Llama drama has humiliated Keir Starmer – Brits are sick of woke nonsense. Here’s how he can end it

LABOUR might be making a pig’s ear of just about everything right now but there’s one thing they’re absolutely nailing – sheer chutzpah. The party that took the knee, said women could have penises and decided Jeremy Corbyn was the answer to all our problems now reckons it’s the party of common sense. They would like us to believe that we’ve all been having some sort of collective fever dream.

A sweat-soaked nightmare where we all mistakenly thought that Sir Keir Starmer and his North London liberal smart-arses were trying to batter us to death with some gigantic Encyclopaedia of Woke. Oh no. They’re actually ON OUR SIDE. Well, knock me down with a rainbow rosette. Wes Streeting has become the latest Labour politician to publicly re-spin his party’s positions. The Health Secretary wrote in this newspaper this week that the NHS had become a slave to wokeness by doing things like dropping the word “woman” from official documents and needed to “stop this daft nonsense”.

“It is going through the worst crisis in its history. It can’t afford to be distracted by ideologues,” he harrumphed. He is, of course, completely correct. Indeed, as we revealed yesterday, its latest woke wheeze is to plough thousands of taxpayers’ cash into developing a new “inclusive” Pride badge. How many lives will that save? I think we can quickly work that one out. So good for Wes for calling this crazy crap out.

But wait. No sooner had wily Wes set out his revamped stall than along came another Labour minister, whose previous comments threatened to p*** on his chips. Ashley Dalton, MP for West Lancashire, has been parachuted in as his health minister, replacing Andrew Gwynne, who was suspended after his WhatsApp group chat read like a transcript from a rugby locker room. Her claim to fame is to have once declared that people could identify as a LLAMA.

She’s also against gendered toilets, thinks trans women aren’t men and holds assorted other gender wars views that do not appear to be in her new boss’s spanking new playbook. Oh Wes! It was all going so well. Dozy Dalton made her daftest comments back in 2016, which, to be fair, is a long time ago. So have her views changed?. Has she undergone the same kind of Damascene conversion as Wes?. After all, the ambitious MP for Ilford North hasn’t always been such a connoisseur of common sense.

As president of the National Union of Students he no-platformed the left-wing feminist and fellow Sun contributor Julie Bindel for railing against the kind of “daft nonsense” that he now decries. Time will tell. But we must hope so. And we must hope other party bigwigs read the room too. Because the woke agenda is failing, and Labour knows it. Everywhere you look, positions that were supposed to be about fairness, equality and Doing The Right Thing are actually doing the opposite.

Even Gen Z — the generation most likely to benefit from the Great Woke Push of their forebears, the millennials — think it’s made the world worse. A survey out this week revealed they think the UK is still racist, even more divided and not worth fighting for (only 11 per cent would pick up arms to defend us — 11 PER CENT!). The reason is the crazy overcorrection that wokeness has allowed. It’s gone too far.

Some in the Labour Party may think they’re being bullied into this new common-sense approach by upstart populist parties like — hold your nose, Emily Thornberry — Reform UK. Or that the rise of a swaggering Donald Trump in the US is somehow responsible. The truth is more simple. People are sick and tired of being lectured to by far too powerful interest groups and activists with narrow agendas that alienate the vast majority of the population — and worse, actively endanger some of them.

It’s time for the tail to stop wagging the dog. Or the bloody llama!. I WAS thrilled to read the recent Cosmo interview with my daughter’s new favourite singer, Gracie Abrams. The 25-year-old nepo-baby daughter of Star Wars director JJ Abrams came across as a well-adjusted young lass, bemoaning social media’s obsession with commenting on people’s bodies. As she thundered to the mag: “It has gotten kind of out of hand. There’s no end to the discourse on women’s bodies, like Jesus f***ing Christ! Shut up!”.

You go girl!. No wonder she’s taken the decision not to give anyone any reason to comment on her body by refraining from the kind of raunchy magazine shoots that feature her suggestively flashing underboob or parading around provocatively in lingerie . . . Thank god for Gracie Abrams. DOMINIC CUMMINGS, that mischievous Get Brexit Done dude with the dodgy eyesight, gave an interesting interview to The Sunday Times at the weekend.