Living in England, I’ve looked up many noses – even people shorter than me. And Rishi Sunak is no exception. At the recent opening of the Portrait Gallery, as soon as he heard my Aussie accent, the bonsai PM looked down on me despite my vertiginous heels. What Rishi lacks in height, he makes up for with a towering bank balance. The Sunday Times Rich List values his family fortune at £651 million. A man of the people, obviously.
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But now, after all the sordid scandals – Partygate, corrupt PPE contracts for cronies, Boris Johnson’s wife Carrie Antoinette’s extravagant gold wallpaper, tractor porn, sexual harassment suits, insider betting scandals, rivers and seas awash with sewage, the National Health Service in intensive care, libraries closed and schools collapsing with concrete cancer, etc – a Labour PM is moving into Downing Street.
I first met Keir Starmer in the early ’90s when he pushed aside the baby bottles and half-eaten fish fingers on my kitchen table to spread out his bundle of legal papers.
My then-husband, Geoff Robertson, had hired Keir as his junior. Keir then joined Geoff in establishing Doughty Street Chambers, now Europe’s largest human rights practice, and acted in many of its leading cases. With his crumpled cardigan, rumpled shirt, intensely earnest conversation and hangdog expression, he would easily have won my vote as Least Likely To Be Prime Minister.
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Well, from my kitchen table to forming a kitchen cabinet, it’s a big moment for Doughty Street Chambers. They’ve invited me to their triumphant election celebration. Keir is no Clement Attlee. He’s cautious, a bit bland and with no big vision, but he’s finally ousted the crooked Conservatives. Putting broken Britain back together again will require a labour of love. Literally.
But right now, all this chaos-weary country wants is to give a big sigh of relief and throw a huge farewell party to those toxic Tories.
Kathy Lette’s latest novel is The Revenge Club.
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