AFTER all his years of striving, conniving, ducking and diving, Michael Gove has finally made it. He is prime minister at last.

Aptly for a man who dismissed the concept of “experts,” he will form a Cabinet of all the randomers, from the man who has done more to deliver “Starmerism” than Starmer himself — former Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy — to one-time sword-wielding Tory leadership hopeful Penny Mordaunt.

Even Trump cast-off Antony Scaramucci will get a look-in, bestriding the Atlantic like a political colossus he undoubtedly is, as they gather to consider the response to a Russian attack on British soil. What the Russians have against the soil remains unclear.

As the PM gets down to the taxing business of chairing this Cabinet of titans, he scans the room for a deputy with a forensic eye for detail and an unstinting willingness to ask the tough questions. Instead, he gets Nicola Sturgeon.

Don’t worry, it’s not real.

These people who used to pretend to run the country for you have come out of retirement to pretend to run the country for Sky TV — high-definition proof that politics is indeed showbusiness for ugly people.

Not content with a pension that would choke a horse, even former Labour MP and secretary general of Nato Lord Robertson is in on the act, but it’s not about the money.

Since stepping down, his job has been to justify Nato’s existence, wandering wild-eyed around the Palace of Westminster and TV studios for years with his trusty hammer looking for a nail. Now, at last, his time has come.

It seems like Starmer has spent decades behind a desk in No 10 staring into the middle distance. In fact, it’s only been two years of cringe and chaos.

In that time, among the monthly relaunches that none of us can actually remember, the inevitable shirt-sleeved visits to factories, and apparently random U-turns that have left the rest of us staring into the middle distance, he has managed to stick to at least one story.

No, not that he was apparently the only human with access to other human beings who didn’t know Lord Mandelson had a wildly dodgy track record and was pals with a convicted paedophile — he only began that charade after a few months in office.

There has been something else, from day one, that has obsessed him — an urge to increase war spending by an entirely arbitrary figure.

It’s being sold as good for manufacturing, jobs and all the rest.

I’m sure it will be, in very selected pockets. All actual evidence however points to social spending being far more beneficial to the wider economy, while also having the happy side-effect of improving lives and killing fewer kids, but perhaps that’s not “hard-edged” enough for the big man.

The figure to be strived for is 2.5 per cent of GDP, apparently. In his last gasp in office, he’s even announced how it would be spent, with a decisive shift to new technologies like drones.

For the discerning political drone, these investments fulfil a number of key criteria:

They make you feel like you are as modern and “capable” as the kit;

They allow folk to be killed at the push of a button with less of the eye-to-eye contact that always risks the people who’ve been sent to kill one another asking awkward questions;

Above all though, they provide invaluable content for 24 hour news, offering endless blurry images of folk running for their lives without having to think too deeply about the kids left in the building that just exploded.

Not content with already having planned over £10bn in cuts to pay for this, Sir Keir has proven his military chops by land-mining No 10 with £4.7bn of cuts for his successor to find. A fitting end to the political career of a man more interested in ramping up a sectarian war in the Labour Party than ramping up the social wage.

After years of being sidelined in the social security system, of being told they are not worthy of a home of their own, that they are lazy and all they need to do is cut down on the lattes to have a decent life, the logical next step appears to be to convince the country young people need to be sent to their death.

A little bit of wargaming with Gove and Sturgeon here, a few carefully placed stories about submarines lurking on our shores there, and enemy fighters in “our” airspace… even when it isn’t “ours” at all.

The lack of challenge is remarkable. That this has gone on for years, and has also been returned in kind by our own forces seems unworthy of even the slightest of sidebars.

Tory and SNP politicians agree with Sir Keir on 2.5 per cent, they just query where the money will come from. In a particularly bizarre twist SNP Westminster leader Dave Doogan last week accused the UK government of having “decimated” the armed forces before this week demanding to know where the cuts would come from to fund rearmament.

Still, the SNP has odd form on this. While many of its candidates have happily stood with anti-Trident “bairns not bombs” placards, they remain committed to Nato’s first-strike nuclear alliance and Sir Keir’s 2.5 per cent.

The only debate seems to be on the flavour of the bomb being funded — presumably they reason that bairns would rather die in a drone strike than a nuclear bomb.

It’s a matter of taste, I suppose.

With the notable exceptions of MPs like Jeremy Corbyn, there is little in the way of pushback on ministers’ outsourced death-wish from the political classes. Not even the Greens can bring themselves to challenge the war drive, with one MP, Ellie Chowns stating: “The Green Party recognises the need for the UK to properly invest in our safety, defence, and security.

“Britain is made safer when defence spending is responsible, ethical, and rooted in tackling the real security challenges of our time.”

Ethical.

Those “real security challenges,” I hope, include climate change and the scramble for scarce resources in the years ahead, but these considerations are left hanging. Instead the only real question is why services will be cut to pay for it.

A reasonable question of course, but it neither challenges the drive to war or its root causes.

When push comes to shove, there’s barely a battle on Earth that isn’t at its core about who has what; whether it be land, resources or the power that flows from them. Just as slashing our aid budget to build bombs only makes it more likely they’ll be used, a failure to rebuild the social wage can only lead to more conflict on our streets — two decades into austerity, that must surely be clear by now.

Other made-for-TV moments over the last few weeks in Scotland have included men and boys dressed from head to toe in black playing soldiers outside Glasgow Cathedral and Holyrood.

I wager a fair few of them have managed to live their life knowing nothing but austerity. Robbed of their futures by men in donated suits acting “tough” on the steps of No 10. Now robbed of their imaginations by rage, they are egged on by wealthy fascists at home and abroad determined their aspirations reach no further than passing on the downward punch.

Some will choose to stare at Gove and glaze over, resigning themselves to war, the atomisation of our class, and even our world; others may take a pacifist path and sit it out in splendid isolation.

Neither will win the age.

As long as want exists, there can be no peace, and while fascism stalks this Earth, we cannot be pacifists.

There is no other war worth fighting.