Morgan recital
Keir Starmer gets angry, and I watch Wuthering Heights
The worm has turned. Keir Starmer’s usual approach to Prime Minister’s Questions is that of a weary headmaster who can’t believe the sixth form have trashed their common room again, because they’re only hurting themselves. On Wednesday we saw a new Starmer, a Starmer who has frankly had enough of your nonsense. This Starmer wasn’t disappointed. He was angry.
Ever since Monday evening, when Labour MPs assured us they had seen a new side of the prime minister, we had been waiting to find out whether this version of him was going to be available to the rest of us, and if so, what it would be like. It turned out that it was, and he is absolutely bloody furious. Spitting. Mad as hell, not taking it any more. It was like one of those films where a florist, goaded beyond endurance, reveals that they used to be a Navy SEAL, and sets out to massacre a biker gang. Sort of.
And there’s more!
“This is enough now,” a character declares, two hours into writer-director Emerald Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights. “I will not stand for this grotesque performance!” Well, you said it.
Fennell was behind 2023’s slaughter-of-the-Sloanes black comedy Saltburn, a film that delighted in shocking its audience with the grotesque, and from the opening titles of her new work, we’re reminded this is her chief trick. What’s that sound we can hear, of wood creaking while a man groans? Is it, we wonder, someone DOING IT? In fact, it’s a hanging, but fear not, fans of being shocked, the man on the gallows has a massive stiffy! This is Emily Brontë reinterpreted by Lord Flashheart.
And that’s it from me for a bit. Tomorrow’s episode of War Movie Theatre is on The Heroes of Telemark.