Twitter, Starmer and the madness of the mob

Elon Musk’s Twitter motto is Vox populi, vox Dei (‘The voice of the people, the voice of God’). This obviously appeals to the lawyer in Sir Keir Starmer since Twitter (being the voice of God) cannot be sued and therefore gives him scope to sail close to the wind. There is much he can learn from the example of the Romans.

The mob is in full song on the walls of Pompeii. ‘Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this’; ‘Phileros is a eunuch’; ‘Nero’s finance officer says the food here is poison’; ‘Secundus likes to screw boys’ and much else of this sort.

Roman orators too went the full Starmer. Curio described Julius Caesar as ‘every woman’s husband and every man’s wife’. In his attacks on Marc Antony, Cicero remarked: ‘You started out a common rent boy, with a fixed, and pretty steep, fee; you took on the man’s toga and at once converted it into a prostitute’s frock.’

The orator Caelius also took on Antony, imagining the scene when Antony’s soldiers brought news of his enemies’ approach: ‘They find him flat out in a drunken stupor, snoring from the depths of his belly, belching repeatedly, with his famous female tent-mates spread either side over the whole bed, and others sprawling around it. Breathless with terror at the news, they tried to wake him, screaming his name, struggling to throw him off their necks. While one spoke so sweetly into his ear, another was violently beating him. Woken by their voice and touch, he groped for the nearest one’s embrace. Aroused, he could not sleep, and drunk, he could not keep awake. So he was tossed about in a daze between the hands of the centurions and his concubines.’ Pure invention, of course, but it makes a good model for Labour’s next unprincipled attack on Rishi Sunak.