There’s a costume sometimes worn by stage performers that must have looked quite daring when it originated in Weimar Berlin — the half-man/half-woman costume. Turn sideways left and show the audience a lovely frock and an elaborate wig. Turn sideways right and show them a dashing top hat and tails.

In these days of snowflake sensitivity, it’s probably a little too “on the nose,” and, because it’s designed to provoke amusement in the paying public, it’s probably quite “problematic” in its carefree playing with gender stereotypes.

Nevertheless, this is of what our leader, Keir ‘Sir’ Starmer, reminds me, just two months into his glorious leadership. He bounced into power proffering sunny uplands of can-do progressivism; now, he gives us a strange speech in the Rose Garden behind Number Ten Downing Street.

That’s where Boris Johnson was accused of partying heartlessly during lockdown: “Remember the pictures just over there, of the wine and the food?” Sir Keir droned like a prissy prefect, “Well, this garden and this building are now back in your service.” He appeared to be promising pain and nothing but, with all the performative solemnity of a rather dull dominatrix.

When Winston Churchill, in his maiden speech as Prime Minister, on May 10, 1940, told the members of Parliament — and through them, the British people — that “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat” it didn’t put anybody off. 

We were going into an existential battle with an extermination machine, but we wanted Churchill to tell us the worst, so we could follow him with total clarity into a world war. After Sir Keir’s gloomy speech, I don’t think that most people would follow Starmer to the nearest bus shelter — even if he told them it was raining.

It’s his loss — literally, according to the awful new polls on his popularity; one of them, by More In Common, has his approval rating falling by 27 points, to negative 16 from positive 11. Almost two-thirds of Britons believe that the new regime is more “interested in helping themselves and their allies” rather than ordinary people, while a majority consider Labour to be “somewhat” or “very corrupt.”

The Labour government came in pleased with themselves for ending 14 years of Conservative rule; they saw themselves as dashing romantic heroes, sweeping languishing Britannia off her feet. It didn’t appear to cross their minds that they might be what is vulgarly known as “rebound sex,” favored solely to show the ex “what he’s missing,” as the scandal sheets say.

I wrote here recently of “the election which swept Labour to power with what one wit dubbed ‘a loveless landslide’ due to the element of punishment-voting against the surreally incompetent Conservative government.”

It remains a fact that while Labour secured one of the largest majorities ever (around two-thirds of all seats) it was on a tiny percentage of the vote — around 34 percent, less than the 40 percent Jeremy Corbyn scored in 2017, on the second-lowest turn-out since 1885, with barely 20 percent of people eligible to vote supporting Sir Keir.

This makes the leader of Labour vulnerable soon into his leadership, and his strange behavior has the air of a hastily-assembled android glitching. Taking winter fuel support from pensioners is almost Brothers Grimm-level villainy, and seems like a politically-motivated low blow: “Take that for voting for Brexit and the Tories, you horrible old pensioners — bwahaha!”

Trundling off to the European capitals to discuss — talk about hiding in plain sight — a “reset” with Europe, Sir Keir seemed no longer awkward in his man-of-the-people half-costume, but rather reveling in his creature-of-Davos semi-garb.

Sir Keir has always faced charges of ambiguity; the devoted husband of a Jewish woman who campaigned for the antisemitic Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist son-of-the-soil who happily grabbed a knighthood. Now this Pushmi-Pullyu act has become a whole lot more serious. 

We wondered whether Starmer’s rule would be boring or fanatical. Surely it couldn’t be both. So whichever one it was, at least there would be the ensuing relief of it not being the other. The leaked documents which indicate an imminent ban on smoking in — deep breath — beer gardens, outdoor restaurants, pavement cafes, nightclub terraces, parks, and outside football stadiums — indicate that yes, he can be both at once.

Pubs, after all, aren’t just pubs here. They were known as “public houses” because the houses of the poor were too cold to live in during our long winters. They support 885,000 jobs across the United Kingdom and contribute £23 billion to GDP; banning smoking would cause many more to close, and it’s already running at around 80 a month — a huge amount in a tiny country like the UK. 

One doesn’t have to be a nostalgic conspiracy theorist to believe that one day soon there will be no public house, with its pleasant pub garden. There will be no public square. There will be no public discourse. There will only be the privacy of the jail cell and the forced-confession of “non-crime hate incidents” — and the one last public spectacle, the humiliation of the heretic.

So it’s been a discombobulating week; voters went for the Keir who was dressed as a cheerleader, but he’s just turned his other silhouette to the electorate and shown himself in undertaker’s garb. We thought he was promising us a rose garden — but we appear to have grasped a handful of thorns.