This time would be different. The lessons of the past learned. Cheats and clowns banished. Lies debarred, chaos expunged. Trust restored, law exalted. Instead of hollow promises, sacred vows. At the helm, “serious” people with “a long-term plan” to “fix the foundations.” Above all, the guarantee of “change.”
The mood music that earned Keir Starmer’s Labour Party vast success in July’s general election was artful to the max. Not least as it chimed with the nation’s scorn for the Conservative Party’s fourteen years in office. Labour’s administrative mastery is now total. Its initial 411 MPs out of 650 in the House of Commons insulates it from major challenge, if not parliamentary rebellion or defection when headwinds blow. A party long in opposition may outlast early follies in power, then rely on time and sonic-speed media to vaporise their memory. With five years at its disposal, a commanding government — arguably the first since Tony Blair’s in 1997 — can do much to embed its own worldview and subdue those of rivals.
But there was a catch. That music was almost too symphonious. The danger lay in voters appearing wholly to ingest it, thus luring Labour to break a cardinal rule: never believe your own propaganda. In Starmer&Co’s moment of triumph, a self-intoxicated party might have made a trap for itself.
Too sour a diagnosis? Perhaps. Yet given such clout, the ensuing months have been revelatory. Several blunders give a taste. A prolonged, bitter dispute inside Downing Street between rival chief advisers. An equally lengthy wrangle over lavish gifts by a titled Labour magnate to cabinet ministers, including Starmer himself. A furious reaction to the unheralded axing of most pensioners’ winter fuel payment. A bleak financial prognosis, on ceaseless replay, which spooked consumers and businesses alike. A mortifying falling out with a Dubai-based company on the eve of a major investment summit of which its owner was a guest. A spat with Donald Trump’s team after a senior Labour staffer invited party members to help Kamala Harris’s campaign in key states. A tiff caused by Labour’s sectarian plugging of the term “working people.”
Each imbroglio, devoured avidly (Mail, Sun, Telegraph, Express) or anxiously (Guardian, Mirror, Financial Times) across the media spectrum, threw doubt on the government’s core competence. An unwelcome glare landed on backstage players in the Labour family, opening new channels of inquiry. And Starmer himself began to draw criticism on his own flank.
The Guardian’s Martin Kettle, for example — a week after lauding a prime minister who “believes in the rule of law. It is his red line” — warned that the lack of “a fully functioning political [compass]” means Starmer “is now at risk of allowing himself to be defined in the long term by stumbles over short-term issues that he considers marginal.” “This professed storyteller in search of a story,” said a New Statesman editorial, appears “powerless to deliver the changes he promised.”
It’s true that colleagues’ fingerprints, not just the PM’s, were on several of these missteps. The influential chancellor Rachel Reeves, whose tax-raising, high-spending budget on 30 October was minutely calibrated to boost wage-workers and raid the better-off, had already plucked that £1.4 billion (A$2.72 billion) seasonal heating bonus, just as £11 billion (A$21 billion) pay settlements had been agreed with well-paid train drivers and (in future, at least) junior doctors, without moreover any productivity gains in the mix. The brief summit row had erupted when transport secretary Louise Haigh, backed by deputy PM Angela Rayner — trade union allies both — berated a UK arm of the Dubai outfit in disrepute over a 2022 “hire-and-fire” scandal. The US filing by Donald Trump’s team that accuses Labour of “illegal foreign contributions” amounting to “blatant interference” was sparked by an ambiguously worded email from Sofia Patel, the party’s operations chief. And the PM’s October surprise, a visit to Mar-a-Lago with foreign secretary David Lammy, was marred by retrieval of the latter’s serial online abuse of first-term Trump.
Some mistakes were principally Starmer’s. The sheer insistence of his message that hard times would precede any economic upswing was doleful enough; when repeated in his speech at Labour’s victory conference in late September, the reaction among the faithful was dismay. A nervous “reset” (another Starmer favourite) was quickly on track, first signalled by ministers’ alarmingly random mid-interview smiles. It was all too late. By November, when GDP of 0.7 and 0.5 per cent in the Conservatives’ last two quarters was followed by 0.1 per cent in Labour’s first, echoing months of anaemic market indicators, Labour’s self-created trap was in plain sight.
