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Finito World
Andrew Murray Burnham, that strange hybrid of politician and tennis player, had been Prime Minister for a matter of hours before the headlines reached for absurd hyperbole.
Even though a series of reasonably banal and even harmless politicians had been swapped for another set, the media was determined to heighten the drama.
“Night of the Long Knives.” “Massacre of the Starmerites.” A “brutal reshuffle” leaving what one broadcaster called a “near wipeout” of the old guard. Rachel Reeves was out as Chancellor – one of the least surprising developments imaginable. David Lammy, Darren Jones, Peter Kyle, Steve Reed, Lord Hermer, Liz Kendall, and Jo Stevens went with her. It was, by any sobre reading, a phone call, then another phone call, then a press release on X.
Political reality is complicated enough without making the essential tenor of a day so wildly wrong by the wholesale misappropriation of language. The competing pledges and priorities are difficult to trace even if you make it your sole business to do so: where will the money come from to pay for defence spending increases, rough sleeping, a cut to VAT on heating bills?
Will Donald Trump really come to Manchester? What kind of Foreign Secretary will Ed Milliband make?
These are now real questions and it’s hard to feel they’re easier to answer when the atmosphere around his first day is made essentially bogus by melodramtic reporting.
What actually happened bears no relation to the language used to describe it. David Lammy, sacked as Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, responded not with the fury of a man run through but with the studied grace of someone who has read the room correctly: “A new prime minister is entitled to build his own team, and I wish Andy Burnham and the new cabinet every success.”
Meanwhile Darren Jones wished Burnham “every success.” Steve Reed said only that he was “disappointed to be leaving government now.” This is not a massacre. It is the single most ordinary transaction in British politics, repeated by every incoming Prime Minister since the office existed, conducted this time with more courtesy than usual.
It is worth remembering what the phrase actually refers to. The Night of the Long Knives was Hitler’s 1934 purge of the SA leadership, in which Ernst Röhm and dozens of others were shot without trial. That is not a metaphor journalists should be reaching for lightly to describe Wes Streeting moving to Defence or Mahmood remaining at the Home Office.
Something has gone wrong with our sense of scale when the vocabulary of a real, murderous purge is the first instinct for a cabinet reshuffle, and the drift has been going on so long that nobody in the press gallery seems to notice they are doing it anymore.
The reason this matters now, rather than as a permanent grumble about headline writers, is that Britain has just watched what an actual attack on a politician looks like. Ann Widdecombe was killed at her home in Devon in what counterterrorism police have called a targeted attack, with a man now charged under the Terrorism Act.
It happened within a decade that has already taken Jo Cox and David Amess from Parliament by violence rather than by-election. Brendan Cox, whose wife was murdered in 2016, warned years ago that inflammatory political language “creates an atmosphere where attacks and violence are more likely than they otherwise would’ve been.” He was talking about “surrender” and “traitor,” not “massacre” and “long knives,” but the mechanism he was describing does not care which decade or which vocabulary triggers it. Words that borrow the imagery of killing, applied often enough to routine politics, wear down the very distinction that keeps politics survivable.
None of this is really about being precious with metaphor. It is about what the hyperbole displaces. A reshuffle that gets reported as a bloodbath is a reshuffle whose actual content, who now runs the Treasury, what happens to the department for business, gets buried under the theatre of the framing.
A genteel, entirely survivable transfer of ministerial jobs deserves better than headlines borrowed from a summary execution, particularly in the same fortnight the country buried a woman killed for being a public figure. Political journalism does not need to be dull to be responsible. It needs only to reserve the language of violence for violence, so that when something genuinely resembling a massacre does happen, the word still means something.
