Who is Keir Starmer?

How do you keep faith with something that always changes?

Photo by David DINTSH on Unsplash

Nearly half a decade on and we've no real idea. He's on the brink of power and we've still not got a clue. 

Yesterday marked the fourth anniversary of Keir Starmer becoming Labour leader. And yet he remains an enigma. He is a thing we project onto, rather than one which tells us what it is. He's a mystery in electoral form - a gamble we have taken, and which others have taken before, to variable effect.

I decided I liked Starmer the first time he appeared in the Commons as shadow Brexit secretary. It was autumn 2016. Very dark times. No glimmer of light in sight. We'd had months of gibberish and vacuity from both parties in the wake of the referendum result. We forget now, but there was a very long shadow period after the vote, where it wasn't remotely clear how Brexit would work, or how it would be pursued, or what the consequences of any particular course of action were. This was a period in which people were still discovering what would later be considered rudimentary knowledge, like the fact that free movement was a requirement of the single market.

I was writing Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now in the background while covering events in Westminster. There was this acute disconnect between what I was being told by experts for the book and what I was seeing in front of me every day. There was simply no-one grappling with the detail. Theresa May's policy literally amounted to saying 'Brexit means Brexit' over and over again, a phrase so utterly devoid of meaning it is astonishing she managed to make it stick for months on end. Jeremy Corbyn was simply intellectually absent. At best, and I really do mean the best, it didn't interest him, and was therefore mostly ignored. 

People I had always rather liked were behaving in terrible ways. David Davis, whose performance on civil liberties issues had once been so impressive, was Brexit secretary. He plainly had no empirical understanding or strategic acumen. He was riding a wave of his own dumb self-satisfaction. Emily Thornberry was his Labour shadow. She was amusing, dry, and intelligent. But I didn't get the sense from her that she had grasped the extent of the topic she was covering or showed sufficient concern about it. 

On TV and radio, most outlets seemed to have drifted from any responsibility to tell their audience what was going on. The BBC had basically handed the issue to Millbank, sidelining their various specialist editors in favour of a Westminster framework which treated it as another Punch-and-Judy soap opera.

Everything was drifting from reality. No-one seemed prepared to discuss this thing as it really was: a fiendishly complicated system-level technical conundrum, where each part affected all the others, carrying severe and long-lasting national repercussions which are now all-too real. 

Then Starmer became shadow Brexit secretary. I remember the first time he appeared in the Commons Chamber. He was speaking a foreign language: intelligent, legally literate, details-orientated. But most importantly, he was taking it seriously. He wasn't on top of all the details. None of us were. But he was trying. And in that place, at that time, merely trying was enough to mark you out from the crowd. I felt a tremendous sense of relief. At least someone was behaving like we were still a proper country. At least someone was doing their best out there, rather than shouting, or laughing, or simply shrugging the whole thing off. At least there was one adult in the room. Thank Christ, I thought. Thank Christ for that. 

Since then, Starmer has been many things. He was the electable face of Corbynism during the Labour leadership election. Then he did an about-face and became a centrist technocrat who was slightly more conservative than Tony Blair. Now no-one is sure what he is. Perhaps he's the human rights lawyer of a previous life. Perhaps he is Peter Mandelson Mark 2. Politically, he is a shadow. He clearly moves to whatever space is needed to win at a given moment.

There is something dangerous about that. The Corbyn lot are right about that, if nothing else. Voters have the right to know what someone's policies are. And they have the right to know their values - how they might act in power when unforeseen events take place. Starmer has purposefully reduced the first and been intolerably vague on the second.

But in a very real and profound sense, I don't care.

