This is the stuff the PM really likes: a long meeting on a difficult problem, details, nitty gritty. Getting the team around a table and digesting a big chunk of policy. He was into his flow, understanding, commenting, ensuring notes were taken. He didn’t want to be interrupted. But he noticed immediately the manner in which the special adviser was holding her phone, slightly away from her body, in her fingertips. That portended something. She was looking at the device as if it had been found to contain something toxic. Which in a manner of speaking, it had.
Starmer leaned back. “Yes?”
It was an update from the press office. Keir did not want to be bothered by something happening in the media. The Spad looked up to the doorway, where the chief of staff had appeared.
“I’ve been asked to tell you –” but Keir raised a hand.
“Can this wait? We are close to a breakthrough here. If we negotiate this properly we might be able to get Britain buying electricity from France on most of the same terms that we used in 2019. A huge step forward. So whatever it is, it had better be pretty serious.”
The Spad winced. “I’ve been asked to tell you that Robert Jenrick – ”
“Oh, for goodness sake.”
“I’ve been asked to tell you that Robert Jenrick has acquired a submarine.”
I remember the silence that followed. You could have stirred it with a spoon. Starmer blinked several times.
It had all seemed amusing enough at first. The shadow justice secretary had begun by chasing fare-dodgers through Underground stations. We had enjoyed the sight of him being told to fuck off by surly young men. Good luck with that, we said to ourselves. Jenrick ended that video by railing against “weird Turkish barber shops” that were somehow “chipping away at society”. Keir actually had a great response to that. He got his hair cut by a Turkish guy, a model citizen – we knew this because the security services do tend to check up on anyone who is planning to hold a blade near the Prime Minister’s head. We had planned for Keir to tell the public that there was nothing weird about Mehmet, that they had nice chats and that he’d never once seen him chipping away at society. A media strategy was formed, but by the time it was signed off the moment had passed.
We took the next Jenrick video more seriously. Some new equipment had clearly been bought and a security guard, perhaps two, could be seen loitering on the edges of the shots. Nevertheless, Jenrick showed what looked disconcertingly like real physical bravery as he jogged up to a van on a gloomy side street, and placed two bewildered fly-tipping builders under citizen’s arrest.
Again, many people found it laughable. The moment when he opens the van’s rear doors and shouts “Plasterboard!” was widely mocked. What the focus groups told us, however, was that we hadn’t properly accounted for how much of pain in the arse it is for a responsible citizen to get rid of some spare plasterboard, and therefore how annoying it is to see someone just dumping it on the pavement behind Kwik-Fit. Out there, in the country, a new appetite was forming for a politician who was prepared to do things.
The videos became more frequent. He hid in the bushes outside Birmingham council’s offices and caught well-paid officials rocking up well past ten o’clock; he presented each with a letter, reminding them of their hours and duties. He went around a south London park with a fire extinguisher, trying to stop people smoking cannabis. He caught Gary Lineker speeding.
Nevertheless, the submarine came as a complete surprise. And to be fair, that is literally what submarines are designed to do. But Keir’s chief of staff neatly encapsulated what we were all thinking: “Where the fuck did he get a submarine from?”
It was not a big submarine. In the video, Jenrick explains to a camera inside the vehicle that it only has room for two people. It was yellow, with a smattering of Union Jack stickers. Even small submarines are not cheap, however. We later found out that the vessel was owned by a company registered in Thailand that was owned, through some clever offshore structure, by itself, but which shared an address with other companies that were linked to an expatriate Tory donor. Details. What mattered was what Jenrick was prepared to do with it.
The sub was in the Channel, 15 feet below the surface. It’s mostly a dull video: Jenrick, a camera very close to his face, is fiddling with switches and talking to someone, unseen behind him in the gloomy cockpit. Then there’s a moment when the sub jolts and he looks genuinely frightened, his skin pale and shiny in the greenish light.
“Are we attached?” he asks, twice. The pilot says something behind him, and the engine gets a lot louder. There’s another long period of switch-flicking and then they surface, and we see the boat.
It could not have escaped the notice of the migrants on the inflatable boat that they were headed back to France. The shoreline, having grown distant, gradually came back into view. This would have caused confusion and dismay. Even so, it must have been a shock when the coffee-coloured waters bubbled, parted, and produced a small yellow turret from which Jenrick protruded.
At that point, the angle in the video changes. It becomes clear he is being filmed from another boat, a speedy little craft which keeps its distance. The back of the sub froths and they move closer to the shore until they reach a buoy, floating on its own a few hundred feet out. Jenrick leans out of the hatch and grabs it. He fiddles with it for a minute, exchanging words with the other person in the sub, and then drops the buoy back into the sea. He waves one arm towards the beach and suddenly we see the cable that he has attached to the migrants’ boat. It pulls taut and the inflatable surges towards the beach – pulled back to shore, Jenrick tells the camera, by a tractor waiting on the sand.
