What’s the opposite of Teflon? It might sound like the first line of a joke but, for those of us who hoped that the last general election would usher in a new era of political peace and stability, there is nothing funny about the punchline. The opposite of Teflon is, or rather was, Sir Keir Starmer.
We talk a lot about the politicians to whom nothing sticks. The ones with the ability to outrun or outmanoeuvre scandals, missteps and even the consequences of their own delinquency or uselessness. Donald Trump obviously has it in spades. From being recorded talking of women and boasting about how he could “grab them by the pussy”, to starting wars after running on a promise not to start any wars, he seems almost uniquely untouchable by conduct that would swiftly end other careers.
Boris Johnson had it. When his colleagues finally ran out of patience with his obvious moral baseness, it was not over the gravest offences: misleading the late Queen over the unlawful prorogation of Parliament or partying in Downing Street while his own legislation prevented the rest of us from attending loved ones’ funerals. Instead, it was Downing Street’s dishonest denials that he knew that a man he promoted to deputy chief whip, Chris Pincher, had been accused of sexual misconduct, that did for him.
Even now, the number of people who continue to claim that Johnson was defenestrated for “eating cake” prove that his Teflon was merely tarnished, not stripped off.
Kemi Badenoch is developing it. When The New Statesman reported the contents of a private notebook left in the Dorchester Hotel, the motivational exhortations it contained seemed hilarious. Especially when you imagine her intoning them into the hotel mirror. Today, it looks like the funniest – “You are a serious person who does big things” – has actually worked. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, she increasingly gives the impression of genuinely believing that she is the most gifted politician, nay human, we mortals will ever have the privilege of encountering. And such is her extraordinary self-belief, a growing number of people are joining her.
And until very recently, it looked like our Temu Trump, Nigel Farage, was a master of the dark art. Time will tell whether his secret £5m gift from a Thai-based billionaire, and the three different stories and counting he has told about its purpose, have done permanent damage, but he is currently looking a lot more rattled than his supporters, whether billionaires or not, would like.
Which brings us to Starmer, who must be the stickiest politician in living memory. Everything thrown at him stuck. Whether true or false, fair or unfair, political or personal, every criticism lobbed in his direction didn’t just land but attached itself to his political carapace and refused to be dislodged. Even in the infamous and far too frequent cases where he responded to the unpopularity of a policy by reversing it, he emerged disliked both by the people who had supported the original case and by the people he had appeased by abandoning it.
More sophisticated post-mortems than this will point to the finer detail of these policy announcements and subsequent reversals; his reluctance to engage with colleagues or outline a substantive vision; and the monstering he received from sections of the media still high on the fumes of the ludicrous Brexit they inflicted on the country.
But the real reason for Starmer’s failure is this stickiness, this anti-Teflon quality that saw his personal approval ratings plumb record depths while most critics either struggled to articulate precisely what had earned their opprobrium or simply lied about things like “two tier policing”, net migration or threats to freedom of speech.
And I wonder whether his hamartia, his fatal flaw, was to care about this reputational integrity too much. Whether this infernal “stickiness” was the inevitable consequence of his resolution to be demonstrably moral, accountable and honest. For in the way that nervous children are taught that dogs can smell their fear, so Starmer’s determination to be righteous gave off an essence that attracted hostility. It meant that the relative triviality of accepting spectacles and suits from a very wealthy parliamentary colleague looked like epic hypocrisy. It meant that the swift sacking of colleagues found to have misled or misbehaved queered his judgement in appointing them in the first place. And it meant that he was on the back foot for almost his entire premiership.
If Teflon politicians care not a jot for criticism or “optics” or any opinion bar their own, then perhaps the “stickiest” politicians worry about it all too much, respond too quickly and reverse course too readily. Perhaps it’s a lawyerly thing, perhaps it’s a personality trait but it’s Kryptonite to political success and it’s something that Andy Burnham needs to bear in mind as he seeks to fight mostly the same battles as Starmer but with slightly different weapons. And glasses he paid for himself.
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