Cleopatra to America's Caesar. (Carl Court/Getty Images)
The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump’s election victory is a nightmare for Keir Starmer. Trump not only embodies much that Starmer holds in obvious contempt, but his very presence in the White House captures much of Britain’s essential weakness in 2024. Whatever Labour MPs think of him, the incoming US President has more power to undermine British prosperity — and therefore their own chances of reelection — than anyone else on the planet, including, perhaps, their own leader. Like Cleopatra trying to survive the great imperial power struggles of the late Roman republic, Starmer has little choice but to submit to the new American Caesar and hope for the best.
Despite the inevitable hand wringing in Westminster, however, Trump’s election provides a political opportunity for Starmer that, intriguingly, has not gone unnoticed inside No.10. From a purely partisan perspective, those close to Starmer see Kamala Harris’s crushing defeat not only as a personal rejection, but also as an ideological repudiation of the kind of progressivism she came to represent. In their view, Harris’s brand of “be more woke” liberalism is just as antithetical to the voters Labour needs here as it was to the voters the Democrats needed across the Atlantic.
To understand the tensions at the heart of the Starmer government over its response to Trump’s victory, it is important to distinguish between the historical, organisational and emotional ties between Labour and the Democrats, which sparked Trump’s ire during the presidential campaign, and the divergent political projects taking shape in London and Washington. Those close to Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s influential chief of staff, simply do not look to San Francisco, Washington or Ottawa for inspiration as Tony Blair might have done in the Nineties. Instead, they look to the solid and rather staid social democracies of northern Europe. To understand Starmerism, in other words, look to Copenhagen not California.
The interesting question at the heart of this Labour government, however, is not so much what McSweeney’s vision of a successful Labour strategy looks like — for that much is clear — but how widely it is shared within the wider Labour movement. Beyond a few figures in No.10, who else shares McSweeney’s instinctive eye-rolling alienation with the obsessions and prejudices of North American liberalism and, somewhere in their soul, saw Harris’s defeat as deserved?
Fundamentally, many in Starmer’s No.10 believe that their “project” to remake the Labour Party, which started in opposition, is only half finished. To complete it, the party needs to develop far less instinctive sympathy with the kind of progressivism Harris represented — and far more sympathy with the ordinary concerns of Middle England. If the Labour Party is to be more than a Biden-style interregnum between periods of conservative rule, they believe, the party needs to be shaken out of its comfort zone on many of the issues which cost Harris in the election, from immigration to the wider “woke” wars dominating the post-mortems now being written about why her campaign failed.
Harris’s defeat, in short, is both a portent of what could happen to the Labour Party at the next election and a tool Starmer can use to stop that from happening, though only if he has the political skill to do so. Put bluntly, while President Trump will test Starmer’s diplomatic skills to the limit, his victory could help persuade a reluctant Labour Party that it needs to do far more to reassure voters that it shares their instincts. That, at least, is the theory.
None of that is to deny that on day-to-day issues, a Trump presidency will present Starmer with endless problems, which could sap energy from his premiership. When the deportations of undocumented migrants begin, Starmer will come under enormous pressure from his own party to condemn them. Imagine the moment it is discovered that a dual British citizen has been rounded up and separated from his children. Like Tony Blair, forced out of office because of his failure to condemn Israel’s war with Hezbollah in 2006, Starmer cannot run too far from the core instincts of the Labour Party. And yet, who knows what ramifications there will be for Starmer should he go to war against Trump on any particular issue.
All this makes Britain’s choice for the next ambassador to Washington vitally important. Right now, Peter Mandelson is being touted for the position. Appointing him would be a show of power from McSweeney — a close ally of Mandelson — putting the Foreign Office in the shade and raising questions about David Lammy’s influence, given his remarks about Trump as a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”. Mandelson is a commercially-minded politician-cum-businessman — a mould well understood in Washington — with an expertise in global trade rules from his time as European Commissioner. It would be some irony, however, if Mandelson’s latest political reincarnation was to negotiate a new trading relationship for Britain that would not have been possible in the EU.
