History of the Present (week ending 29 June 2024)
This newsletter is called History of the Present, not History of the Future. But for once I'm going to risk it. Less than a week before the British election on 4 July we can say with a very high degree of probability that, barring some extraordinary incident or horrible accident, our next prime minister will be the Labour leader Keir Starmer. (PaddyPower has the odds at 1/200.)
But who is he? I've met him a few times to discuss matters European, but from that very superficial acquaintance can say only that he is intelligent, well-informed and highly disciplined. Three articles published this week help us to to understand him a bit better.
The conservative columnist Daniel Finkelstein knew him when he was young, through a friend who was a member of the East Surrey Young Socialists - a groupuscule title that, for anyone who knows Surrey, feels almost like a contradiction in terms. (Finkelstein’s article [behind paywall, I’m afraid] begins with the arresting line ‘I was sitting in a kitchen above a brothel on the Archway Road when I first heard the name Keir Starmer.’) He recalls a young Starmer who was very much on the left, supporting the miners’ and other unions in strikes, helping to produce ‘a Marxist magazine’ and calling for a united Ireland.
So how come this lifelong ‘left liberal’ (Finkelstein’s term) is now advocating policies so much to the centre, and even with touches of centre-right on issues like migration and tax? After going through a number of hypotheses, Finkelstein reaches a verdict that is extremely creditable to the Labour leader. Starmer is ‘someone with a left-wing instinct,’ but also pragmatic and deeply realistic, which ‘leads him again and again to temper his initial view’. He is, the conservative columnist concludes, ‘open-minded and careful and deliberative. He is someone I will disagree with, I'm sure. But also respect.’ A cynic might say that the journalist has assured himself good access to the next occupant of No. 10 Downing Street. But knowing Finkelstein, I think this qualified tribute is worth a lot more than that.
‘Make Britain Serious Again’
The second piece is by Jim Pickard in that classic slot, ‘Lunch with the FT’ [paywall, of course], and features Starmer eating an £11 vegetarian breakfast at a Retro Cafe (that’s kaif, not café) in Southampton, while our intrepid correspondent digs in to a £8.50 fishfinger sandwich.
This is very much the story as told by the candidate himself, with the politician's origin myth of the stern, undemonstrative toolmaker father (but secretly collecting newspaper cuttings about his son’s successes) and the wonderfully brave, inspiring mother, overcoming a potentially crippling disease which doctors said could mean she would never walk again. When I say origin myth, I don't mean it's untrue, just that it’s a crafted, narrative version of a biographical truth, rubbed smooth by repetition, like Joe Biden’s ‘hard scrabble’ childhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
What emerges clearly, nonetheless, is a man who is immensely determined, workaholic, aspirational, ambitious and fiercely competitive in everything he does – including his regular eight-a-side football game. A talented flute player as a child, he quit because he was not going to reach the top. 'Maybe that does tell you something about me,' he says. ‘If I can't be the best, I'll leave it in the cupboard’. He offers the British people not the euphoria of Tony Blair’s victory, at a time of economic growth and ‘the Cool Britannia sense of moving forward’, but what he calls ‘ordinary hope, realistic hope’. His motto, he says, is ‘Make Britain Serious Again’.
‘Is he more ruthless than Blair?’ ‘Yes’
The last and most revealing piece is a long profile [free access!] by the Guardian’s Charlotte Edwardes, who followed him around for many weeks, from April to June this year. It's a great example of what a fine writer can do, given the time, resources and access to craft a piece of in-depth reportage. She delivers some wonderful lines: ‘Stressed, he has a face like a slammed front door.’ And retells the story of a conman who answered lonely hearts ads as ‘Keir Starmer, DPP’ (Director of Public Prosecutions, the office that Starmer held for sometime), and conducted two long-term affairs under that false flag. When the case came to court, one of the duped women said the fake Starmer’s conduct ‘wasn’t very DPP-like’. (Say what you like about England, it can still make you laugh out loud.)
Here again there is the origin narrative of the toolmaker dad and the hero mum, here again the evidence of fierce competitiveness, work ethic, aspiration and discipline. Edwardes asks him if he is more ruthless than Blair ‘I don’t know,’ Starmer parries, ‘I've never thought about it’. But she asks the same question of a senior Labour insider who replies simply ‘yes’. His achievement in bringing the Labour party back from the unelectable hard left of Jeremy Corbyn to the verge of what looks like a big, possibly even a landslide victory, is evidence of that. His competence and seriousness are not in doubt.
He first made his name as a human rights lawyer, and his commitment to the rule of law, both national and international, is very clear. Edwardes reminds him of something he said about Brexit in 2019: ‘my big big fear was that we might turn in on ourselves and become a country that didn't any more want to play our part on the international stage, didn't think international obligations and standards mattered any more’. Although Starmer has avoided the B-word like the plague in this election, for fear of alienating Leave voters who are returning to Labour in the so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats, on this occasion he laughs and says ‘Blimey, I was ahead of myself. Therein lies the story of the last five years. That's why the election has to be a reset.’ Britain's continental European friends and partners should take cautious encouragement from that.
Blair, like Willy Brandt and Bill Clinton, was brilliant at establishing an emotional connection with a large audience. Starmer lacks that skill. He has all the charisma of a bank manager. ‘Some people will say you are boring and stiff,’ Sky News’ Beth Rigby charged him. Yet what emerges from Edwardes’ long profile is something rather attractive: the sense of a very private family man, for whom the most important things in life are as they should be. He carefully guards the privacy of his teenage son and daughter, and doesn’t ask his wife Victoria to play the part of Politician’s Wife or First Lady, except on a few special occasions. And his family seem to keep him grounded. He tells the story of his son's reaction when he came home with the Spectator magazine’s Politician of the Year award: ‘He didn't even look up from the telly. He took it, said,"How did you blag that, then?" And passed it back.’
There are some top jobs – editor of a newspaper, head of a university or big company, prime minister, president, football manager – where you simply never know how good the person will be at it until you have seen them actually doing it. Some people, such as George Brown, Olaf Scholz and Rishi Sunak, were quite impressive at the number two job but turn out to be no good as number one. Others, quite unexpectedly, show their true quality only when they're in the top job: Harry Truman, Margaret Thatcher. So the proof of the pudding is still to come.
Starmer’s a solid but not inspiring candidate. I think there's a good chance he may be a significantly better prime minister. Our hope will have to be very ‘realistic’, since Britain is in a bad way economically and socially after 14 years of Conservative government, and the longer-term negative consequences of Brexit are only now really starting to hit. But we can reasonably expect that Britain will become a serious country again – just as France, alas, moves in the opposite direction.
‘Things can only get better,’ was the punchy theme tune with which Blair moved into No. 10 Downing Street in 1997. Call me an irredeemable optimist, but this time we may at least quietly sing ‘Things will probably get less bad’.
I preface this by saying freely that I’m a Conservative and always have been, but I hope I’ve demonstrated over the years that I can be reasonably dispassionate: I do notice in some Labour supporters a strain of magical thinking that Starmer is so muted, cautious and light on policy details because he’s focused on winning the election (which is a valid hypothesis) but that he will suddenly cast off those chains on 5 July and deliver some kind of progressive, social democratic nirvana. His very blankness has allowed some people to project anything they want on to him. I’m deeply sceptical that that will be the case.