A couple of days ago, on a Swiss flight from Seoul to Zurich, a pilot experienced a medical emergency. Three doctors on board assisted, another pilot assumed the controls, and the plane landed safely. Like many, you might be appalled that David Lammy wasn't on the passenger manifest, hammering on the cockpit door with the timeworn advice: 'You don't change the pilot during a flight!'
But do you ever change the pilot mid-flight? As a nervous flyer, I can envisage situations where you absolutely would. Yet, in contemporary British politics, the folly of a pilot switcheroo is one of only about five metaphors. Today is a big day for it. Aviation sticklers will point out that if you count the switch to auto-pilot, you almost always change the pilot mid-flight. Moreover, most long-haul flights give at least three pilots a chance to shine—or not lose every contested seat in Hartlepool to Reform.
Perhaps that frequent switchover mirrors what's happening in a country that has had six pilots in 10 years. After the May election results, we're headed for an anguished debate about whether to get another new pilot. Many across the political spectrum feel tribal about their preferred pilot, but I don't love any of the choices. Several are having their own medical emergencies.
Starmer loyalists aren't the first to use this metaphor. Abraham Lincoln warned the Union 'Don't swap horses in the middle of the stream' during the 1864 election, and 'Don't change the pilot' was Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1936 slogan. If we had a magic plane, we'd fly Lammy back to admonish those guys that they are no Keir Starmer.
As for Labour's airborne emergency, many will recall Airplane! (1980). But vibes-wise, we might be dealing with the serious plots of films that movie spoofed. In Zero Hour! (1957), food poisoning from fish knocks out the cockpit crew, leaving a liability as the only person who could be called upon. In Airport 1975 (1974), a pilot has a heart attack, crashes into a passenger airliner, kills the flight engineer and first officer, and blinds the captain. This gives the flavour of the absurd disasters that have brought Labour to this point. Can one of Labour's not-wildly-gifted amateurs do it? MythBusters tested the 'only you can land this plane!' trope by landing a NASA simulator with radio instructions. They found they could land the plane, but would you want them to?
Meanwhile, postmortems occur in a world with a literal jet fuel shortage, as if personnel changes are less relevant than ineluctable forces. Starmer has only a tiny amount of fuel left, but can run on fumes for a while. Looking at results, investigators ask whether Labour in its current incarnation has anything in the tank. Where would the pilot-swapped craft land? That Swiss flight ended in Kazakhstan, somewhat to the right of Zurich. But Labour could contrive to land somewhere east of Seoul.
Many claim to support Lammy's bid to barricade the cockpit door. 'I would suspect rumblings will start even before the king's speech on May 13. Starmer will be lucky to still be there by midsummer,' twinkled Nigel Farage outside Havering town hall. 'But personally, I think he's a great chap, and I really want him to stay.'
Let's wrap up with a reminder that one of the most common romance scams sees a conman pretend to be a pilot. You want to believe him, you're thrilled he seems different, so you let him into your life. How does it end, other than in a humiliating Netflix documentary? He doesn't take you places you've never been, expertise isn't overrated, and you'll be poorer by the time he's finished.
