Keir Starmer is haunted by England Removing portraits won't erase the past

How do you know you’re in a ghost story? It isn’t always obvious. The ghost, after all, usually doesn’t appear until the very end. But there are signs. Perhaps it’s the time of year, or the Ulster rain pawing at my window, but I think such signs are appearing in the life of the prime minister. I feel duty bound to inform him that he is being haunted. 

I observed the first clue in late August, when it emerged that Starmer had removed a portrait of Margaret Thatcher from his study. Accusations of puerile tribalism were denied with a smile. Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, he said: “This is not actually about Margaret Thatcher at all. I don’t like images and pictures of people staring down at me. I’ve found it all my life; when I was a lawyer I used to have pictures of judges… I don’t like it. I like landscapes.” 

Some took this statement as artful evasion. I think it’s worthy of serious thought. Ghost stories tend to begin with similar moments of unease. People staring down at me. How easy it is to imagine. The comfortable sofa, the pool of lamplight, yet another document plumbing the alarming depths of Rachel Reeves’s black hole. But he cannot concentrate. His gaze creeps up to the portrait on the wall. He is disturbed by an uncanny feeling of… what? Invigilation? Judgment?

This will seem fanciful. Keir Starmer is a man who doesn’t dream. He’s a lawyer. An abacus man. Although he loves classical music, particularly Beethoven, his frank indifference to the other arts is well documented. There’s no favourite novel (unless it is expedient for him to have one), no poem that rattles around his skull. He just doesn’t care. And he isn’t going to pretend otherwise. Angela Rayner is equally unconcerned with such fripperies, declaring that “beautiful means nothing really”. This is who these people are, and I admire their honesty — there’s nothing more embarrassing than a barbarian in a toga. 

Is this the sort of man who would get the creeps in his own study? Well, yes. In fact, Starmer’s personality is Clue No. 2. Such stolid, clockwork men are exactly the sort of people that end up in good ghost stories. Robert Aickman’s hapless protagonists are earnest blanks clutching Blue Guides, while M. R. James specialised in the tweedier end of donnery. Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter, the best English ghost story written this century, is narrated by a physicist. The truth is that, with the notable exception of Hamlet, hopeless neurotics don’t make for decent haunting. No one is particularly impressed when an out-of-work actor sees Boudicca in the bathtub. The real pleasure is in watching a bluff empiricist having his certainties sanded away, night after misty night.

What are Starmer’s certainties? Who haunts this lawyer? A possible answer to these questions arrived last week. It turns out that Thatcher is not the only notable to have been mothballed. Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, and William Gladstone have also vanished from Downing Street’s walls. A No. 10 spokesman has stated that “the change of artwork is long planned, since before the election, and is timed to mark 125 years of the government art collection”. 

This makes no sense, at least when it comes to the queen and the playwright. The picture of Elizabeth, one of the Ditchley pattern portraits, is among the most famous paintings in the collection. An anniversary celebration should foreground such a treasure, especially when so much of the government art collection consists of paunchy, periwigged men. Shakespeare’s value to such an endeavour seems pretty obvious to me. You’d think that a painting of the world’s most famous playwright — albeit an 18th-century copy of the original — would be something that the government art collection might want to show off.

Raleigh is more complex these days, at least in the prime minister’s circles, who would no doubt be horrified by the planter and pirate once they had skimmed his Wikipedia page. They’d be even more disturbed by his poem The Lie, which feels uncomfortably close to the bone: “Tell potentates, they live / Acting by others’ action; / Not loved unless they give; / Not strong but by a faction.” And Gladstone? Again, too enmeshed in his own age, too past. His portrait, a copy of an original by Millais, can’t help. Those black and liquid eyes were made for staring down.

This soft iconoclasm has attracted a fair amount of comment. A. N. Wilson led the charge, declaring that “it is becoming clearer by the day that the PM is determined to rewrite the nation’s history in his own joyless image”. I wonder if something stranger isn’t afoot. Wilson implies an active policy on Starmer’s part. If that were the case, I’d expect Sir Keir to hang a nice portrait of Oliver Cromwell, perhaps contrasting with some factory workers and Stakhanovite miners. Instead, Elizabeth and Raleigh have been replaced with two technically brilliant but slightly drab pictures by Paula Rego. This is hardly a grand statement of political intent. No, what I see are not the orders of a prime minister, but the panicked reactions of a haunted man. 

Clue No. 3 lies with the portraits themselves. Malign paintings form their own sub-genre of weird fiction. While not all ghost stories in the strictest sense, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Schalken the Painter, Nikolai Gogol’s Portrait, John Buchan’s Fullcircle, and Susan Hill’s The Man in the Picture build macabre tales around rectangles of pigment and linen. These stories work because they expand on what we already know: that good portraits are more than decoration. They are time, slowed and set. A master storyteller can quicken them again.

This is especially true of historical artworks. The portraits of Elizabeth, Raleigh, and Shakespeare are not particularly unnerving in themselves. But they preserve times that could not be further from Starmer’s orderly world. Times when Dr Dee spoke to angels in Mortlake, when Kind Kit “dyed swearing” in Deptford, when Giordano Bruno composed hermetic tracts and James I authored pamphlets on demonology and witchcraft. Such portraits provide disturbing reminders of a Britain that predates BBC Three. They haunted Starmer’s Downing Street, these English ghosts, and so they had to go.

The story will not end there. Ghost stories never do. The protagonist makes a mistake and makes it again. He digs too deep, looks too long. In creepy tales about portraits, the picture proves impossible to escape. It can be locked in an attic or sold to a dealer or even dismissed out of hand, but in the end a haunted portrait tends to get its way.  

This was certainly true last week. What should have been a quiet assertion of Starmerland has become yet another gaffe. It seems that portraits of queens, prime ministers, playwrights, and pirates become still more powerful when they are hidden away in vaults or back corridors. The old, unfashionable past just won’t die. It’s in the pictures that stare down at Sir Keir, in the stones of the city, in the pull of the river beyond. A Prime Minister haunted by England. Am I right? There’s only one way to find out — we’ll have to wait until the very end.