Starmer's moment of reckoning

Where is the competent boring government we were promised?

Sir Keir Starmer MP, Prime Minister (Holborn and St Pancras, Labour)” by House of Commons, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

What seems like one error is in fact three. Keir Starmer made them one after another.

First he got rid of a highly competent, formidable ambassador. Then he chose the wrong person for her replacement. And then, once he realised he made the initial errors, he committed a third by failing to deal with it firmly enough.

The first error shows how he became embroiled in the usual Westminster silly-bugger toy-soldiers hyperbrain bullshit. The second shows that he outsources his judgement to other people, and that his judgement about who to outsource it to is poor. The third shows that even once he realises his other errors, he does not adequately neutralise them.

Karen Pierce, the sitting UK ambassador to the US when Starmer became prime minister, came from a relatively humble background. She was a grammar school pupil from Lancashire who secured a place in Cambridge and then entered the Foreign Office. She took the job seriously, learning Japanese before her first posting to the country. That seriousness meant she climbed the institutional hierarchy, advancing up the ranks, serving in Washington, the Eastern Adriatic, South Asia and Afghanistan among other locations. At the peak of her career, she became the UK’s permanent representative to the United Nations, the UK ambassador to Afghanistan, the Foreign Office’s director general political, and finally ambassador to the US.

Every report about her mentions the same qualities: Very confident, highly competent, accomplished, no-nonsense, strikingly informal, flamboyantly dressed, witty, highly adept at code-switching between chattiness and diplomat baroque. At the UN, she went toe-to-toe with her Russian counterpart. In the US, she carved out good working relationships with both sides of the political spectrum, despite the rabid tribal culture.

According to the Statesman’s Ailbhe Rea, there was still a good chance that Pierce would stay on when Starmer entered Downing Street. Starmer’s initial chief of staff, Sue Gray, drew up a shortlist of two: Pierce or David Miliband.

That fact is itself quite revealing. At the time, Starmer had separated his operation in two: Morgan McSweeney was head of political strategy and Gray was chief of staff. One focused on politics and one on governance. There were reasons to question Gray’s suitability for that role, but there was at least a serious government approach to policy formulation, delivery, appointments and process.

Then the briefings started against Gray. Starmer felt he had pick between her and McSweeney. Predictably he went for the guy who he felt had just won him an election. McSweeney was made chief of staff. Political strategy took over everything: Not just the outward facing sections of No10 but the inward facing parts as well. The politics wiped out the governance.

This meant that policy formulation became utterly political, in the worst way. It’s why so many policy ideas are clearly based on the newspaper headlines they will promote rather than any effect they will have on the country. Yesterday, for instance, the Home Office banned asylum seekers using taxis to get to medical appointments. “I will stop at nothing to remove the incentives that draw illegal migrants to Britain,” the home secretary said. But of course no-one believes that this policy will prevent a single asylum seeker coming to Britain. No-one who was going to set foot on a boat will refrain from doing so because sometime in the future they may not be able to get a taxi to a GP. The policy is there for newspaper coverage, not to actually achieve an outcome. It is a classic example of broken Westminster incentives.

It is also why policy struggles to be delivered, even when it is properly formulated. Whitehall is an obscenely complicated place in which governments only succeed when they have a very clear idea of what they want to do and maintain a laser-focus on how to achieve it. This would have been Gray’s role. It was a hard task and she may have failed, but at least her lifetime in the civil service equipped her for it. Instead, we got McSweeney. The system crumbled in the usual way, worsened by the lack of clear direction from Starmer. And then, with dreary predictability, we got another prime minister slagging off civil servants and complaining about how hard it is to govern when it was his own appointment decisions which helped create that outcome.

With Gray gone, it was left to McSweeney to put forward suggestions for the ambassador role. Was that decision taken on competence? Proven track record? Experience? Obviously not. It was taken on the basis of his personal and political affinity with Peter Mandelson, with perhaps a side-serving of galaxy-brained strategic bollocks about how you needed a Prince of Darkness to operate in the Court of Trump.

It’s not even clear that Mandelson, who unlike Pierce had no ambassadorial experience, could be bothered to do the job. He was at that point in the running for the position of Oxford’s chancellor. McSweeney, seemingly on Mandelson’s behest, apparently asked Cabinet Office officials whether he could do the job part-time. This gives you a good indication of Westminster’s relative assessment of value: One full-time experienced woman is worth less than a part-time inexperienced man.

It’s now clear, by his own admission, that Starmer knew Mandelson had been friends with Jeffrey Epstein and that he had maintained that friendship after his conviction for child sex offences. Obviously this raises questions about his integrity.

There is a considerable amount of hypocrisy around this point, of course. Mandelson was everywhere at the time and many of the people currently criticising Starmer were perfectly happy to give him a platform. But the thing is: it was his call. It was ultimately the prime minister’s decision.

