Forget the much drooled-over Rat Boy summer, it seems we’re in for a Hot Keir one. The entry of Labour into government this week has made certain female journalists come over all peculiar. Caitlin Moran has documented these current heightened arousal levels over at the Times where she claims that every middle-aged woman she knew felt “fruity” the day after Starmer’s arrival at No. 10. Her observations were backed up in Metro, where a lady hack breathlessly described how the “new Daddy in town” — aka the Prime Minister — was “turning up the heat in Westminster”. In another unfortunate image, particularly for any readers stuck in a sweaty, overcrowded railway carriage, one X user was quoted as saying that “some of us have been on the horny Keir train for quite some time”.
Meanwhile, in the Spectator, Zoe Strimpel was engaging in a forensic analysis of the “beefcake-adjacent” leader and his “rugby player face”, which came out very well in comparison to poor David Cameron’s reported absence of chin, “thin lips and tiny mouth, more like a fish’s than a person’s”. Starmer, Strimpel marvelled, “looks like he could actually take someone on in a fight. He looks like if furious he could be dangerous. He looks, in short, like what one used to think men ought to look like.”
My first response was to go and find some current footage of the man in order to check which of us had lost the plot. Sure enough, I found the familiar stolid features and adenoidal vowels of a 61-year-old chartered surveyor, and not Russell Crowe in Gladiator as I had been momentarily led to believe. In fact, in common with nostalgic paeans to British imperialism, a lot of the hype around Starmer’s hotness seems to be based on what he looked like when a lot younger: first, like a New Romantic lead singer and later like the dad in Bluey.
My second thought was to wonder whether such pieces were covertly aimed at establishing their authors’ fealty, either for strategic or ideological purposes — a bit like a Pravda apparatchik rhapsodising over Khrushchev’s beneficence, or some hack on CNN insisting that President Biden is still compos mentis. So much of modern life seems to require pretending, as convincingly as possible, that you don’t see what you do see, or do see what you don’t.
Or perhaps the heat is down to hypergamy in human females, also known as the spectre haunting the manosphere’s nightmares: the idea that women are particularly attracted to high-status partners, leading them to shun more Lilliputian types who long to get laid, yet remain cruelly untouched. Obviously, there is something in this. No other explanation of Rupert Murdoch’s continued allure as husband material makes sense. And many of my lesbian friends have an otherwise inexplicable yen for Penny Mordaunt, especially when she’s wielding a ginormous sword. Ditto Strimpel’s simultaneous hots for Nigel Farage, whom she was waxing lyrical about only a few weeks ago.
But as a generalised explanation of human female mating choices, based on the instances I know of, hypergamy has never rung true; surely even less so, then, as an explanation of female sexual fantasies about men they are unlikely ever to meet. (It’s probably the case that women tend to want what other women want, René Girard style, but that’s not quite the same thing).
And anyway, the role of British Prime Minister after years of decline hardly screams take-me-now, world-straddling omnipotence. If powerful politicians are your thing, you might as well go abroad for your fantasy kicks and spend a transgressively thrilling half hour with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping instead. Not for nothing are there headlines out there like “I Pretended to Be a Young Joseph Stalin On Tinder, and It Went Weirdly Well”.
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