Prepare for a Hot Keir Summer When did competency become a kink?

My second thought was to wonder whether such pieces were covertly aimed at establishing their authors’ fealty, either for strategic or ideological purposes — a bit like a Pravda apparatchik rhapsodising over Khrushchev’s beneficence, or some hack on CNN insisting that President Biden is still compos mentis. So much of modern life seems to require pretending, as convincingly as possible, that you don’t see what you do see, or do see what you don’t.

Or perhaps the heat is down to hypergamy in human females, also known as the spectre haunting the manosphere’s nightmares: the idea that women are particularly attracted to high-status partners, leading them to shun more Lilliputian types who long to get laid, yet remain cruelly untouched. Obviously, there is something in this. No other explanation of Rupert Murdoch’s continued allure as husband material makes sense. And many of my lesbian friends have an otherwise inexplicable yen for Penny Mordaunt, especially when she’s wielding a ginormous sword. Ditto Strimpel’s simultaneous hots for Nigel Farage, whom she was waxing lyrical about only a few weeks ago.

But as a generalised explanation of human female mating choices, based on the instances I know of, hypergamy has never rung true; surely even less so, then, as an explanation of female sexual fantasies about men they are unlikely ever to meet. (It’s probably the case that women tend to want what other women want, René Girard style, but that’s not quite the same thing).

And anyway, the role of British Prime Minister after years of decline hardly screams take-me-now, world-straddling omnipotence. If powerful politicians are your thing, you might as well go abroad for your fantasy kicks and spend a transgressively thrilling half hour with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping instead. Not for nothing are there headlines out there like “I Pretended to Be a Young Joseph Stalin On Tinder, and It Went Weirdly Well”.

Rather than proximity to titanic levels of potency, Moran explains her torrid feelings in terms of the much more unshowy value of “competence”. Basically: relative to the last lot, this lot look like they know what they are doing — a bar that is both terrifically low and scarily defeasible, especially at an early stage. Starmer’s storied career history, first as lawyer then as Director of Public Prosecutions; his surviving the Corbyn years by pretending he believed in socialism; his present insistence upon caution in policy-making, and upon costing everything in advance; his ruthless removal of potential troublemakers, hostile to his market-friendly aims; all this suggests the unfolding of an actual plan to onlookers who are parched for the sight of one after the last years of Tory chaos. It is also true that, as I’ve written before, nobody knows what the plan is, but at least it looks like there is one. If the Conservative Party were any type of erotic fiction, it would be a Carry On film; on current appearances, Labour would be a big, serious Alan Hollinghurst novel.

Of course, appearances can quickly change. But there is such a thing, per Moran, as a “competence kink”: much discussed on fiction message boards, also known as a “competency boner”. The competence in question can be that of a group — “the thrill of watching talented people plan, banter, and work together to solve problems”, as one blogger puts it — or of an individual character, highly proficient at doing something in a way that causes blood to immediately rush to a reader’s loins. There’s even a sub-genre of fiction on Goodreads called “Competency Boner”, with titles like Once A Fallen Lady and Wrapped Up With A Ranger. It’s scarcely reassuring that capacities basic to human functioning are now being treated by some as a niche sexual fetish, to be ranked alongside a penchant for latex or Lily Allen’s feet, but that’s apparently the world we live in now. For all I know, OnlyFans is full of pay-per-view videos of people competently changing bicycle tires or descaling kettles; when it comes to fathoming the soundless depths of the human libido, I wouldn’t be surprised.

And I also regret to inform readers that there is a small but perfectly formed category of softcore fanfiction out there called “Sir Keir Starmer stories”, from which probably the cleanest bit I can quote is: “My knee still hurts from the football match. But my hands are fine.” It’s surely only a matter of time before the two genres merge and we get a fictional Sir Keir winning a steamy tussle with the Blob over planning reform. Who knows: perhaps in time, people with “competence kinks” will even come to displace asexuals and furries as the edgy new identity at Pride, in which case an entire generation of gay men and lesbians will be able to sigh gratefully with relief. At the beginning of a new regime, everything glows with what the non-fictional Starmer called “the sunlight of hope” during his first speech last week, using a boring metaphor perfectly competently.

But it’s not just Moran feeling it. In this time of growing civilisational chaos, a companion yearning for competence is rising. The education system and many workplaces are obsessed with something called “competence-based education”, specifying behavioural or learning outcomes that have to be demonstrated rather than bits of knowledge that have to be grasped. Some educationalists have argued that, perversely, an obsession with competence in an educational system produces more incompetent people not fewer, since at most they learn to fulfil basic requirements instead of getting really good at things, and they don’t typically get to use any creativity or initiative in doing so.

If this were true, it would be a perfect example of the way in which the people in charge of us these days — including, of course, our recent politicians — only seem to be able to think one or two chess moves ahead of their own initially flashy-sounding decisions, introduced with great fanfare to solve some problem that ends up being made much worse. In a world of frogs, anything vaguely humanoid can look like a prince. If Labour under Starmer can think even five moves ahead of its future decisions — about housing, the economy, the justice system, defence, education, social care, sewage, the NHS, infrastructure, prisons, and all the messy rest of it — I promise I’ll write a highly charged erotic poem to the Surrey man myself.

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Kathleen Stock is an UnHerd columnist and a co-director of The Lesbian Project.

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