The video then cuts to Jenrick on the beach, some time later. A small crowd of migrants and two bored-looking French police officers stare as he cuts a long strip of material from the side of the inflatable. And then he runs back into the sea, jumps into the little speedboat and stares into the salt spray as they turn for England. He sort of looks like Bear Grylls, one of the Spads remarked, if Bear Grylls was an estate agent with a penchant for mass deportation.
Immediately the meeting became about how to react. The bloke from the Sun came in and told everyone to shut up. Keir seemed to like this. Control was being asserted. We started to talk about which laws Jenrick had probably broken, but the bloke from the Sun told us to shut up again. “That’s what he wants,” he said. “He wanted TfL to tell him off for catching fare dodgers; it made them look like a bunch of useless twats. He wanted the police to question him about Lineker’s Ferrari. He wants us, or better yet the French, to arrest him for policing our borders.”
Another man, who had also previously worked on the Sun, told us: “We have to fight fire with fire. We have to do something… Not that, obviously, but something. This is a symptom, you see. The public think we’re not really doing anything –”
“Which is ridiculous,” the PM bristled. “Only yesterday I launched a new commission to look into rural broadband. It will report back by 2029 at the latest,” he added, with evident satisfaction.
A senior comms guy raised a hand and was nodded at. “What if. And to be clear, this is purely blue-sky stuff, no bad ideas, no judgement, this is just something I am going to run up the flagpole and then immediately take back down again. What if Keir hit someone?”
The silence was back, but now it teemed with possibilities.
“I’m just saying. It worked for Prescott. He punched a Welsh farmer and essentially became a national treasure. Eric Cantona kicked a hooligan. Highlight of his career. Done right, it can show character.”
“Macron’s punchable,” chipped in a policy assistant. “I’d punch Macron.”
“He’s, ah, he’s 47,” said someone else. Briefly, silently, we acknowledged who would win that fight.
“Orbán’s the same age, and not in the best of shape. And he’s horrible.”
“I am not,” the PM said with an icy clarity, “going to punch anyone, least of all the president of another country. It would be a diplomatic disaster and a national humiliation.”
“What about Matt Hancock? The constituency of voters who would like to punch Hancock must be almost universal.”
“No.”
“Could he headbutt James Corden?” Everyone, even Keir, appeared to enjoy the idea.
“Or – he could shove Prince Andrew?”
In the end we decided to start small. Just Keir, walking along a street in his constituency, holding the phone as if making a video call, because apparently that is how everyone makes videos now. He had wanted to talk about the things he likes about Britain – including, obviously, football. Fortunately we were joined by a new senior press strategist, just arrived from the Sun, who insisted we all shut up. “No one cares,” he told us, “if a politician is happy. New trade deal? No one cares. GDP up a fraction? No one cares. They want you to be clear about the problems that exist, and solve them.”
The problem that Keir was going to be clear about was found in a building in his constituency. Hundreds of shell companies were registered there, and many of them were used, we knew, for tax evasion. (Helpfully, one or two were linked to Tory donors; we would leak this later if the video did well.) The plan was for Keir to walk the streets, chatting into the camera about how annoying it was that some people didn’t pay their fair share, and then get him to bang on the door, demand to know from the people inside what was going on and tell the public he was (a) bloody annoyed and (b) personally going to do something about it.
It was going OK. He was talking into the phone, a bit of a lecture but basically fine, and then we all heard it: the plaintive chirping of a hire bike being stolen. Keir looked up from the screen, lips pursing furiously. He made eye contact with the bloke from the Sun, who nodded frantically, then strode towards the thieves.
“Oi,” he said. We cringed. But then: “OI!!”
Our hearts leapt. Best of all, he was still filming, capturing his angry-dad act from a low angle.
“Leave that alone. You can’t just take things without paying for them!”
They offered him a choice between fucking off and getting punched. Still, it was positive that they hadn’t defaulted to the second option immediately. But then they recognised him.
“Oh! You’re that guy, right? Who is he?” One asked the other. They were laughing now, and one, instinctively, produced his own phone and began filming.
“I’m the Prime Minister. And I’m telling you to stop stealing that bike.”
This they found hilarious. And then Keir made his move, standing directly in front of the soon-to-be-stolen bike. In a moment he was shoved aside by the two young men, who rode off up the street, their vehicles clicking and bleating in protest. Keir sighed heavily.
But wait, they were coming back! Had they seen an opportunity for discourse, for change, for – no. As they rode past, one of them threw his takeaway cup of drink. The other had somehow, in the space of less than a minute, procured a sandwich, which he also threw. They wheeled off, cackling like seagulls. Egg mayonnaise and warm Coke dripped from the PM’s Charles Tyrwhitt suit.
We began urgently to discuss how this could be used to illustrate the National Policing Guarantee, but the bike thieves did not waste time on a media strategy. They posted their video online within minutes. By the afternoon it was leading every news website.
