One of the oddest things about Keir Starmer is that he really isn’t very odd at all.
Yet the Prime Minister suffers from a sort of political split personality syndrome: private Starmer and public Starmer are two very different people. One is likeable, warm, down to earth, engaging, thoughtful; the other is wooden, unemotive, uninspiring.
This inability to convey in public who he really is was in evidence once again this weekend, as England’s Lionesses roared to Euros success for the second time in three years. Here was an opportunity for the Prime Minister to connect with the nation in celebrating something that he, like so many of us, genuinely cares about: football.
Starmer’s love of the sport is lifelong and real. Unlike with previous occupants of No 10, it is not a tedious facade to make him look like he understands normal people. You won’t find Starmer doing a David Cameron and forgetting which football team he is supposed to support, nor participating in a football match as if it is a game of public school rugger, a la Boris Johnson.
Starmer is a real fan, far more at home watching his beloved Arsenal than at Lord’s, Twickenham, or the Henley Regatta. He is a decent midfielder who still plays whenever he can find the time. He is as comfortable discussing Arsenal’s search for a centre forward as he is chatting about his family or the pressures of his job. In short, he is a pretty normal bloke who enjoys doing pretty normal things.
Yet put him in front of a microphone and all that disappears. A man who could easily hold his own in a debate about the benefits of the 4-2-3-1 formation or the role of modern wing-backs suddenly starts talking as if he is a walking AI. His bland statements about Sunday’s Euros final could have come from pretty much any other politician in living memory. Here was a chance for the Prime Minister to connect with voters on a topic that genuinely exercises him; to share his joy with a nation equally thrilled by the Lionesses’ latest successes. He could not find a way to do it.
Boris Johnson during the Euro 2020 semi-final at Wembley (Photo: Tom Jenkins/Getty)This is a problem that has blighted Starmer throughout his political career: even when he is being authentic, he somehow still manages not to sound it. In part, this reflects a man uneasy with public displays of emotion. Starmer is guarded, private, and prone to telling interviewers that he hates talking about his feelings or engaging in what he recently described as the “self-analysis thing”. Ever the barrister, he treats the business of government as if it is a case he is arguing in court: studying the details, formulating a plan, making the argument.
But politics is more about emotion than it is about reason; of course, it helps if voters like what a politician is saying, but it helps a lot more if they like the person saying it. And that is where Starmer struggles. The Prime Minister is not immediately likable in public because he struggles to convey who he really is.
He is not alone in this. The same affliction blighted Theresa May during her time in office, despite those who knew her claiming she was a barrel of laughs behind closed doors. Gordon Brown never found a way to truly connect with the public. Others in Starmer’s government suffer the same political flaw: those who know Rachel Reeves, for example, insist she is fun, outgoing, and witty in private, but comes across as wooden in public.
I have long thought that class plays a big role here. Curiously, what unites many of the politicians who struggle most to convince voters of their humanness is just how normal they really are.
Not for them the Etonian swagger of Cameron and Johnson, the Winchester-honed strut of Rishi Sunak or the trading-floor bravado of Nigel Farage – leaders who from a young age were raised to believe that they were born to rule. With that sort of privilege comes a surefootedness, an ease in their abilities, an innate confidence that they do not need to act the role of statesman because it is a part they have long been preparing to play.
Most politicians from more humble backgrounds, I suspect, never feel fully at ease in the gilded dining rooms of Westminster, attending lavish banquets with world leaders or dressing up in white tie to address halls of bankers. The only way to deal with a world so alien to the one they previously inhabited is, to an extent, to act, to perform – to play the part of what you think a Prime Minister or a Chancellor or a Cabinet minister should be.
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Some of the more self-aware politicians are open about this. Only last week, Foreign Secretary David Lammy admitted in an interview with my LBC colleague James O’Brien that, despite 25 years as an MP, it was only very recently that he began to actually believe in his abilities. “I have had imposter syndrome at nearly every critical stage of my life”, he said. “It’s always been there.” Only when he was appointed as Foreign Secretary last year, at the age of 52, did he discover “an innate confidence in my ability to do this”.
I wonder if some of this unconscious unease affects Starmer, a working-class boy still relatively new to the world of politics, who now finds himself hobnobbing with presidents. Those who have been with him since the early days of his journey to Downing Street describe a man who was initially hesitant, trepidatious, and guarded about his long-held ambition to climb to the very top of the political pole. Nobody says that about David Cameron or Boris Johnson. Political power was something that Starmer was determined to work hard to secure, not something he had always believed was his anointed destiny.
Perhaps over time, Starmer will come to feel more at ease in the role he holds and find a way to connect with voters on a deeper level – to reveal more in public of the man he is in private.
The Prime Minister is openly hostile to the idea of emotional self-reflection, but if he is to turn his dire poll ratings around, a bit more introspection might be exactly what he needs. Getting properly excited about the Lionesses’ stunning success is as good a place as any to start.
Ben Kentish presents his LBC show from Monday to Friday at 10pm, and is a former Westminster editor
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