Someone fetch the smelling salts and fainting couch: Labour Party PM Keir Starmer and his family met with Taylor Swift for a WHOLE TEN MINUTES backstage.
Starmer vs Starmer: the Canary is compromised
They even met Taylor’s mom (for the out-of-touch poshos, like Richard Madeley at Good Morning Britain and Kay Burley at Sky News, that’s American English for mother).
It’s an absolute scandal of proportions not seen for… well, say the last ten minutes.
Why am I writing about this? To be honest, it feels like a waste of webspace and words all round. Nor do I really want to be giving oxygen to such a preposterously insignificant non-story that really needs to die. But as a self-professed Swifty, and in equal opposite measure an ardent anti-Starmerite, it felt like the perfect opportunity to point out something surprising about this whole nonsense corporate media kerfuffle.
That EVEN the Canary is kind of on Starmer’s side in all this.
At least insofar as, of all the donation scandals Keir has already been embroiled in, in just over 100 days in power, ‘Starmer meets Swift’ isn’t it.
Point is, I like slagging off Starmer as much as the next left-winger holding the slimy centrist suck-up to account, but this? Meh. Here’s why.
Keir Starmer meets Taylor Swift: faux outrage hits fever-pitch
We know you’re all itching to know – what did they talk about? We think this person on X is probably on the money:
I bet Starmer told Taylor Swift the story about his flute.
— Frances Smith (@francessmith) October 16, 2024
We’re going to guess when Keir Starmer met Swift and her band, he didn’t ask: “do you have man?” or a police escort for that matter. Quite honestly, it doesn’t matter either way. It’s non-news. Less than that. Most of the British public couldn’t care less – and for good reason.
For one, it’s not unusual that the police provide escorts to celebrities. They don’t do it all the time, but after the terrorism threats in Vienna, clearly threat levels were heightened for the popstar. The scale of the event also would have come into play.
Then, there’s the fact this confected faux outrage is just a little bit rich. Did they care when that limp lettuce leaf of a prime minister Liz Truss met with Tay-Tay?
LIZ TRUSS MET TAYLOR SWIFT oh the horror pic.twitter.com/RpQPeCD1u7
— Suzi Stockpot 🇺🇦 (@suzistockpot) October 16, 2024
Were they worried when Brexit bullshitter PM Boris Johnson met with a literal ex-KGB agent and Russian oligarch? Or that he then gave the said ex-KGB spy’s son a place in the House of Lords?
He what?!!!!!
Keir Starmer met Taylor Swift!!
With his FAMILY!!!
Did he give her the nuclear codes?
Listen, when Kay Burley hears a PM a couple of PM’s ago met with a KGB agent after he got rid of his security. It’s going to blow her mind.
What?
She knows?
Oh…
— MimiJ (@MimiJ9) October 16, 2024
Obviously, that was a significant story, because Johnson gave Evgeny Lebedev a seat in the halls of power. There’s also the not so small fact that Lebedev owns part of the UK’s corporate media. Specifically, this is the Evening Standard and the Independent. In other words, he wields significant influence in politics and the media.
By contrast, the main thing Swift is influencing is the record sales of friendship bracelet making supplies across the nation.
It’s a puerile gotcha if ever there were, so a poster on X reminded them that Rishi Sunak was PM for the first part of her tour. And guess what? She had a police escort then too:
I think the Taylor Swift story is just ridiculous. But for balance https://t.co/i9bd0bbtwt
— Dianne Bancroft (@DianneBancroft) October 16, 2024
What we have is a band of the worst corporate media stenographers – because let’s be clear, they’re not journalists – thinking they’re going all vigilante shit on the PM. In their wildest dreams. The reality is, they’re all kicking up a fuss over something entirely inconsequential. One post summed it all up:
EXCLUSIVE: Keir Starmer has met literally hundreds of people who aren’t Taylor Swift since becoming PM. More on this breaking scandal as we get it.
— Sam Freedman (@Samfr) October 16, 2024
Dear reader: read something else
Now, I’m BEGGING the corporate media to let this lie. Because quite honestly, I’m all out of Taylor Swift lyric puns and it’s getting a little bit cringe reading article after article from journalists that really don’t know their Swift-lore. They need to just STOP. Can they just NOT. (Full disclosure, that one came courtesy of my dad, who has IMHO more Swift-sass than the lot of them).
Most of all though, there’s a hundred more important things to be calling Keir Starmer and the Labour government out on. So, to give no further room to such inane idle column inches, here’s a handful of things the corporate media SHOULD be shouting about instead this week:
- Gaza. Specifically, the fact that Starmer and the government are STILL supplying arms to Israel. Or that as the Canary’s Ed Sykes underscored – Labour’s donation from Quadrature is neck-deep in shares profiting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. All as it literally burns patients alive in tents at hospitals, targets journalists, UN workers, and schools full of refugees. Not to mention that it’s also continuing to bomb Lebanon. There’s a daily horror-reel of atrocities Israel is committing. So, Starmer and co are complicit in Israel killing Palestinians and Lebanese people.
- I wrote earlier about the fact the other wet lettuce Liz – Kendall – is going full Iain Duncan-Smith at the DWP. She’s planning to put job advisers in hospitals to give mental health patients tips on their CVs. Again, we pointed out how this fucked up job = wellbeing and self-worth and ergo better mental health rhetoric is going to kill people.
- Wes Streeting’s new nickname just dropped and that could be a headline in itself. As one person on X masterfully coined – and my brilliant colleague and fellow Swifty Rachel Charlton-Dailey is promoting – say hello to the biggest Ozemprick in Britain. The more pressing part of this story is of course his announcement of weight loss jabs for unemployed benefit claimants. The corporate media didn’t deign to mention the horrifically fatphobic, classist, ableist, and claimant-demonising ramifications of all this. Nor that there are literal class lawsuits in the US for the drug. As the Canary’s Steve Topple highlighted, this couldn’t possibly have anything to do with big pharma firm Eli Lilly getting its lobbyists in with the new crop of Labour MPs. Once more, it will likely kill more people through fat-shaming, dangerous side-effects, and curbing hunger, rather than giving people the money and healthy food and environment they need to live.
- Starmer’s cutting the red-tape regulatory bonanza. That would be those pesky little protections that look after people health, worker’s rights, and nature. Couple that with his government’s love-in with big corporations, and you have a recipe for privatisation disaster. Did we mention probably more death and destruction of people and the planet to boot?
- The first reading of the Assisted Dying bill. As Charlton-Dailey powerfully, poignantly pointed out, the bill poses a huge risk to chronically ill and disabled people the state routinely punches down on. See: all of the above. Crucially, she highlighted that while “everyone should be able to have dignity in dying” – disabled people aren’t currently afforded the right to dignity in life. Other countries have shown it’s a slippery slope. If you want to read something vitally important today – read her article, instead of the countless crock of shit pieces about Starmer and Taylor Swift. But in short, this could also kill more marginalised people.
There’s a pattern emerging here, and it’s that all of these things are – or will – put people’s lives at risk.
Starmer talking to Taylor Swift for ten minutes and getting a police escort didn’t harm anyone. Except perhaps poor Taylor forced to listen to the most boorish tales from the stale Keir-bot-come-prime-minister.
Feature image via Youtube – Taylor Swift/10 Downing Street/ the Canary
