Revealed: Sir Keir Starmer’s guilty secret – he doesn’t like politics

Keir Starmer
Keir Starmer

Why is this Government so useless? It is not a rhetorical question, a prelude to denunciation (though there is plenty to denounce). It is a question I want to try to answer.

The charge sheet includes – in no particular order – Lord Alli’s gifts of suits, spectacles, wellington boots and penthouse flat; the ending of the winter fuel payment; the ceding of the Chagos Islands; the increase in employers’ National Insurance and the dropping of its threshold; the imposition of inheritance tax on family farms and family businesses; the Labour Party workers who went to campaign against Donald Trump; the Cabinet disarray about assisted suicide; Rachel Reeves’s CV; the rise and fall of Sue Gray; the mere presence of David Lammy; Louise Haigh.

Apart from the fact that all the above involve avoidable mistakes, does a single thread run through this ragbag? Some critics discern an ideological consistency. They say the Government is much more Left-wing than it admits and motivated by an animus against anyone – except for businesses too big for Labour to dare touch – who tries to make an independent living. 
There is an unattractive ideology lurking here – and I’ll come back to that – but it does not explain the ineptitude. If Sir Keir Starmer really were red in tooth and claw, a substantial minority in his own party would now be rooting for him.

Instead, almost no one praises him or his Government, except for those literally paid to do so. Can you remember that distant period three months ago when people said that “the sensibles” were back in charge?

I suspect the key to this mystery lies elsewhere. There is much talk nowadays about Britain’s de-skilling in vital trades and professions – digital know-how, engineering, GPs, language proficiency, the Civil Service. It feels as if the same has happened in a skill in which the British have traditionally excelled: democratic politics.

Politics is a hard school, but it is not like training for accountancy or for Sir Keir’s profession, the law. It has few written rules, no body of printed learning, no settled career structure, no tenure and its only pass-or-fail exam is the ballot box.

The way you got trained for politics used to be in the House of Commons. But since Tony Blair’s “family-friendly” hours and the routine use of the “guillotine” to curtail discussion of government Bills, it has become possible to have a political career without ever seriously scrutinising legislation or being fully tested in debate. MPs used to learn their trade through the hierarchy of their party tribes in Parliament, but now, what with Covid, social media, feeble debates and the proliferation of individual offices and aides, they have become more like sole traders, frantically signalling their wares in an overcrowded market.

Thanks to the growth of Civil Service control and of “independent” regulatory bodies which hedge in elected politicians, it is even possible to be a government minister without learning how to make real decisions. Thanks to the ever-greater concentration of power in No 10, you can now be a Cabinet minister without being captain of your own ship.

It has become apparent, since Labour came into office in July, that it does not, in functional terms, understand the difference between government and party. Perhaps foreseeing this problem, Sir Keir stole Sue Gray from the Civil Service to be his chief of staff. But when he reached Downing Street, Ms Gray lost the internal battle. Now almost all the important positions there are held by party people not by officials. So almost nobody understands how to make Whitehall work for the new government as it should.

People who excel at politics thrive on its uncertainty and risk, like good sailors enjoying a storm. They also relish the implication of the word democracy – that it means communicating with the people. The giants of the past 50 years – Thatcher, Blair, Boris; Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump – all positively wanted to go out and reach the voters. Some preached; some seduced; some reasoned; some joked, but all were drawn to the smoke of battle and the roar of the crowd.

Sir Keir Starmer is not like that, and nor is Rachel Reeves or most of his other senior colleagues. Before he became the Labour leader, and worked under Jeremy Corbyn, Sir Keir devoted his greatest energies to trying to reverse the largest democratic vote in our history, which was for Brexit.

As leader, as an election campaigner and now as Prime Minister, he seems to dislike both reasoned argument and tub-thumping. On the very day she was forced out of office in 1990, Mrs Thatcher spoke for her government in a no-confidence debate. “I’m enjoying this!” she exclaimed, although she already knew she had fallen. Sir Keir is now, in theory, at the height of his power, with an unassailable majority, yet he does not seem to be enjoying politics one bit.

This column has occasionally advanced the theory that the best way to test a leading politician is to imitate the method used by P G Wodehouse’s famous fictional fathead, Bertie Wooster. Bertie discovers that if you go up to someone and say, “I know your guilty secret”, you immediately gain power over them. First-rate politicians pass this test: they never cower. It is not relevant here whether they actually do have a guilty secret: it is a question of mentality. Their toughness is such that they just brush you aside.

All the above-mentioned leaders pass this test. Several other prime ministers – John Major (who did have a guilty secret), for example, and Theresa May (whose only one was running through a wheat field) – fail it.

I fear Sir Keir fails the Wooster test. In his otherwise inexpressive face, his eyes show fear, not, presumably, of personal scandal, but rather of the exposure, inevitable at the top level of politics, of what you really think.

Sir Keir was the country’s chief prosecutor. The working assumption of any public prosecutor is that he is right and his opponents are bad and wrong. That is a bad assumption in politics. It means that, for Sir Keir, all questioning of his policies and actions feels like an affront rather than an opportunity. It is why, though he is an intelligent man, he never says anything interesting: there is nothing he wishes to discuss. A good politician is one who is energised by political challenge. Not Sir Keir.

In his legal background is his ideology. Sir Keir is of that school of Leftish thought which sees judges, not elected politicians, as the ultimate arbiters of government. The Attorney General, Lord Hermer, recently issued new guidelines to ministers which allow government lawyers, instead of offering legal advice, to instruct ministers that it would be inappropriate to proceed with a legally high-risk policy. Starmerism, if there is such a thing, is founded on the belief that human rights should be our religion and lawyers should be its high priests. The fundamental reason he is useless at politics is because he hates politics.

By being so bad at politics, he creates a political vacuum in his own party. Given his enormous majority, it will be filled by a Labour rival, not by a change of government. The most likely lad, in the sense that he is on a mission which enthuses his own troops, is Ed Miliband. Unfortunately, the effect of his net zero mission will be to destroy the affordable energy upon which all citizens and Britain’s few remaining economic strengths depend.