Trump’s victory is clarifying in more ways than one, however, challenging British politics to reveal its hand on a whole raft of issues beyond Brexit, trade and security. When the President-elect moves to reinforce his southern border, in what sense can Britain plausibly claim to hold a different policy given the emphasis Starmer has placed on the creation of a new “Border Force”? As Starmer put it in his conference speech earlier this year: “It is — as point of fact — the policy of this Government to reduce both net migration and our economic dependency upon it.” The difference between Starmer and Trump, then, is not one of ambition, but delivery. Similarly, when Trump moves to ban the surgical transition of trans children, as he has promised, how will a Labour government react given that Health Secretary Wes Streeting has already kept the previous government’s ban on the use of puberty blockers for children?
On more structural questions, Starmer will face a choice all British prime ministers have tried to avoid: does he align Britain with the US in its struggle for global supremacy with China, or try to carve out a European third way? Britain, France and Germany tried this when Trump pulled the plug on the Iranian nuclear deal in his first term, only to find that they were powerless to escape the economic power of the US. When Britain attempted to continue using Huawei to build its 5G network, despite Trump’s warnings, Boris Johnson was forced into line because Trump simply imposed technological sanctions that Britain could not escape. Expect a similar pattern to play out all over again, even on the thorny issue of Ukraine, where Europe is unlikely to be able to make up the shortfall should Trump decide to pull the plug on US support for Kyiv next year.
If anything, Trump is far more powerful today than he was in 2016, and we in Europe are far weaker. Trump won an undisputed electoral mandate, backed by a likely Congressional trifecta and a more radical, coherent and thought-through ideology developed by organisations such as the Heritage Foundation. Europe, in contrast, looks lost and leaderless, weakened by war and geopolitical competition, and no longer comforted by the idea that Trump is just a passing threat. In Germany, the government is broken and likely to be replaced within months, its economic model ruined by the loss of reliable energy from Russia and high-end manufacturing competition from China. In France, Emmanuel Macron is a shadow of the self-appointed Trump whisperer who bestrode the world stage in 2016. And in Britain, Starmer already looks weakened after the struggles of his first 100 days in office.
The question at the heart of all this, then, is whether there will be an emergence of Trumpism here in the UK, much as Thatcherism went hand in hand with Reaganism. The conditions that gave rise to Trump are, if anything, more pronounced here than in the US: with record levels of immigration, years of economic failure and a growing sense that the British state is in some fundamental sense broken beyond repair.
Such a view, ironically, is already shared by many of those inside No.10 who have already come to see the creaking, mice-infested building of No.10 Downing Street as a symbol of Britain’s failed state. There are a number of senior figures close to Starmer who have even concluded that the building is not suitable as the hub of a 21st-century government and needs to be closed down, and turned into a ceremonial museum. The day-to-day running of government, for its part, would be moved to the Treasury, Foreign Office or even the Home Office. The question is not whether this would be a good idea in practice but whether the government can afford the upheaval.
The central irony of Starmer’s project, then, is not simply that it is trying to address many of the same concerns as Trump — from immigration to gender and globalisation — but that it is also beginning to share the same instinct that something has fundamentally broken in “the system” which needs fixing, or, perhaps, “draining”. For Starmer, and those around him, the question is not how to distance themselves from Trump over the next four years, but how to prove to voters that they don’t need to vote for a British version of him to address their concerns here. Biden, Harris, Scholz and Macron have all tried to do the same and failed. It would be a brave man to bet Starmer will be any different. It didn’t end well for Cleopatra either.
Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016, due to be published in September 2025
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SubscribeThe only right, proper and great thinking for the mind, is to ask what is ‘thought’. Is it a ‘subject or is it an ‘object’. Can it be studied when itself is the subject studying itself as an object?
I’d still position Alain Badiou and Jordan Peterson as the key thinkers of the Left and Right over the past 20 years.
Some might rightly mention Sloterdijk, and I would say that Zizek has been invaluable in bringing Lacan’s thought back into the culture in lieu of the Anglo academy’s rather toxic obsession with Deleuze and Guattari since the 1990s (they being another prop for the Judith Butler post-structuralist complex).
Ultimately only a handful of people are able to be true philosophers, because it is a destabilizing and mind altering endeavor.