There is a moral imperative at the moment: the government must go. We are experiencing an absence of governance, a complete fracturing of anything which might be considered basic adequacy. Rishi Sunak has no ideas for how to improve the country. His only initiatives are those designed to placate the right of his parliamentary party and prevent the loss of votes to Reform. He has no idea how to fix public services, nor the slightest discipline to execute the plan even if he did. In so far as he does express ideas, it is to do things like leave the ECHR, which would trigger another catastrophic technical clusterfuck of precisely the sort we experienced during Brexit. He is a man without qualities, whose terror of the electorate now consigns us to another six months of rank administrative irresponsibility at a moment of critical national failure. The Tory party at the moment is good for nothing - for absolutely nothing - except financial scandals and bullying scandals and sex scandals and lobbying scandals and racism scandals and sexism scandals and Islamophobia scandals and looking at tractor porn in the Commons Chamber. They're not even the fag-end of a government. They're the fag-end of a fag-end of a government, the last sprinkled drift of ash as it melds with the air, utterly without substance or gravitas or any sense of rudimentary competence. The people involved are the ones left over from countless previous reshuffles, the passed over and the deranged, suddenly promoted to positions way past their cognitive thresholds, attended to by special advisors who are themselves the dreggy ends of their particular political subcategory, only capable of securing a position when all standards for their appointment have collapsed. Under their authorship the country has entered a stage of seemingly perpetual decline: the transport system, the courts, the universities, the health service. In nearly every area you look at, the people working inside it rage at their total betrayal by political masters without any knowledge of the policy area they adjudicate on nor any interest in acquiring it. They are the muck you find between the cushions of the sofa, an age-old blob of matter, of indeterminate origin, sticky and wet, promoting a sudden jolt of revulsion as you watch the TV. They are fucked and they are fucking us and they must be removed from power at the nearest opportunity, petrified cynical self-interested reactionary small-minded fucking shambles that they truly are.

So in that context, it really doesn't much matter to me who Starmer is. He could be anyone really. They must be replaced and he is the best placed person to do it.

But I think we can go further than that. The view of Starmer as without values is a fundamentally political one. It is ideological, and based on the fact that he is very clearly non-ideological. And yet the really pertinent fact - at this point, for this country - is not so much about left-and-right, but about competence-and-incompetence. 

What is the era that we are in? Is it about big ideas for the future? No. I wish it was, but it is not. We are in the era of chaos and dilapidation. We are in the era of national A&E: emergency intervention to save the patient. And in that context, Starmer might just be the exact right man for the job.

Look at the people he placed around him. He relied on Morgan McSweeney for an election strategy. We can consider that strategy uninspiring if we want. It is. But it has worked. It has been tried and tested and proven highly effective. Look at the appointment of Sue Gray. It suggests a heavy premium on civil service expertise, a desire to return to functional governance, with Downing Street capable of communicating with government departments, the Treasury and the civil service, in a workmanlike relationship, free of conspiracies about 'the blob' and persistent distractions over populist fever-dreams. 

Both areas are defined by the same approach: What is the problem? What is the solution? What works?

This is the continuity between the man who walked into the Commons as shadow Brexit secretary in autumn 2016 and the one we see now. There are many things to disagree with Starmer about, including the really rather deceptive way he has conducted himself over the last few years. There will be more in future. But we might just have stumbled upon the perfect candidate for the moment: someone who promises competence when competence, more than anything, is required. Someone who promises boring stability when we need it more than ever. A serious person in an age of clowns. 

Odds and Sods

Two interesting films this week. The first is Fallen Leaves, a Finnish film about two broken people drifting closer together by director Aki Kaurismaki. The second is Bottoms, a violent American teenage lesbian sex comedy by director Emma Seligman.

On the face of it, they seem miles apart. Fallen Leaves is defined by that bone-dry Finnish sense of humour, taking place in a grey world of loneliness and zero-hour contracts. Bottoms is defined by joyous and deranged technicolour abandon. But they are united by two things. They are concerned with the underdog: the unattractive, the unloved, the unappealing. The kind of character that would not even be an extra in a different film. And they are both utterly committed to their reality, to their unique manner. A complete hermetically sealed world you can step right into. They'd make an excellent double bill - covering similar ground in a very different ways.

Also, buy my fucking book you cunts etc etc. Unless you already bought it, in which case probably don't.