Does anyone on board know how to fly a plane? Labour’s captain has lost control | Marina Hyde

2 hours ago 4

A couple of days ago on a Swiss flight from Seoul to Zurich, a pilot experienced a medical emergency. Three doctors on board assisted, one of the other pilots assumed the controls, and the plane ended up landing without harm to life. Like me, you will be absolutely appalled that David Lammy wasn’t also on the passenger manifest, hammering furiously on the cockpit door and offering that timeworn advice: “You don’t change the pilot during a flight!”

I mean … don’t you? Ever? I’m quite a nervous flyer and can definitely envisage a fairly significant number of situations in which you would, in fact, very much change the pilot mid-flight.

Still, sometimes it feels like there are only about five metaphors in contemporary British politics, and the folly of a pilot switcheroo is definitely one of them. Today’s a big day for it, let’s face it. Huge! Of course, the aviation sticklers will be on hand to point out that actually, if you count the switch to auto-pilot, you almost always change the pilot mid-flight. Furthermore, most long-haul flights can give at least three pilots a chance to shine/not lose every single contested seat in Hartlepool to Reform.

Then again perhaps that frequent switchover is a version of what has been happening in a country that has – so far – had six pilots in 10 years. And after this set of May election results is fully in, we can already be sure we’re going to get an extremely anguished debate about whether we should get another new pilot. These days, many across the whole political spectrum feel excessively tribal about stanning for their preferred pilot, but both within Labour and without, I must say I don’t love any of the choices on offer. Several of them are having some kind of medical emergency of their own.

But here we all are for now, and the captain has switched on the “I’m Going Nowhere” signs. Certainly, Starmer loyalists aren’t the first to deploy this type of metaphor in politics. Abraham Lincoln famously warned the Union “Don’t swap horses in the middle of the stream” during the 1864 presidential election, while “Don’t change the pilot” was a Franklin D Roosevelt campaign slogan in 1936. And yes, if we all had a magic plane, we’d fly David Lammy back to those eras to admonish those guys that they, sir, are no Keir Starmer.

As for the particular type of airborne emergency Labour is dealing with, a lot of people will be falling back on the example of Airplane! (1980). But, vibes-wise, we might instead be dealing with the not-played-for-laughs plots of the films that movie spoofed so brilliantly. In Zero Hour! (1957), food poisoning from the in-flight meal fish knocks out the cockpit crew leaving a proven liability as the only person on board who could be called upon. In Airport 1975 (1974), the pilot of a small private plane has a heart attack, then crashes into the cockpit of a passenger airliner, which kills the flight engineer and first officer, as well as blinds the captain. Which certainly gives the flavour of the series of extravagantly absurd disasters that have brought Labour to this point. Can one of Labour’s not-wildly-gifted amateurs do it? There’s a fun episode of MythBusters where the hosts tested the “only you can land this plane!” movie trope for real, by trying to land a Nasa plane simulator with only radio instructions from a pilot. They found that, actually, contrary to the howls of the it-could-never-happen brigade, they could in fact both land this plane. But would you want them to, and all that.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to avoid the fact that postmortems will take place in a world where there is very literally a jet fuel shortage – almost as if personnel changes are less relevant than the ineluctable forces of reality. We know Starmer has only a tiny amount of fuel left, but can probably run on fumes for a while if that’s what they decide to go for. But looking at the results in so far, investigators are surely at the stage of asking whether the Labour party itself in its current incarnation has anything much in the tank. The other question is where the pilot-swapped craft would land. That Swiss flight ended up landing in Kazakhstan, which you’ll notice is somewhat to the right of Zurich. But you certainly wouldn’t put it past Labour contriving to land somewhere east of Seoul.

Having said all that, there are a whole host of people claiming to be very keen to support Lammy in his bid to barricade the cockpit door. “I would suspect that the rumblings are going to start even before the King’s Speech on the 13th of May. [Keir Starmer] will be lucky to still be there by midsummer,” twinkled Nigel Farage on the pavement outside Havering town hall on Friday morning. “But personally, I think he’s a great chap, and I really want him to stay.”

Incidentally, let’s wrap up this metaphorical journey with a reminder that one of the most common romance scams sees a conman pretend he is a pilot. You want to believe him, you’re thrilled he seems different to the others, so you let him into your life. How does it end, other than in a humiliating Netflix documentary? Let’s just say he doesn’t take you places you’ve never been before, there are some things in which expertise isn’t actually overrated – and you’re going to be a whole lot poorer by the time he’s finished.