It’s always heartening when people agree with you. I had Keir Starmer down as a non-ideological technocratic centrist dad the moment I first clocked him, with a tin ear for both simple human interaction and the darker subtleties of the political arts. So despite carrying his famous “Ming vase” over the line in the 2024 election, I’ve been wholly unsurprised by him flatfooting and pratfalling through jagged shards of porcelain ever since, living down to all my worst fears. Now absolutely everybody else thinks he’s crap too.
Or so I thought, until a family visit to China last month, when I established a connection beyond mythical Ming vases. The “Keir Starmer menu” has become a foodie phenomenon.
Let me explain. While in Beijing we thought we’d book a table at Yi Zuo Yi Wang, a popular Yunnan restaurant in Chaoyang, an area home to foreign embassies and international media organisations, galleries and happening night-spots. Yi Zuo Yi Wang translates as “In and Out”, but that’s just a coincidence.
It’s where Starmer and his entourage ate during his visit to China in January, a trip intended to thaw Anglo-Chinese relations after years of Tory froideur. And in one regard, at least, it worked: the Chinese loved him. They loved that he ate with chopsticks. They loved that he said thank you in Chinese. They loved that he came to this particular restaurant twice and ordered exactly the same things off the menu all over again. And I suspect, most of all, they loved him just for being there, while recognising in him one of their own, a modest bureaucrat interested in calm, order and obedience.
Yunnan cuisine features a lot of mushroom-based dishes. In its coverage of Starmer’s meal, the Telegraph went big with the scoop that many of these dishes are actually prepared using hallucinogenic mushrooms, but either despite or because of the magic mushrooms, the restaurant has been booked up for months, and we secured our table with some difficulty. This is down to the Starmer Dividend. Interestingly, the interior vibe – exposed brickwork, random glassware and potted plants – is pure triumphalist New Labour Islington chic; the clientele, in addition to business people and occidental diplomats, is definably hipster – all ankle-length trousers and seemingly no socks.
As soon as we sat down we were offered the twice-ordered Starmer menu, printed in English. We ordered the lot (though some of us swapped the Yunnan white wine for mushroom margaritas). And it was absolutely delicious. The only slight disappointment was the stewed rice with mushrooms in a copper pot, which tasted to most of our party as a bit like takeaway special fried rice. According to one ex-pat Beijing YouTuber, this was Starmer’s favourite.
And in a spirit of journalistic inquiry we asked the restaurant staff what they thought of Starmer. They said, and I quote: “He was kind, just like us.”
Starmer’s powers of enchantment aren’t restricted to Beijing’s diplomatic quarter. About 1,300 miles away in Yunnan province itself, near the Myanmar and Laos borders, in a courtyard restaurant in Dali we were instantly offered, in Chinese and English, copies of the same Starmer menu from In and Out, which we were presumably going to find irresistible. In Kunming, Yunnan’s capital, our son and his fiancee spotted Fuzhao Zhan restaurant advertising its The Same Style as the Prime Minister menu, with a head and shoulders photo of Starmer giving a thumbs-up sign (though originally probably altered from a photo of the PM making the standard UK political hand gesture indicating “Tough Decision No 37”).
All of which adds up to not very much apart from the universal attraction of the exotic. That said, Starmer couldn’t be blamed for taking comfort wherever he can, and there are worse places than China to be the object of a little adulation. The country is clean, efficient, polite and friendly. In Beijing you can hear birdsong in the streets thanks to almost all the vehicles being new and electric (we heard a woodpecker about a mile from Tiananmen Square).
The streets teem with hipsters, online influencers and young women cosplaying Tang and Ming dynasty princesses. More than 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty over the past half century, and the country’s infrastructure, transport and environmental protection should make any Briton weep when they consider how nearly 50 years of Thatcherite privatisation have pillaged our public realm into ruination. And, of course, they have zero tolerance of any kind of dissent.
Add to that our son’s phone’s initial translation of the Chinese characters representing Starmer’s transliterated name on the sign in Kunming: “British Prime Minister Star Beast”. I mean, what’s for Keir not to love?
Curated by Dr. Elena Rodriguez
