Keir Starmer’s speech cried out for a couple of gags – or perhaps a scream into the void

‘I was out in London on Monday night when I saw this old, homeless-looking guy dancing in the street. He seemed genuinely happy, waving his arms about, laughing. It was lovely to see. When I got closer, I realised it was Jeremy Corbyn.”

That was how I began my stand-up gig in Islington earlier this week. I didn’t go in hard on Keir Starmer himself lest I should share that same Mark of Cain that now brands the parliamentary Labour party. Some will be upset by the prime minister’s resignation, especially the comedians who have Starmer material in their sets. Saying goodbye to suddenly redundant jokes is always a wrench. Political comics, of course, bear the brunt. I remember their frustration when the Gulf war ended and then their elation when the second Gulf war began and they realised they could recycle stuff that had been seemingly laid to rest.

Unfortunately, Starmer avoided gags in his Downing Street gig last Monday. Instead, he decided to help slake modern society’s desperate thirst for public tears. Fair play, he fought them back, but it still gave the speech’s ending a Britain’s Got Talent contestant vibe. I cried on Michael McIntyre’s Big Show and got, at the last count, 23 million views on social media.

I’ve spent 40 years trying to make people laugh, foolishly, it turns out, saving my tears till I was back in the dressing room. But the tear in Starmer’s eye just reminded people that he hadn’t paid for his spectacles. He’d have been better off with a twinkle. A bit of whimsically embittered humour in his speech would have leavened the bread somewhat and also, generally speaking, I think worldly-wise is a better look than desperately defensive. He said he’d taken his rejection with “good grace”, but I always think “good grace” works better when it’s conferred rather than claimed.

So what if he had gone for comedy? If he was feeling really brave he could have worn a T-shirt, maybe, at some point, fingering the fabric and asking, mock-plaintively, “Too little, too late?”

He could have opened the speech by saying he’d had no thought of resigning until he’d looked out of his window that morning and seen Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting carrying a lectern. He could have gone a bit satirical and, channelling Rudyard Kipling, described the leader of the Labour party post as “The White Man’s Burden”. Many pundits were shocked, and probably dismayed, that Steve Bray, the anti-Brexit campaigner – what’s the “use by” date on that particular activism, by the way? – was allowed to have Beethoven’s Ode to Joy blasting out of his portable speaker when they were all trying to listen to the speech. They obviously don’t spend much time on public transport. Surely, Starmer could have cocked an ear and said: “Ah, Ode to Joy. The perfect soundtrack for someone who knows he might never have to speak to Donald Trump again.” Trump’s commentary on Starmer’s dilemma was, well, Trumpian. He, very movingly, described the Labour leader as “a sort of a friend of mine” and then noted, incisively: “He has two problems: energy and immigration and crime.”

Generally, when a prime minister resigns, various politicos will, after much lively debate, decide where that exiting leader sits in a postwar prime ministers’ league table. It is arguably Liz Truss’s most enduring legacy that her successors no longer have to live in fear of last place.

I must admit, when I heard Starmer listing his many achievements last Monday, I started to wonder if the Labour party was doing the right thing. It felt a bit like when you resolve to end a romantic relationship and then, at the fateful rendezvous, they turn up wearing that dress. Sort of.

I had one last thought on Starmer’s speech. When I was about seven or eight, I would tell my parents I was off to use our outside toilet, but instead I would walk to the top of the garden and scream as loud as I could, into the dark, damp night. I’d just do three minutes or so and then go indoors, feeling cleansed. I was too young to know about primal scream therapy. It was just an urge. Imagine if Starmer had walked up to that lectern and, after a brief pause, screamed: a long, loud, heart-wrenching wail; a bellowing, wordless exorcism of every credibility-sapping U-turn, every ill-advised freebie, every seemingly heartless welfare reform, every shattered dream, and then silence, a brief nod, and back into No 10. The absence of language, the sidelining of specifics, would mean anyone could watch Starmer’s scream and recognise themselves in his frustration and pain. It would reveal, for our consideration, the fragile humanity beneath that complimentary suit.

Photograph by Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images