Many more would be much better suited to following ideas rather than leading, not entering in any such dangerous intellectual exercise at all… much better for them to conquer intuitively, if at all, than to enter the intellectual labyrinth and ruin themselves.
As Nietzsche said: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
Immortal Souls – Ed Feser. The evidence
https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Souls-Treatise-Human-Nature/dp/386838605X/ref=monarch_sidesheet_title
As philosopher Ed Feser has shown, we in the west have literally lost our minds since Ockham’s absurd nominalism, Hume’s self refuting “fork” ideology, Kant’s incoherent antirealism, Descartes’ forgetting about that of which he thought and the train crash of disconnected postmodernism. The answer, preposterous as it might seem to claim in this wasteland, is in Final Causality and the realistic metaphysical foundation of Thomism. Sanity. Final Cause is the ultimate shaper of all reality; God.. all is moved by love. We are definable by the ends we seek. https://www.amazon.com/Thomass-Aristotelian-Philosophy-Nature-Obsolete/dp/1587314320
Well… he hasn’t “shown” anything; rather, he’s put forward an argument that we can either agree or disagree with, in part or in whole.
Reading this article made me wish that, hope that, Agnes Callard would write a piece for UnHerd on Fernando Pessoa’s very interesting (philosophical, anti-philosophical?) work The Book of Disquiet. (A brother can dream.)
I read TMWQ 50 years ago and it had a similar effect on me as listening to Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan around the same time –
Neither author tries to offer a solution, or even a signpost, but the effect was to inspire me on the path to “relentless” discovery, honesty, self-knowledge and the realisation that the answers to the questions Musil & Dylan pose lie not in more “thinking” but in the realm of the heart, where experience and observation go much deeper than words and concepts. Dylan’s challenge had me travelling through 30 countries over the following years, but it was only later that I was fortunate enough to learn that the journey / challenge is actually more about undoing and realising what a wonderful life we ‘simply’ have, than embracing some convoluted (or even ‘sublime’) philosophical “truth”. As Socrates has it, “Know thyself” .
Nicely put. Though Dylan might be allergic to the very idea an encapsulated Life’s Philosophy, I’d guess he does have a sense of mission and purpose, and with some kind of through-line, though changing shape over the decades. To communicate that sense of questing, maybe, and to call out beauty and bravery as well as injustice, suffering, and sorrow. And to make much of it sound good—though many have disputed that. In Dylan’s body work, the emphasis is toward the grim and sorrowful, but with many notes of mercy and gladness (more so during some decades than others). The fact that he remains quite silent about his own inner motivations and even seems pretty uninterested in exploring them is part of his mystique, and legacy. But he doesn’t seem like a mere leaf blowin’ in the wind.
It takes different breeds of seekers to help feed the hungry spirit of the world—or somethin’ fancy like that. If nothing else, Dylan is clearly a noteworthy original of lasting impact.
What about those philosophers who believe that have found the answer to how people should live? Here’s a few: Marx, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot etc.
Better hope that you never find the answer!
All the best books do teach you how to live. This is one to avoid it seems.
There’s philosophy and being philosophical. You can peer at a drop of water in a cloud but it has condensed from the gas of water vapour and is about to fall earthwards. To do this one needs to be close up. A medium sized cumulus weighs 200 tonnes, one needs to be miles back from it to appreciate its majesty, its weight is counter intuitive but a small aircraft can fly through it barely impeded. Best avoided, big brother cumulo nimbus has a fearsome engine raging inside it
A big cloud looks as if it is heading somewhere, has a purpose. It has, it’s heading to where conditions are suitable to redistribute the world’s water. No volition beyond the prevailing wind ‘seeking’ to balance air pressure. It’s part of an auto balancing system but what did the primitives think before science appeared?
A primitive, a child even, will know clouds rain but not that they are completely made up of water. With experience the child grows and expands its purview.
The point? Learn to fly something. You’ll have something new to consider beyond the skill and the machine itself. Look out of a passenger aircraft window and smile at people who say we’re overcrowded. Ponder the narrow minded. Become philosophical over their philosophy, or lack of.
One of your primitives who predates our science is Aristotle. He said the cloud has a purpose, to provide rain.
