Educated people – commentators, public intellectuals, TV pundits and golf course experts – will never forgive you for granting them what they most loudly ask for. Over the years they demanded the non-politician politician; the one who hadn’t read PPE at Balliol, presided over the Oxford Union, interned in a shadow minister’s office, done a year or two in a lobbying firm, a legal chamber or a magazine, or a spell as a special adviser, and then pitched up, all glib and gleaming, in their early 30s as the honourable member for Greasy Pole South.
Then in 2024 they got the non-politician politician and they hated it. Of the prime ministers who served since 1979 only one – Theresa May – waited until the age of 40 to be elected to the Commons. Margaret Thatcher was 33, Tony Blair 30, Gordon Brown 32, David Cameron 34, Boris Johnson 37, Liz Truss 34 and Rishi Sunak 35. Their rises were rapid enough to rule out pre-politics careers consisting of much more than glitzy cameos.
In this list Keir Starmer stands out like a proper mensch. He had been knighted for his contribution to public service before ever – at the advanced age of 52 – he first stood as a candidate. He had run a big and important organisation. He had been though the mill. He was a solid achiever in his own right. He even had a face like something fashioned out of brick.
Less than two years into his term of office his unpopularity with the voters and with the commentators seems set to force his resignation, ironically on the grounds that he lacks the political and communication skills that the Oxford Union, the PPE, the period as a special adviser delivering off-the-record tips to lobby journalists, would have given him.
Starmer’s inheritance was bad. Anyone properly looking at the figures knew that. In the long, lost months before the 2024 election, the Sunak government, still desperately trying to pull something out of the bag, took steps to make things worse.
No one financially literate thought that the country could afford the 2p cut in employee national insurance enacted by Sunak’s chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, in the spring of that year. Or that there was so much money sloshing around that the extended eligibility for full child benefits to those earning up to £60,000 was just sitting there waiting to be spent. But as the BBC’s Chris Mason commented at the time, Hunt’s decisions created “a headache” for Labour. Repudiate them and Labour would go into the election promising a tax hike: accept them and Labour would probably have to find the money from somewhere else.
So it did the cowardly thing and put off the problem until it was safely in government. The result was a catastrophic series of early tax-and-spend decisions. Some of which – most notably the winter fuel payment – became like a revolving door with spikes on it – drawing blood on the Government’s way in and then impaling it on its way out again when the policy was withdrawn. Starmer looked both weak and horrid. And unprepared, because despite the party’s almost obliterating lead in the polls, very little had been done to lay the ground for the coming administration.
In office, Labour was, like its predecessors and governments abroad, unable to do anything quickly about the cost of living crisis and unable to tell a convincing story about why it couldn’t. Who wants to hear that the solution is a slow, incremental and sometimes unpopular progress towards higher economic growth?
In conditions like this people look for scapegoats, and the one that a section of the voters and a large part of the press fixed upon was immigrants. According to their narrative, foreigners were coming here illegally on boats, occupying luxury hotels from which they would occasionally sally forth to murder or rape people. Remove them and somehow all would be well. In 2024 the same Starmer who had led the prosecutions of the 2011 rioters, whose frenzy of looting paralysed several cities, was called “two-tier Keir” for behaving with utter consistency in calling for no toleration of the 2024 rioters, whose targets in the wake of the Southport murders were hostels and mosques.
The country turned its lonely face to Keir and discovered someone whose motto appeared to be “U-turn if you want to and I’ll be right behind you”. Initially loyal supporters – never brave to begin with – were sent out to defend policies in front of theatrically outraged interviewers, only to find themselves undercut by a Government retreat.
But none of this explains why it is that Starmer became so uniquely unpopular. Even allowing for the fact that all politicians these days are unpopular even before they begin – there isn’t a single British party leader who enjoys positive approval – his unpopularity is striking. And, in a way, hard to explain. He is courteous. He isn’t bombastic. He is not a hater. He’s done some good things. The Labour far left has reason to loathe him for purging the party of Corbynism, but everyone else has been spared the lash.
It returns us to the question I raised at the beginning. What voters actually hate is weakness or, at least, the appearance of weakness. It destroyed John Major, with his vulnerability to criticism and his bemused half-smile. Starmer speaks in public with the funeral voice of an adenoidal vicar extoling the virtues of a dead parishioner he’s never met. He always looks slightly frightened when what the voters really want is reassurance, a good slogan and a decent dose of bullshit.
Ironically it was his worst stroke of luck and one terrible and connected decision – the election of Donald Trump 2.0 just months after his own election victory, and the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Trump-whisperer – that has shown Starmer in his best light.
The Prime Minister has been staunch for Ukraine, for Nato and for European co-operation and, where most of his opponents have been wrong in different ways over Iran, he has been right and even the voters give him credit for that. He would make someone a very good foreign secretary. It’s a job where you don’t have to speak to the public, and previous ex-prime ministers like Alec Douglas-Home and David Cameron have shown: it can be done.
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