Here is how it works. Labour’s impressive media operation had in opposition long aimed torrents of vitriol at the floundering Tories. After gaining power, Starmer&Co sought to emulate its enemy’s post-2010 feat of blaming every tough decision on its disgraced predecessor. The big story now was to be the Tories’ bequest of a financial “black hole” that Labour initially put at £22 billion (A$42.7 billion) then, the more this figure was examined, blithely went on to double and even quintuple. But Starmer&Co, high on its own certitude, didn’t have the political skill to land the argument. Its model unravelled: less a Cameron–Osborne tribute act than the magician who smashed an audience member’s expensive watch before confessing “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the rest of the trick.”
A slow-motion PR fiasco
Yet even without the economic quarrel, the twin ballyhoos over freebies and office politics had long devoured the leftovers of Labour’s fleeting honeymoon. Each involved rolling revelations and fresh characters, perfect for the 24/7 cycle and morning splash alike.
From high fashion to Taylor Swift concert tickets, designer specs to madcap Manhattan weekends, the freebies squabble was a feast. (No illegality on anyone’s part is suggested, though a parliamentary standards inquiry is under way). The donors were pro-Labour tycoons, principally the media owner Waheed Alli, ennobled in 1998, who since 2020 had showered largesse on Starmer himself, plus seven future cabinet ministers, dozens of junior ones and MPs, London mayor Sadiq Khan, and the PM’s wife Victoria Starmer, a solicitor turned health worker, whose elegant outfits lent the billowing affair its “wardrobegate” moniker.
The PM, blinking through his costly glasses, at last faced scrutiny on his own account. His suits, executive box at Arsenal soccer club, family audience with Ms Swift and her momager, and £100,000 [A$190,000] from Lord Alli, were all tenderly barbecued, demoting even the sassy Rayner’s New York penthouse whirl to a side dish. Homely touches in a Covid-era speech filmed by the future PM (it was newly reported) at Alli’s Covent Garden mansion now looked guileful. Rosie Duffield, an MP long at odds with Starmer, resigned over the evidence of “sleaze, nepotism, and apparent avarice,” alluding here to his son’s extended stay under Alli’s roof while preparing for school exams.
Thus unfurled a slow-motion PR fiasco of its own, timing and conduct fusing in a lethal stiletto effect. Bad enough was the lurid clash between pinch and luxury, far worse the reek from that cherished English vice, hypocrisy. Again, Starmer’s Labour had spent years excoriating in lurid terms the manifold failings of its Conservative opponents. Every discharge made palpable that these failings were seen in moral as much as political terms. Labour’s own diversions may still be at the foothills of preceding scandal. But they look grubby. No wonder, as reported by More in Common’s pollster Luke Tryl, that “freebiegate” (a runner-up in naming rights) “undermined trust” in the government and even — horror of horrors — elicited from the public a “they’re all the same” sentiment.
By contrast, the Number Ten kerfuffle had less spectacle, a smaller audience, but more dramatic tension. Access was the combat zone, leaking the weapon, power the prize. The feud pitched chief-of-staff Sue Gray, a proficient career civil servant of Irish parentage who had investigated Boris Johnson’s “partygate” disgrace before advising Starmer, against head of strategy Morgan McSweeney, a shrewd Ireland-born, London-based strategist whose years battling Labour’s far-left and promoting the centrist Labour Together project led to a pivotal role in Starmer’s long march to Downing Street.