He wouldn’t have agreed with your idea that its purpose is to redistribute the world’s water. That is not a purpose for him, nor for me as far as I can understand it, and so is not true. It is, using Aristotle’s ‘primitive’ terminology, purely incidental, and to him, of no account.
Therein lies your philosophy. You live in the desert and dismiss, begrudge others’ clouds. You miss the point. I dare say you now know more about clouds than before. Look up today, a huge cloud over your head, all you see. There’s still a stratosphere and more above. Both you and Aristotle don’t see the wood for the trees. A shame with centuries between you.
I am making the point that Aristotle sees further than you, and had the terminology to criticise and correct what you said.
I have a family member who is like this character. He collects trivia about far distant stars and arcane mathematical equations, but never researches the dangers of Diabetes 2. I once casually quoted to him a stanza from Bob Dylan’s Tombstone Blues, which I think makes the same point as the essayist, and he was highly offended:
Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge
Living only in the mind breeds impotence. Your heart or gutfeel can give your life direction and then one should commit oneself to act on this. That gives experiential knowledge, the only true knowledge. The rest is mental masturbation.
Thank you for explaining to me why I find Robert Musil unreadable
That’s funny. I gave up halfway through the article. I had no idea who Musil was and now I’m not at all interested in finding out.
…..
It could be a variant of „the dependence effect” you mentioned another time: by giving information about Robert Musil’s book, you create the need to read it.
Don’t mean to be intentionally cruel but this is pretentious twaddle. “All that can be said can be said clearly.” Where’s Wittgenstein when you need him.
The Tractacus is unreadable.
Wittgenstein might reasonably ask: What do you mean by that?
A classic example of why I dislike philosophy – the idea that you will be able to understand everything if you just think hard enough. Reality is much more complex than that.
It is also self indulgent; you can’t think much about these things if you’re up at six to get to work
Golly. If only someone had thought to make a distinction between the active and contemplative lives, and to observe the value of leisure and contemplation for any human life that aspires to be anything but merely slavish.
Agreed.
Even the very concept of truth is a bit ridiculous. In many, if not most, areas of inquiry there simply is no possibility of landing on a singular, undeniable truth. The complexity is what makes our world so interesting.
For instance, what is the meaning behind the name “Boxing Day”? I’ve already seen three different explanations in my email today. So, this question, which first occurred to me fifty years ago, is still up for debate.
Note: It’s likely that the first uses were a) oral, not written and b) very local. The people involved are long gone. I think.
2+2=4 is pretty straightforward, I think.
Yes, I believe Aristotle tried to drill down to the basic, uncontroversial truths starting with “A=A”.
‘Identity,’ logic’s most fundamental axiom: whatever a thing is (A, B, P, X… whatever), it is whatever it is.
The clue is in most but not all
However, when there are multiple interpretations available for a set of evidence, not all interpretations are equal. It seems to be not that simple to assess which is the best interpretation, one useful tool being Occam’s razor.
Not in BLM land it doesn’t.
Being that I am currently at the Trona Pinacles in California which is on Bureau of Land Management land, your comment took me a second to realize that you’re not commenting on thar BLM land. Hahaha!
Not if you are off the Post Modernist persuasion or you subscribe to the white patriachal approach to maths-its whatever you want it to be-which is great unless you are doing a job that requires mathematical precision!!
That’s axiomatic, rather than the truth.
Are you saying that it’s not true that 2+2=4?
It can be true, assuming the digits are numbers.
If they are strings, ‘2’ + ‘2’ = ’22’
What is true, isn’t true, always. Someone will come up with the same question, but in a different context. But the original will likely still stand.
Anybody capable of reading this understands they are numbers and therefore the concept represented is always true. Only a deliberate misinterpretation would say it is not. If we didn’t all agree and assume such notation represented numbers mathematics would be nigh on impossible. If it was intended to represent a string that would need to be clarified in accordance with the conventions of our common language and one way of doing that is enclosing in quotation marks as demonstrated yourself. ‘2’+’2′ means something completely different than 2+2.
No one told Microsoft (if you’ve ever programmed in VB you have to be very careful )
There is a difference between a simple fact and a complex truth.
