It seemed an especially cruel prank to play on the nice people of Nansledan in Cornwall. They, like the rest of us, will surely have seen the scary pre-dawn pictures of Yvette Cooper calling in the Home Office goons to smash down the doors of illegal immigrants and chuck them in the back of waiting police vans.
They may even have seen the government’s deliberately misleading Facebook ads, knowingly produced in Reform UK teal, bragging about smashing various targets for the deportation of illegal immigrants and promising even tougher action to come.
So what were they meant to think when, barely moments later, who should be swanking up the street in a brand new suburb on the outskirts of Newquay, pointing through the windows and chuckling away but the prime minister, the deputy prime minister and His Majesty the Actual King? What could they possibly want?
Had His Royal Highness come to personally boot somebody on the first flight back to Albania? If this was another Home Office Hit Squad, then no one could say that expense had been spared.
Several hours after the event, it remains slightly unclear what they did in fact want. Prime ministers don’t often go on walkabout stunts with kings. Angela Rayner is making a big announcement on housebuilding later this week, and it seems like they managed to convince His Majesty to join in the drumroll for it by acquiescing to be filmed in the act of urgently pointing at some houses.
But herein, dare one say, lies Labour’s problem. If you see the government walking up your driveway, who can honestly say they’ve got a clue what to expect?
They want the human empathy of cancelling cruel plans like Rwanda and Bibby Stockholm, but they also want to cosplay as Nigel Farage.
They also want to accelerate the transition to net zero via human Duracell bunny Ed Miliband, but actually, hang on a minute, they also want to build a third runway at Heathrow.
Miliband, as it happens, was nowhere to be seen in the House of Commons on Monday afternoon. Instead, the junior energy minister, a genial young Scotsman called Michael Shanks, had to live up to his job description by answering two separate hour-long question sessions at the dispatch box, one after the other. The first concerned the controversial refusal to grant new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.
“The North Sea is a declining basin,” said Shanks. “We are trying to kickstart the future!”
Kickstarting the future sounds good but it doesn’t always work. Someone called Margaret Thatcher kickstarted the future once, with a little energy transition of her own, and not everyone approved.
The SNP’s Dave Doogan, who has recently become a shoo-in for the title of angriest man in Westminster, stood up to get extremely irate about the government. “They are going out of their way to accelerate away jobs in Scotland!” he shouted, not unreasonably.
An hour later, Shanks would still be standing at the dispatch box, answering questions on a slightly different subject, explaining why it was absolutely fine to import trees by boat from America to burn at the Drax power station in Yorkshire.
Drax is a “renewable” power plant, you see. Trees can be cut down, shipped over the Atlantic, burnt but then planted again, even though every stage in the process is more polluting than the last.
“This government will do whatever it takes to ensure energy security for the people of this country!” he said this time, which would have sounded more convincing if he hadn’t just been explaining to Doogan, like a vegan Meat Loaf, exactly what he wouldn’t do. He will do whatever it takes, but he won’t do that.
All of which ends with no one really understanding what their government is meant to be about.
To take yet another example, back in the Corbyn years, Andrew Gwynne MP could be relied upon to rant with unimpeachable moral virtue about any and every issue he could find, from Hillsborough, to the Waspi Women, to single-use plastic, to anything at all.
Now we know that he was concurrently running a WhatsApp group for edgy banter, where he made hilarious gags about running over elderly constituents and about how people with Jewish sounding names are probably secret members of Mossad.
It sticks, in the end, this stuff.
Of course, everyone knows it’s never wise to open the door to a politician. The risk of it happening is almost certainly behind the inexorable rise in the video doorbell industry. But usually you at least know what you’re going to get.
With Labour, who can say they’ve got a clue?