In elevated terms, their conflict might be viewed as part of an inevitable tension in democratic governance between official and sectional interests. At root, it came down to the positioning of desks (if never to “deskgate”). Gray took the brunt of the leaks: over her controlling style, intriguing mid-career break in Northern Ireland, and salary, which outranked the PM’s even as she reportedly set those of younger office “spads” (special advisers). The attrition lasted for thirteen post-election weeks before McSweeney was given her job, Gray’s dubious consolation a sinecure as chair of the broadened Council for the Nations and Regions, a cross-UK body with no formal powers, which she eventually decided (having missed its first meeting) not to take up.
Throughout a drifting office war without evident leadership from the top, disquiet about Starmer had rumbled. Never exactly popular, his net pre-election rating of –21 had turned to a peak +11 on the morrow, before sinking in an October poll to –38 (though November saw an uptick to –25).The election analyst John Curtice, now comparable in esteem to David Butler, refers to the PM’s “weak political antennae” and “apparent inability to articulate a clear vision of the kind of country he wants to create.” But Labour remains all-powerful, and Starmer (in the damning words of Max Hastings, enjoining support) “the prime minister we’ve got.” He’s not going anywhere. So what will become of him?
A singular politician
The gradualism of Starmer’s rise may hold a clue. His long stint as a lawyer with a particular focus on human rights saw him become director of public prosecutions (2008–13), knighted in 2014 (though he doesn’t insist on the title), and nominated for the ever-safer seat of Holborn & St Pancras in central London before being election its MP in 2015, when, after five years of centre-right coalition, David Cameron’s Conservatives won outright over Ed Miliband’s Labour.
In the next, Brexit-dominated half-decade, Starmer the trenchant “remainer” served as shadow Brexit secretary under left-populist (and long-term EU opponent) Jeremy Corbyn. When the latter’s quixotic bandwagon lost big to Boris Johnson’s Tories in late 2019, Starmer’s pitch for the leadership of a party still steeped in Corbynism saw him scoop up Labour’s pro-EU centrists while tacking left against two further-left rivals. It was enough for a decisive win.
Starmer’s career, until the age of fifty-one, was thus in law, not politics. Law’s codes, mentalities and languages have shaped his professional being. It’s natural that the experience provides a bank of cognitive wealth in the new sphere, and good that a frequently heard complaint in Britain (“many politicians have never had a proper job”) does not apply to him. In part this informed the praise he received for a forceful response to the days-long eruption from 29 July of anti-immigrant rioting and looting in patches of urban England. Many culprits’ notably swift and hefty prison terms were welcomed as broadly as the rioting was condemned. A saving grace is that no one was killed.
Making room for the new arrivals meant the graduated early release of more than 3000 inmates from a decayed, overcrowded estate (a handful jeering “vote Labour!” as they were raced off in high-end cars), but even this could act as a validation of Labour’s all-purpose case that the Tories had left “chaos” in their wake. Yet the riots, which followed the death by stabbing of three little girls at a Taylor Swift dance party in Southport, a resort town in northwest England, also revealed a potential downside for the PM.
That Starmer is “lawyerly” doesn’t count: it would be like saying Trump is “controversial” or Putin “conspiratorial.” What might count is the idea of law that seems to underlie his response to the crisis: in the looser sense as a proprietorial shield to burnish in the dispensing of justice, rather than as a common inheritance; in the tighter as a tool for co-partisans to secure particular social outcomes (a tendentiously defined version of social harmony, for example), in a way moreover that is prepared to suppress needed information and thus democratic debate.
If that point admittedly deserves much fuller treatment, a by-product of Starmer’s legal background may safely be counted a definite flaw in the political arena. This most diligent and meticulous of leaders is a weak persuader. True, his diction is fluent. But his voice is droning, his language trite, his rhetoric vapid, his speeches hackneyed. So perfect are his evasions as interviewee as to be almost a work of art. “Weighed down by the banal literalisms of a legal mind,” says the New Statesman’s Finn McRedmond, rare in having noticed Labour’s “language problem.”