Straightforward, but like all analytical truths–things true by definition–not very interesting. According to the conventional meanings arbitrarily assigned to the symbols in the equation, as far as equivalence is concerned ‘2+2’ is just another way of saying ‘4’–or ‘3+1,’ ‘9-5,’ etc. This doesn’t tell us any more than what we already had to know in order to use the symbols correctly in the first place.
Beware of: ‘2’ + ‘2’ = ’22’
(?) It doesn’t follow from our frequent inability to ascertain what’s true that the concept of truth is itself ridiculous. As for ‘complexity,’ this is a comparative term: it would make no sense to situate things on a complexity continuum that didn’t offer both lesser and greater complexity alternatives. Plus if simple things aren’t themselves interesting, at what point in the complexity hierarchy does interest make its appearance, and if there, why not earlier or later?
Surely what your thus far unsuccessful quest for the meaning of ‘Boxing Day’ should turn your attention to isn’t any opacity in the concept of truth but the very nature of explanation itself, and its limitations. If you wonder how an animal knows how to do something despite no other animal having taught it, for example, and someone suggests, “That’s its instinct”–swell! That clears that up! Now you know how and when to use the word ‘instinct’ appropriately in an English sentence; but are you any wiser than before? In fact, you’ve been given a mysterious black box where an explanation should be; and yet, we accept such black boxes as ‘explanations’ all the time. As long as we can stick labels on things, enabling us to tidy them away into the right closet, our desire for order is appeased and we don’t inquire further. Poke around too closely in those closets, though, and the world can suddenly reveal itself to be much less satisfactorily explained than we thought.
Reality is complex because every individual lives his own reality, reality is a mix of family and societal background, genetics, experiences, what you read and learn, culture, interactions with others, religion or lack of, urban or rural ilfe, etc. There are many different realities, that’s why no one agrees on anything.
I respectfully disagree with the notion of many different realities. There are many different perceptions of reality.Yes, reality is complex, and ultimately unknowable, in total, in this incarnation. We perceive reality through the lens of the inputs you described. Consequently, we interpret reality with varying degrees of correctness and incorrectness simultaneously.
What you have described is not philosophy at all. Some sort of pastiche of someone thinking.
PPE (and History) graduates are why we have rampant NET Zero policies.
The art of thinking has withered on the vine in recent decades. Having been surprised at a request to teach critical thinking to PGs, a data search showed no mandatory twaching of this skill in the Russell group, with creative thinking consigned to schools of management entrepreneurship/ innovation modules. Doubtless a focus on certification over education has not helped, but senior academics are now discusslng whether AI jeopardises even this functional outcome and what can be done (central exam halls ar the obvious answer but resisted because of the cost relative to the Covid virtual option – univeersities being a profit maximising racket these days).
We need to start thinking again, to become excellent secondary data researchers, build inductive/deductive skills and enjoy the freedom of our own conclsions. And to do that we have to make the time for reflection. I saw a hopeful shift in last year’s UG cohort, and I hear this years are more Why (is that so) than How (do I get a first).
Your comment is very interesting. In the light of your words I wonder what you think of my (self serving) thoughts.
So, I teach mathematics and statistics at a pre/first year university level and believe that students should be able to do pen and paper calculations. For example, work out the variance by first principles for say five data points. Any big data set, shove it into a calculator.
Am I silly? Is there any value in this?
Not at your level but I’ve had occasion, with younger people, to revisit the lost mysteries of arithmetic. They complained it hurt their heads. I used to ask them what it was like to go to the gym after a long absence. That Maths is the mental gym? Train hard, fight easy stuff.
At school we used log tables, I used to write down the numbers as powers after taking the log, e.g. if the calculation involved taking the log10 of 5.2 I would write down 10^0.716 for that number. Helped me to remember what it meant. I don’t think anyone else did that. Even then most students were just going through the motions.
Not sure how useful this is at University level.
You must be as old as I am. You said:
Not sure how useful this is at University level.
It is of historical and theoretical value for young engineers to known their heritage.
Log tables were useful for engineers before they were elegantly encapsulated in the slide rule. What an absolutely brilliant and elegant mechanical device for advanced mathematical calculations. It took quite a long time for computers to surpass it.