When he came to power, Starmer promised a government of probity and integrity, of national service, of duty and seriousness. That appointment betrayed every single one of those qualities. It did it morally, on the basis of his association. But it did it in terms of governance and competence too. Why not just leave the current figure in place, given she had demonstrated her suitability and experience? Why get into all this half-arsed strategising? Why allow creatures like Mandelson, people who have never accomplished a damn thing in their lives beyond securing a prominent position in the Westminster gossip circus, to be given positions of authority? Why not govern the way you promised? Why not give us boredom, sobriety and diligence, instead of the madcap merry-go-round of British political bullshit?

It’s a morality tale, in a way. Starmer must have known, in his heart, what the right call was. He was a civil servant, for Christ sake. Every indication is that he despises people like Mandelson. And yet he simply does not have confidence in his political judgement. He therefore hands those judgements to McSweeney, who is an absolute clown, coming up with clown policies for a clown administration, that should have damn well performed better, an administration that must perform better, that has a historic responsibility to perform better, that was tasked with saving Britain from populism and is instead handing it to them on a fucking plate.

So Starmer loaned out his judgement, handed it to McSweeney, and all the usual Westminster chaos played out from there. Accusation, growing whispers, gradual erosion, sudden chaos, and then complete collapse. And for what? What was the great gain Mandelson would have provided that would justify this level of risk? Absolutely fuck all. Absolutely fucking nothing.

Now Starmer feels trapped in that grim-dark cycle of incompetence, managed incompetently, creating further incompetence, addressed in an incompetent manner.

That includes half-hearted emergency measures which serve only to perpetuate the original problem. When the Mandelson story blew up into a scandal following the release of Epstein emails last September, Starmer could have acted with more severity. Instead of allowing him to resign, he could have fired him. He could have scorched-earth him, for instance with the privy council decision he eventually took this Wednesday anyway. This week, he could have pre-emptively handed the intelligence and security committee discretionary power over the release of Mandelson material rather than the Cabinet secretary. He didn’t. In each case, this half-hearted rearguard defence tactic hurt him rather than helped him. In each case, it damaged his authority rather than strengthened it.

This series of unforced errors has now become so severe that the news this week is all about Starmer being on the verge of destruction, his entire premiership at risk from a scandal in which did not do anything directly wrong, but merely appointed the person who had. That seems a very sudden escalation, no matter how egregious the error. And yet it is symptomatic of the same strategic foolishness which created the Mandelson scandal in the first place. Namely, the fact that the prime minister has been left with no allies.

What has the McSweeney strategy entailed exactly? What is it based on? Well, we can see that every day. It is to punch your friends and placate your enemies. Yesterday’s nonsensical asylum-taxi policy was a classic example. Every time the home secretary rises to speak, it is with the express intention of smacking liberals and progressives around. And that rhetoric is not by chance and is not an outburst. It is vivid, persistent, a strategy, a concerted effort to secure the admiration of nationalist reactionaries in the hope they might one day vote Labour, which they never will.

What has it got them? Do they have any new allies? Obviously not. The right despises Starmer. Hasn’t made a blind bit of difference. But it has liquidated any support base which the prime minister might now have benefited from. It has alienated anyone who might previously have given him the benefit of the doubt: liberals, progressives, the hard-left, the soft-left, the centre-left, among voters, among the public, on the government benches, in the Commons tea rooms, within the comment pages of the newspapers.

Where is the core Starmer support that any sensible strategist would have maintained? It does not exist. So now, every scandal becomes existential.

On the face of it, this has therefore been a godawful week. After all the hope of the Labour election, we’re back in the same old circus. But two further points urgently need to be made, which are much more positive: one is about proportion and the other about national democratic health.

This is, as many people are saying, probably the worst scandal of Starmer’s government. But it is not, as many people are also saying, ‘the scandal of the century’. I am begging people to retain some basic grasp upon their memory. I am begging them to keep a sense of proportion.

Under Boris Johnson, tens of thousands of people died during covid whose deaths could have been prevented. The Covid Inquiry’s Module II report found that the UK response to the epidemic was “too little too late”, leading to 23,000 more deaths in England in the first wave than would have been seen otherwise. Lockdowns lasted much longer than they needed to, depriving us all of our freedom for weeks on end, because the decision to impose them was taken so late and without regard to expert advice.

The report found: “Throughout September and October 2020 Mr Johnson repeatedly changed his mind on whether to introduce tougher restrictions and failed to make timely decisions. For those restrictions that were introduced, such as the ‘rule of six’, SAGE had warned that they were unlikely to be effective, but Mr Johnson continued to reject SAGE’s advice to implement a ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown. The weakness of the restrictions used and Mr Johnson’s oscillation enabled the virus to continue spreading at pace”.

You want a scandal? That’s a scandal. That’s about as big a scandal as it is possible to conceive, of thousands of deaths due to government incompetence, of the universal removal of liberty due to government negligence. But that report secured one day of media coverage when it came out. Just one, compared the week of coverage we’ve just experienced. You could almost feel the shrug that emanated from Fleet Street. Meh. Covid. Yesterday’s news. Story’s over.

Any given week of Johnson’s administration brought a scandal far in excess of what we saw here - from unlawfully proroguing parliament, to gutting the country through Brexit, to lying about the customs impact on Northern Ireland, to mutilating the trading integrity of the UK, to breaking his own rules during the pandemic, to the corruption over health equipment, to trying to gut the system for parliamentary standards to save his own MPs.

