by Vivienne Pratfall Processes the Week’s Political Drama Between Life Events
Starmer Resigned and My Flatmate Screamed
Right so I was doing my eyeliner — the difficult bit, the flick, the part where one wrong move ruins your entire morning — when Jade burst through the bathroom door at approximately seven forty-five AM on a Tuesday and screamed, and I stabbed myself in the eye with the wand, and by the time I had recovered sufficiently to ask what had happened, she had already moved on to texting about it. That is how I found out that Keir Starmer had resigned. Not with ceremony. Not with a mug of tea in hand and a thoughtful expression. With mascara in my eye and Jade’s notification sound going off every four seconds.
I am Vivienne Pratfall. I write for The London Prat when I am not working my Tuesday and Thursday shifts at the wine bar in Dalston, and I am nineteen years old, which means I have now lived through three Prime Ministers and one absolutely chaotic leadership transition in the time most people spend deciding on a sofa. London is relentless. Politics is relentless. My eyeliner situation is not improving.
Why Should I Care, and Why Do I
Here is the complicated truth about being nineteen and politically aware in London in 2026: you are supposed to care, you actually do care, and simultaneously nothing ever seems to respond to the caring. It is like shouting into the Jubilee line. The sound goes somewhere. You just never find out where.
I care about Labour party unity in the abstract, the way I care about whether the restaurant downstairs cleans its extraction fan — in theory it affects me, in practice it remains someone else’s problem until it very much becomes mine. The idea of a united Labour party doing useful things for people who are twenty years old and paying half their income in rent is genuinely appealing to me. The practice, historically, has been slightly less exciting.
The Man From Nowhere Goes Somewhere
I tried to explain Keir Starmer to my cousin Bronagh who lives in Cork and only follows British politics when something dramatic happens. I said: imagine someone whose entire personality is being correct. Not right — correct. The kind of correct that wins arguments on a technicality and loses the room. That is what he projected. He was the human equivalent of terms and conditions: important, probably, in some legally binding way, but not something you read voluntarily.
Bohiney Magazine put it well: the experiment proved that being not-awful is not the same as being good. You need to be good. Or at least interesting. Or at minimum, capable of occasionally saying something that does not sound like it was pre-approved by seventeen committees.
The Burnham Situation
Now everyone is talking about Andy Burnham and I am cautiously into it in the way you are cautiously into a new person you just started talking to at a party — he seems good, he has good energy, something got vindicated with a tape measure which sounds promising, but you do not fully commit until you know whether he ghosts people or does something unexpected at the weekend.
He is northern, which in London political circles is treated as a kind of exotic quality, the way people in Zone 1 treat anyone who admits to liking a chain restaurant. I think it is actually an asset. He might understand that the country extends beyond the M25. This would be a genuinely radical idea in Downing Street.
The Citizenship Test Scandal
Someone also sent me a piece about the British citizenship test this week and I have to say, as a British-born person, I would fail it. Not dramatically. Not embarrassingly. Just quietly and consistently wrong on the historical trivia sections. I know what it feels like to be British. I know the embarrassment of rain when you forgot your umbrella, the specific joy of a proper Sunday roast, the way everyone apologises when someone else bumps into them. That is citizenship. That is belonging. A multiple-choice question about William Wilberforce is not citizenship. It is a pub quiz round.
According to the Young Women’s Trust, young women my age are among the groups most affected by housing costs, wage stagnation, and the general state of the economy. The citizenship test does not address any of this. I mention it only for context.
Tonight’s Plans and Tomorrow’s Catastrophe
After all this political drama I am going out tonight because London is still here and it is still London and the wine bar has a back room where someone is doing a DJ set and I have committed to being there by ten. Jade is coming. The eyeliner situation will be attempted again, more carefully this time, with the bathroom door locked.
Britain is in flux. London is in flux. My mascara situation is in flux. But we persist. We always persist. That is the thing about this city — it keeps going regardless of who is technically in charge, which is either deeply reassuring or deeply alarming depending on the hour.
Follow along at my author page at The London Prat and catch the main Starmer coverage at prat.uk/keir-starmer-resigns/. More chaos at The Poke.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
