Epstein Didn’t Break Keir Starmer, But It May Finish Him

“Are we the Italians?” was the best British politics meme I’ve seen for a while. (If you missed “Are we the baddies?” I can’t help you. Do keep up.)

If Sir Keir Starmer is driven from 10 Downing Street by (among other things) the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, it will bring the total number of prime ministers Britain has had in the past 10 years to seven (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Starmer).

That is certainly reminiscent of Italian politics in the second half of the 20th century. The Italians had seven prime ministers in 10 years not once but twice: in the 1950s and the 1990s. (I won’t list them all; life’s too short. The only name you’d recognize would be Silvio Berlusconi.) But the resemblance is superficial. British politics is much funnier than Italian politics has ever been. It is also much more British to behave this way than most Americans realize.

British readers of a certain age will get the allusion if I say our politics increasingly remind me of the Carry On films. Made on low budgets between the 1950s and the 1990s and starring a generation of English comic actors, the Carry On films combined seaside slapstick with salacious humor. The best of the genre was Carry On Up the Khyber, a magnificently pre-woke send-up of the British Raj. (Kenneth Williams steals the show as the Khasi of Kalabar.)

As the last few months of political crisis have unfolded, we have all been watching Carry On and Keep Calm. It’s as if the writers decided to reform the old troupe and reenact the politics of the 1970s as a kind of feature-length farce, but with especially preposterous casting. Starmer plays Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister who is in real life Starmer’s political hero, but who was as artful as Starmer is hapless. Nigel Farage, the beer-swigging, fag-smoking leader of the populist Reform UK, is a very unlikely Enoch Powell—the austere Cambridge classicist who was Britain’s first anti-immigration demagogue. At first sight most implausibly of all, Kemi Badenoch—herself the daughter of Nigerians—plays Margaret Thatcher, the free-market Iron Lady who led Britain out of the postwar doldrums.

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal is, of course, no laughing matter. Young girls were lured by Epstein and his accomplices into sexual exploitation. Crimes