The Mandelson scandal is bad. Very bad indeed. And that therefore makes it comparable to an average Tuesday under the Johnson administration.

And yet, there is one area where a comparison with Johnson really does seem enlightening. It concerns tribal loyalty, accountability and a national political culture.

You can see it most clearly in comparison with the US. There, the Epstein files have produced a lot of noise but very limited repercussions. Trump, together with his zombie wife and his Mar-a-Lago club, are referred to 38,000 times. No action against him. The only resignation I can spot comes from the chair of a corporate law firm. It’s pretty similar in other countries - Norway, Denmark, France - lots of noise, few resignations.

In the UK this week, the newly-titled Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had his title of prince removed and was thrown out his Windsor home - literally put to pasture on a farm. In Westminster, Mandelson was forced to resign long ago and now a frenzied conversation takes place over the integrity of the man who appointed him. But Starmer, unlike Trump, does not appear in the Epstein files, nor will he in future. No matter what we think of him, he would not attend those sorts of parties, he would not go on those sorts of holidays. Plainly he is of a much higher moral quality than someone who would. And yet our standards are high enough that even having appointed someone below those standards becomes a potential resignation offence.

Why has nothing happened with Trump? Because tribal animosity defines everything in the US. There is no universal moral standard, no impartial accountability. Is the same true here? No. Sure, the right-wing press are gleefully punching Starmer with a degree of moral hypocrisy. Sure, Kemi Badenoch is pontificating very hard indeed even though she could easily have been in the same situation herself. But the greatest danger for Starmer does not come from them. It comes from his own MPs, who are outraged not just in terms of his strategic inadequacy, but because of the damage to the government’s moral standing. They are operating according to a set of universally accepted moral codes. And the consensus is that they are to be applied regardless of party identity or ideological loyalty.

It’s tempting, given that the British right has gone quite mad in recent years, to say that this is no longer the case, that only the left accepts these codes. But that is not correct.

Look what happened with Johnson over partygate. He had many voters behind him. He had the press behind him. He seemed like nothing could touch him. But then, quite suddenly, he contradicted a universally accepted moral rule - do not be a hypocrite - and that support deserted him. Voters on the right held a sufficient degree of commitment to universal standards. They were outraged, and because of that outrage, and the ensuing bleeding-out of his polling, the Tory party eventually got rid of him. The moral norm held. Standards were maintained.

This resilience in the public shows why you can still have some degree of faith in this country. It will not stop people voting for extremely stupid things. Obviously not. It’s perfectly possible we end up with a Reform government. But in the event of that government, it will allow us to challenge Farage much more effectively than progressives have been able to challenge Trump in the US.

For all of the hypocrisy, and the disappointment and the grim chaos this week, there has been something genuinely admirable and encouraging underneath it all. Britain remains a country where standards matter. That is not the case everywhere. Thank Christ it is here.

Odds and sods

This week’s newsletter is available as a podcast either on Substack, or by clicking at the top of this piece, or on Spotify.

My column for the i paper this week was on, well, the Mandelson scandal, and in particular the aspect where he seems to operate against British interests in what is basically a conspiracy with capital. I swear that Engels could’ve written this shit and he’d have made it subtler. You can read it here.

Our Origin Story this week - in a winning bit of timing - is on Blue Labour and in particular Maurice Glasman, the man described as the intellectual head of the movement. But in fact he has no head, intellectual or otherwise, and there is no movement. It’s basically just some half-mad bloke talking unrelated shite. I really was quite astonished by his indecipherable and baseless political understanding. You can listen here and I strongly recommend it. Dorian read, as far as I can tell, every piece of writing that exists on the subject.

I also seem to have made an appearance on the new Sleaford Mods album, The Demise of Planet X. The lyrics, which obviously I am very happy with, are: “I’ll shave your hair off and make you look like Ian Dunt, you cunt.” You can listen here. You can also listen to my pals Andrew Harrison and Jason Hazeley ask the band’s Jason Williamson about it on the Oh God What Now podcast here. I really like the Mods. I would naturally listen to that album. So hearing my name come up in it was… a very, very strange experience.

I watched Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia at the Old Vic last night. It’s my favourite play, bar none, and this production lived up to it. The performances were impeccable, the staging very elegant and understated, and it just brimmed with love for the material. I sat there overwhelmed, once again, by the scale of the accomplishment, the vastness of the undertaking. It is the work of a man operating at the height of his powers, drawing in an immense tapestry of subjects - from gardening to Newton, sex to Fermat - two time periods, multiple well-drawn sympathetic characters, and then deploying it all to investigate some of the most profound questions in human experience. It is almost crystalline in its structure, with everything - from rice pudding to affairs, grouse numbers to thermodynamics - relating back to its central preoccupation with chaos and determinism. It is a play that has the highest possible expectation of its audience. I would urge you to see it, no matter how far you have to come to do so.

Cheers you lot. But also fuck off.