Two episodes crystallised my opinion of Starmer. First, his dithering over school closures during the early months of the pandemic. Sir Keir changed his mind on the matter no less than six times. Boris, with some justice, was able to observe that he had had “more flip-flops than Bournemouth beach”. Second, his hit-and-run. Later that autumn, he knocked over a Deliveroo cyclist while reversing his SUV. In eager anticipation of his appointment with his tailor, he made off before Met officers arrived on the scene.
Cumulatively, these incidents reveal more than mere quirks of character. They tell us that behind the façade of technocratic competence — confected largely by the liberal press — is a man utterly out of his depth. Indeed, his chronic indecisiveness, let alone the vestiary vanity that dictates his behaviour, betrays a sensibility rather at odds with the trappings of technocracy. Technocrats typically see themselves as political plumbers, dour managers capable of unsentimentally transcending popular preoccupations in order to push through unpopular, if necessary, policies. Above all, they have a vision, however misguided; take their appalling record in the eurozone or the Third World.
Starmer, it is true, mimics the lexicon of technocrats with remarkable facility, all the trite soundbites about “sound money” and “short-term pain for long-term good”. Versions of these dicta have been repeated ad nauseam, most recently at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool this week. Yet the fact is that Starmer is no technocrat. He is, rather, a man without a plan, cluelessly blundering and muddling through from one crisis to the next. Lacking a vision for Britain, the “short-term pain” he promises with Calvinist glee can only be a prelude to long-term pain.
Political incoherence, while damaging socially, can be rewarding individually. Indeed, it has stood Starmer in good stead. Possessed of a cynicism bordering on nihilism, our chameleon was happily reconciled to Osbornism in 2015 before taking a seat on Corbyn’s shadow cabinet only a year later. Two years on, by then already a darling of Islingtonian Europeanism, he led the anti-democratic putsch to reverse the result of the referendum, only to abandon the demand once its real objective — the displacement of the Left, of course, not re-entry into the EU — was achieved in 2019. His ascent to the party leadership followed shortly thereafter, on the strength of retaining the slate of reforms promised in the manifesto of old, including sweeping nationalisation and redistribution. Unsurprisingly, these pledges were swiftly jettisoned in a bid to refashion his party as a cut-price New Labour tribute act.
Adherents of a tradition less susceptible to spin-doctoring would no doubt have been left scratching their heads at Starmer’s seemingly endless capacity for reverse-ferreting. As it is, though, the mavens of self-respecting liberal opinion hardly batted an eyelid. The rare pleas for clarity voiced in the usual quarters of Labourist opinion — “Labour desperately needs to stand for something,” declared the New Statesman in 2021 — were drowned out by the plaudits of pundits praising such concessions to electability.
Much the same was said of Starmer’s bot-like proclamations to the press. We were led to believe that colourless Keir doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem, let alone a discerning literary taste. As a child, he had no fears, no phobias, the Guardian reported. “He doesn’t know what he dreamed last night — or ever: ‘I don’t dream.’” In the end, though, his carefully crafted conventionality counted for little. With fewer votes than Corbyn received in 2017 and 2019, Starmer was able to seize power only thanks to the distorting effect of the simple plurality system.
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SubscribeTechnocrats like Starmer are followers, not leaders. But they crave to be in positions of leadership because they like the idea of power, but don’t like the responsibilities of power nor do they have the temperament to wield it. They say there are two types of people in power, Foxes and lions, and in this day and age we have an overabundance of foxes and a major shortage of lions. This applies throughout the entire western world and not just in Britain and that’s why it’s In such a bad shape.
There’s a really searching piece waiting to be written about Keir Starmer, one that will cut through all the noise, the wind and the feeble fury that he seems to epitomise. This isn’t it.
Instead, we have a patchwork quilt of a piece, sewn together with a misjudged sophistry that might go down well in certain circles but which, in my opinion, does a disservice to the seriousness of the downward spiral the UK finds itself in. By the UK, i mean the millions of good people who find their lives being blighted by the utter failure of our political class to address their concerns, to engage their energy or to enthuse their outlook.
Less than three months into a new parliament, the next five years stretch out before us with a lame duck PM and a government machine that resembles one of those “British Leyland” cars we used to produce in the 1970s that started to fall apart as soon as it left the production line.
We need a much more thorough analysis of how we arrived at such an impasse. The author is an academic historian and has written books on post-colonial India that seem to have gone down well, but his finger – rather than being on the UK pulse – has simply been pointed into the air. I hope at least Comments can touch the breeze.
Its illogical to expect good leaders to be reliably elected under a democratic system. Half of the voters are below median intelligence, yet are given an equal vote.