… I was momentarily stirred to hear there were some handbags between Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer in one of parliament’s corridors after prime minister’s questions on Wednesday… According to some reports, the Labour leader was “puce” and “rattled”… I guess it’s fitting that [Starmer] has finally mildly lost his rag in a misunderstanding… No doubt he ran the full gamut of emotions from shirty to tetchy…

… Britain is a majority-nutter nation, and we mostly want to elect politicians with something of the nutter to them… Thatcher and Blair: obvious nutters… Fast-forward to… Johnson. Nutter. The message of the 2016 referendum was the euphoric nutting of David Cameron (non-nutter)… The reason Jeremy Corbyn – full nutter – did better than expected against useless anti-nutter Theresa May in 2017 was simply because he WAS full nutter…

Corbyn… was the wrong kind of nutter. He was not a kindred nutter. As for May… She parked the bus… Nobody wants to watch that… The worry for Labour is that… watching Starmer is just like watching May, or maybe José Mourinho without the eye-gouging… I suspect that even when the nutter of the day has cocked it up, what the nutter-addicted people are always really crying out for is just another nutter, a different nutter, a new nutter to bathe us in nostalgia for whichever previous nutters we currently yearn for… Have you seen the epic parish council meeting video that went viral this week?

(Marina Hyde, “Britons want a bit of drama from their leaders — and Keir Starmer isn’t serving it,” theguardian.com, 2-5-21)

Admittedly this phrasebud nosegay is picked free of context from what Marina Hyde herself describes as her “whimsical” column, and that’s the fun of it — the nutter part.

(c) 2021 JMN