phase One, that it was time to move “with spirits high” into the next phase of “delivery, delivery, delivery” of his government’s vision for Britain. What exactly he was intending we’ll never know, as he has since become (struggles for right euphemism) distracted by events.

I suppose the prime minister could not have been expected to predict what was going to happen next – that his deputy, the Secretary of State for Housing, was going to transfigure in real time into a walking Ponzi scheme.

We were told that Angela Rayner was an ambassador to the Cabinet from somewhere called “the working class”, a foreign country, tragically underpopulated when it comes to human rights lawyers, in which native men in caps spend their afternoons in smoke-filled betting shops while their womenfolk wash clothes in the communal bathtub and the kids play marbles in the street.

And where grifting your way into a significant property portfolio is just the sort of thing that happens in between dog fighting and casual procreation.

Truth is she was an imposter, a pretend inhabitant of this strange land. Rayner is working-class only in the sense that Stephen Fry is an intellectual: classified as such by people too dim or misinformed to know any better, or to have met the real thing.

Which, let’s be clear, is a relief. Far more depressing if Rayner’s life joins up, in any moral sense, with those of the struggling people she pretends to represent. They are better than she is.

Gareth Roberts has written in the Spectator that Reform’s success in large part derives from a carefree campness, an unaffected gaiety. I think this is true. As St Augustine nearly said, we can come to rest in the transcendent and humour, irony, laughter can point us towards home. And as Our Lord most definitely did say, we find our way to Him by becoming once again like a child. It is no trivial thing to be authentically carefree.

The corollary is also true. Voters discern in this depressing coalition of solicitors (real and fake), NGO lifers, former trade union officials, Matrix Chambers graduates and miscellaneous public sector junkies an emphatic joylessness. The Fabians are in charge and finding out that the real world hasn’t been reading their pamphlets. And they are jolly cross about it.

I wish Rayner well, but I suspect it won’t be long before I forget to include her in my prayers. What really gets me, though, is not the hypocrisy of these people, but their vigorously prosecuted war against freedom and what it means to be free.

Freedom is not a list of permissions, or well-crafted derogations from a presumed culture of constraint, written up by Fabian lawyers who really are, to put it charitably, no better than the rest of us.

Starmer’s Game: Phase Two, like A Prayer for the Dying, manages to have that “so bad it’s funny” vibe. When looked at in a certain way, you can manage to laugh at it. Although how long such consolation will be available, in a country which now arrests comedians for wrong think, remains to be seen.

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This article (Did Nobody Think to Tell Starmer that the Sequel’s Always Worse?) was created and published by Country Squire Magazine and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Sean Walsh

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