The Eggening, as it came to be known, did nothing for the PM’s popularity. The culprits were arrested, but this led people to gripe that antisocial behaviour was only punished when it was directed at the Prime Minister. I heard Keir observe ruefully that he should have learned from Miliband – or the ghost of Harold Wilson, for that matter – that Labour leaders must keep their distance from sandwiches.
The humiliation lasted for weeks. Even Badenoch was able to land a few sandwich puns at PMQs. Meanwhile Jenrick was racking up the views. He’d been tipped off that a fossil-fuel protester was planning to disrupt the darts. He apprehended the guy before he could do anything, marching him out to an applauding crowd. He got a handshake from Luke Littler, for crying out loud.
In No 10 there was a huge shouting match. Four or five former Sun employees were yelling at various Spads, strategists and ministers. “We have to do something,” bellowed the director of communications. “We have to get people’s attention.”
And then it all changed, thanks to Rachel.
She definitely didn’t mean to do it. It was accepted by the public, and police investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, that it was an accident. And yet… I remember a pollster who summed it up, a few months later, as: “Clearly an accident. But not necessarily a mistake.”
The state visit had been delayed by the stock-market crash; even Trump’s team didn’t think it was a great idea for him to be seen banqueting with royalty while America’s portfolios burned. And so he arrived in November, during the shooting season. It went badly almost from the start. Trump was rude to the Princess of Wales. He addressed the Commons, flanked by sniggering Reform MPs, but the event descended into furious confrontation when Secret Service agents dragged Ed Davey out of the chamber for heckling him.
It was agreed that a shoot could work well for both leaders. The gun lobbyists behind Trump thought it could bring some Roosevelt energy to the presidency. In the UK, the sort of people who talked about “Strong Labour” got hot under the collar at the idea of Keir with a firearm. But of course the PM is a pescatarian, and you can’t shoot a haddock – not if you want to maintain your political integrity – so we settled for clay pigeons.
The King – who is well versed in field sports, and has been shooting since he was 11 – had agreed to be paired with the president, but Trump didn’t want to be shown up. He asked to be paired with the person he assumed would be the worst shot – and the only woman in the shooting party. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves.
Trump was possessed by a ructious temper, as he had been for the whole trip. That mood was now at its peak. He was jibing Reeves, physically prodding her. Whenever she called “pull!” and one of the orange discs whirred into the air, he would yell “choke!” so close that his spittle landed on her cheek. She took it incredibly well, smiling icily and picking off the pigeons. This infuriated Trump.
Then came the moment that would be replayed endlessly on screens across the globe. She raises the gun to her shoulder and calls “pull”. Two bright orange clay pigeons rise into the autumn sky. She squeezes the trigger and one of them becomes a cloud of dusty fragments. As she is moving the barrels carefully to follow the other target, he punches her in the shoulder.
American TV anchors tried to cast this as a “jostle” or a “chuck”, but it’s clearly a punch, delivered with enough force that she stumbles. What happens next happens in a fraction of a second. She is a natural shot, but she is not experienced in handling a gun; she lets go with her left hand, and the heavy 12-bore – one of the King’s own Purdeys – is now supported only by her right hand, which is also on the trigger. The muscles of her arm struggle to compensate, her hand squeezes. She becomes the second person to shoot Donald Trump.
And for a second time, he gets lucky. The pellets are of a light gauge and mostly miss him. But not all: one flies into his hand, two into his stomach, one clips his jaw. It is not enough to cause any serious injury, but it hurts. He sits down in shock. Keir stepped towards him, assessed the damage, and put his hand on Reeves’ shoulder.
“Well,” he said, as the president whimpered on the floor. “You’ve certainly done something. And I think it’s fair to say it’ll get people’s attention.”
Obviously it was a diplomatic nightmare, but it’s not as if the Trump administration was pleasant to work with before that. The markets weren’t happy, but as we had found before, what they were really unhappy about was the idea of Reeves being sacked. The White House was furious but Keir had no choice, he had to say that her position was secure. Nobody mucks about with the bond market.
And in the months that followed, she made the incident her own. For once, no one minded that her apologies sounded robotic and insincere, because no one felt particularly sorry that she’d shot him. My favourite line from her during that time was: “I did not shoot him to death” (Today programme, 4 March 2026). She found a way to express deep official regret for the accident, while allowing the public to understand that a (light) shooting of Donald Trump had been, for many people, a rather cathartic thing to witness.
As the economic and political situation in America became more troubling, it took on a greater significance. A year before the election, on a wall in east London I saw a huge mural: Reeves in cowboy hat and bandolier, her gun held aloft. ¡Viva La Reevolucion!
I stopped for a while to look at that, and I thought: You never know.
[See also: The Sydney Sweeney vibe shift is futile]
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This article appears in the 07 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2025