All this may not be unconnected to his default tone, peevishness, even when under only light pressure. Starmer has an unusually overt sense of his own rectitude. At parliament’s Prime Minister’s Questions, he would whack the boy-scout Rishi Sunak with an “I’ll not take lectures from…,” and now the classroom minx Kemi Badenoch with a condescending “one thing I learned from being opposition leader…,” every last consonant sounding tetchy. Oh, lighten up, man! But already I can hear Sir Keir in my ear: “Britain needs a serious politician for serious times…”
Well, they all want to be thought serious. None more than Gordon Brown or Theresa May, who were just inept. Here there is a genuine deficiency. As part of its repertoire of skills, the modern PM’s job compels the incumbent to be a motivator. This means performance of a kind. Think actor, tour guide, or even… top barrister or judge. The very high-minded Starmer resists this aspect; he’s disdainful of the PMQ argy-bargy (unaware they all are?). But if he doesn’t try, or tries and is poor at it, this will further impair his chances of policy success.
To be fair, he has made something of an effort, of two kinds. One is an oft-told story crafted around his awkward relationship with his father (whose trade escapes me) and his mother’s illness. The other is to seize any opportunity to showcase himself as an ultra-fanatic of a north London soccer club. One nadir came at PMQs on 16 October when Starmer congratulated the new England soccer manager, saying: “I won’t hold his old job against him, but I wish him well in the new one.”
This mystifying comment, it turned out, referred to the new manager’s previous role in charge of a south London soccer club, a rival of the north London soccer club. What larks! Except always-on soccer chat (I call it footblah) also works — for a networked male clerisy in tech, media, policy, finance and law — as instant signifier: of the fellow fan (always “passionate,” of course) and banter merchant. To a party leader required to humanise by exhibiting a personal quirk, soccer is thus now supreme. Yet it’s odd that all the PM’s compulsive Arsenal (for it is they) footblah doesn’t make him seem any more plausible a figure. Maybe that’s because Starmer’s attempt at lightening up comes over as uber-conformist, even ingratiating.
Or perhaps more that he seems low on a faculty defining of a vital intellect, namely imagination (a case made by the feminist writer Joan Smith, and again Finn McRedmond.) The interior life Starmer has shared is meagre and reports of it vague, though on the venerable radio show Desert Island Discs in 2020 the “castaway” sensibly chose a detailed maritime atlas as his allowed book, a football as his luxury, and a Beethoven sonata as his favourite music.
Starmer’s emphatic sense of self (“I know who I am”) and acute protective screen deter most inquiry. His manuals on human-rights law may be the truest guide to his exact and methodical mind. From day one, the image of a busy and purposive figure (“a government in the service of working people”) has been visible in a domestic carousel of speeches, site visits, regional gatherings, NHS staff tête-à-têtes, policy announcements. Sixteen foreign trips to date encompass NATO and Commonwealth summits, European Union and member-state bilaterals, Baku’s COP29, Rio’s G20. The statesman PM visibly enjoys both the gladhanding and the sermonising. No one, to my knowledge, has yet called the style “presidential,” even during endless talk of “the first hundred days,” but that may come.
Such is the persona which — along with luck, which every aspiring leader needs — propelled this capable and collegiate man to the top job. Now he’s there, he’s enjoying himself: in charge, doing the job, a jet-setter, never off the screens. Criticism is “water off a duck’s back.” The aforesaid flaws haven’t touched him. He’s in for the long haul.
And yet. Asked in Rio on 19 November by Sky News’s Beth Rigby what might be his “lasting mark” as against the three “consequential” post-1945 PMs — Attlee’s welfare state, Thatcher’s enterprise, Blair’s modernisation — Starmer began and ended his answer with “I want working people to be better off,” the coda his petulant “… and I make no apology for that.”
The PM’s pledge on 5 July that “especially if you did not [vote Labour], I will serve you” is long annulled. The state “that will tread more lightly on people’s lives” a phantasm. Governance by sundering is under way, guided to the max by micro-polling in Labour’s new constituencies. The election campaign, when Starmer decreed “country first, party second,” is aeons distant. The social contract is frayed, the political contract broken. Keep half an eye on that trap after all. •
