QUENTIN LETTS: Why didn’t they pop Miss Swift in an Uber and have her perform at No10?

Chris Philp, shadow leader of the Commons, had been researching the issue of our times and had made a list of the magnificoes who accepted tickets to Taylor Swift concerts. 

In addition to Sir Keir Starmer, 62, Miss Swift’s audience included (said Mr Philp with his habitual gulps and blinks) the secretaries of state for home affairs, science, health and education, the Treasury chief secretary, the school standards minister and the PM’s parliamentary private secretary. 

‘What were they doing?’ cried Mr Philp. ‘Having a Cabinet meeting at the concert?’ 

This was a ridiculous question. 

Everyone knows the school standards minister and the PM’s PPS are not in Cabinet.

Sir Keir and his wife Victoria previously attended a Taylor Swift concert at Wembley on 21 June, during the singer’s first run of shows at the stadium this summer

Taylor Swift performs on stage during ‘Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour’ at Wembley Stadium on June 22, 2024 in London, England

But it got one wondering. Would it not have been easier to have popped Miss Swift in an Uber and to have had her perform in the Cabinet Room at Downing Street? 

Mohammed to the mountain and all that. Another question unaddressed in coverage of this important controversy: why is Taylor Swift such a Starmerite muse? 

Chopin’s mazurkas suckled Polish nationalism and Sibelius fuelled Finnish separatism. 

Richard Wagner is associated with National Socialism whereas Sir Winston Churchill preferred Gilbert & Sullivan and the hobgoblins of ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’. 

Shostakovich was a son of Stalinism until Pravda savaged his opera Lady Macbeth Of The Mtsensk District. Is this something Miss Swift should beware? 

Could the worm turn and could she find her bourgeois tendencies harpooned by a Guardian leader column?

If so, would that be for artisticpolitical reasons? Or because her mother had upset Sir Keir’s factotum Morgan McSweeney?

Sir Keir had a ten-minute chat with Ms Swift and her mother backstage after accepting four free tickets to her sellout Eras tour in August, it has emerged. Pictured: Swift performing at Wembley in August

Ma Swift looks a fast bowler. One would not bet against her gobbling Mr McSweeney for breakfast. 

Never having knowingly listened to Miss Swift, I am at a disadvantage. Is there, as with Beethoven, early Swift, middle Swift and more contemplative, late-period Swift? 

Which of those commands the devotion of Daddio groover Sir Keir? Do the PM’s top comrades – Sister Reeves, Brother McFadden et al – gather round the No 10 gramophone of an evening to listen to Taylor Swift discs to inspire ‘the work of change’? 

The PM was once a flautist. Had he only accepted freebies to a concert by Sir James Galway, newspaper coverage might have been less prominent. Sir James is not quite as photogenic as Miss Swift.

So many questions, so few answers, even with Lisa Nandy, culture secretary, at the despatch box. Miss Nandy vouchsafed no insights to Miss Swift’s intellectual appeal. 

Aesthetic considerations may not rate terribly high with this minister. She said she was seeking a better relationship with the arts, but did not quite put it like that. 

Instead she wanted ‘a new covenant with our civil society partners’.

The first culture minister I knew was Norman St John-Stevas, a delicious dilettante. 

Norman might well have liked Taylor Swift – he had a weakness for bling – but I am not sure he would ever have spoken of ‘civil society partners’. 

Miss Nandy is said in private to be amiable but at the despatch box she is as starchy and impenetrable as an under-boiled potato. 

She overdoes the vehemence both in acclaim and denunciation. She was ‘delighted’ and ‘very pleased’ to hail the ‘incredible work’ and ‘fantastic example’ of some ‘youth providers’ in Grimsby. 

Rt Hon Lisa Nandy MP, The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport pictured in the House of Commons, October 17 2024

Later she accused the Conservatives of ‘violent indifference and neglect of arts and culture’. 

Violent indifference! All this before 10am. One dreads to think how trenchant she becomes once the sun is over the yard-arm. Beside Miss Nandy sat Chris Bryant, minister of state. 

He was not on Mr Philp’s list of Swifties. 

I wager that Bryant – cerebral, witty and better suited to be culture secretary than raw-spud Nandy – is more a man for Tallis or Warlock.

He did, however, have an interesting rock statistic. Answering a question about ticket touts, he disclosed that £96 tickets to see Coldplay at Wembley next August are already up for re-sale at £17,623. 

If Rachel Reeves could find a way of imposing capital gains tax on ticket touts, the black hole might vanish.