The Starmers are sexy

I’d all but forgotten about David Cameron when he returned as foreign secretary under the last government, and the first thing I remembered about him, when he returned, was his chin. By which I mean its prim absence and how, combined with those thin lips and tiny mouth, more like a fish’s than a person’s, I have always found the man deeply unhandsome in a very Tory way.

Now we have new leadership, and with it, a new paradigm of attractiveness. David Lammy, the new Foreign Secretary, is even less handsome than Dave but for different and therefore revitalising reasons. Elsewhere in the cabinet, though, things hot up with the cheek-bony, luscious-locked Angela Rayners and the Rachel Reeves of the world.

But for me, they are the wrong sex to ogle, and thus, to the very top: Starmer himself. Politically, I’m as lukewarm about the new Prime Minister as the next north London free marketeer, but as I did what I always do when a new leader is elected – googled ‘[leader] young’ – I found that he has form as a beefcake. One picture sees the Prime Minister as a Leeds student, lying on his front on the floor with mates, an impressive array of biceps visible and a downright saucy pin-up face. Cheekbones to die for, nice full mouth, thick croft of hair on the forehead.

While he is no longer that fittie – he’s 60 – he’s still a relatively fine figure of a man. Over the weekend, Jane Garvey wrote in the Times that Starmer was unlikely to ‘prompt many erotic dreams’, and that ‘maybe that’s a good thing’. I see it differently. Starmer is the first prime minister since Tony Blair (sorry) with whom I would happily consider a saucy affair. As a British subject and voter, I take a different view to Garvey. That Starmer is beefcake-adjacent is a good thing. He 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.

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If Rishi also brought good looks to power, they were of a more elfin, small-statured variety. Starmer looks like he would be at home on a rugby pitch (he isn’t, sadly), and also like the kind of man you can yell at in a hormonal rage and it’d just glance off the surface.

This bodes well. The prime minister ought to look tough but unflappable. And after so very many years of Tories with bad mouths, bad chins, portly bordeaux-swelled middles, absurd hair and vanishing jawlines, it feels positive, or at least interesting, to have to look at someone with standard masculine features.

In some ways Starmer is pretty ugly. But that’s also of a piece with the kind of masculinity we have been lacking in the many years of Tory rule. His wide face, his big forehead, his shock of non-silly grey hair, friendly wrinkles – though he’s short at 5 ft 8 (still taller than Rishi and Boris) – are all refreshing.

And then there’s his wife, Vicky Starmer. She’s a minxy lady by any standards, even those that exist outside of politics – trim, with an interesting face, and a natural, music-festival-esque beauty that one doesn’t tend to see in Tory wives (the impeccable Akshata Murthy was an exception).

There is more than frivolity in sexually assessing the new influx of those in power. Looks reflect tribes; they speak directly to ancestry (the Cameroonian chin) and to entrenched modes of life. To too many bottles of burgundy, to a habit of bad jokes, public schoolboy or Bullingdon Club in tone and spirit. They speak, in short, to a sense of who is running one’s country, and – in the utter absence of successful politics, as plagued the last batch of Tories – the realisation that their thinking is as hackneyed and predictable as their taste in jokes, their chin-jaw angles and their exhausting machinations and tricks.

But in Starmer’s rugby-player face, in his attractive non-Tory wife, we see not just possible ogling potential, but a new era etched on their faces. We see change, which may yet go either way, but in the honeymoon period before catastrophe strikes, it’s as refreshing as a long cool draft of lemonade after an endless, scorching day.