You’re posing at least two questions here: will it have pragmatic value for young peoples careers – the mundane question; or more importantly for me, will it provide them with pleasure and satisfaction throughout their lives like some find in killer sudoku, the Times crossword, learning other languages, or playing with recursive structural equation models in the social sciences. There is incredible value for those who find it thrilling, or even just fun.
I’m long retired from teaching mathematics and statistics, but I still savour them – and intellectual play in general.
Perhaps a cycle is being broken? First requirement is an inspirational teacher, next the inspired who will grow to pass it on.
When I studied Philosophy over 59 years ago I concluded Western Philosophy’s search for truth was doomed to go round in circles and it should be focussed on choice. Since then the choices available to humans have multiplied and their capacity to make them has diminished. It will disappear completely with a reliance on AI in LLMs that mimic the lowest common denominator of the past thoughts of humans. At first aimlessly and then mindlessly.
I read TMWQ twice twenty or thirty years ago, and always understood Ulrich’s intellectual prostration as a metaphor for the teleological vacuum besetting the Austro-Hungarian empire on the eve of its eclipse. (For the record, I was also a decidedly second rate analytical philosopher, and quit academia the day I got my PhD.)
Bravo RC! Humblebrag of the year. Love it!
Hai thang yow!
“also a decidedly second rate analytical philosopher” – ouch!
I thought this was a fascinating piece. Exactly consistent with how the Old Testament describes human nature.
Upvoted, not least because I don’t understand why you received downvotes without a comment to explain what you got wrong.
So does Star Wars
Star Wars is more realistic though
The essay by Agnes Callard managed to explain the difference between a life guided by the pursuit of serious self reflection, a moral code by which one might try to live and a life that was “a machine for the relentless devaluation of life.” In that former mode, one might as Callard notes be frightened of what one might find in such a serious pursuit of meaning, or truth and perhaps simply see the whole activity as overwhelming us. But at far as I can tell, she nonetheless comes down on the side of those brave enough to inquire, to seriously question ourselves, even in the face of arriving at some revolting conclusions–a task for which philosophy is uniquely suited. Musil, for all his interest in different experiences really is aptly described “what happens when ideas are forced to do the work to which they would only be suited if you did not remove any possibility of ever wholly encompassing some subject matter”. All in all, her essay takes dead aim at Musil’s glibness and deeply cynical approach to living. Under the description she offers, Musil is unarmed without philosophy–something he considers uesless. Too bad for him.
The author uses a novel to try to explain something about the human mind, and i can see what she’s getting at.
She invokes two different approaches and tellingly, describes philosophy as “a safe space for the unfettered operation of mind” as opposed to an untethered approach as characterised by Musli. (I’m tempted to call him muesli, as a scattering of all kinds of ingredients.)
So what i find interesting is how the internet is changing the way our consciousness works; or rather, how we allow it to work. The scatter-gun approach with lack of lengthy concentration is an obvious parallel with browsing, allowing a huge number of ideas to flit through our heads.
To cut to the chase, the question is: what should we do with consciousness? It can be both a blessing and a curse, a tool to advance ourselves and our species whilst also creating a void to be filled with potential harm and falsehood. When young, many find themselves becoming captured by ideology as a means to fill that void (see yesterday’s essay by Mary Harrington) until the realities of life intrude. Some never escape that trap (see any essay by Terry Eagleton).
It just feels like something vital is changing. We’re becoming far more aware of these issues than hitherto, as both the intellectual space freed up by mechanisation and the pace of life expands, whilst our output into – and receptivity to – the internet creates an externalisation for us all, a kind of universal consciousness, along the lines envisaged by Teilhard de Chardin, or perhaps a less holistic way.
Perhaps philosophy provides “a safe space for the unfettered operation of mind” – but there are many philosophies, religions and political systems of thought competing for attention. Strangely none of them converge on a single truth, possibly because there will always be people motivated to break any emerging consensus for all sorts of ‘reasons’.
Thank you, but do not all things in fact converge on a single truth? Is it not love in its unlimited expressions, in its eternal and universal utility?
Doubling Down, continually, is a limited version of ‘unlimited expressions’, and even that ends in unintended consequences, which disrupts any Eternal, Universal Utility.