Starmer is the Lord Protector of Britain’s morose new Puritanism

We live in a gloomy age. Wars, famines, economic depression, chronic lawbreaking, climate panic, and random murders punctuate our daily news. Around the world, cheerful politicians are thin on the ground.

A burst of forced hilarity for the cameras may be permissible at election time or when shaking hands with foreign visitors, but the unwritten rule seems to be that it must be switched off pretty quickly. Kamala Harris apparently laughs too much. We are unnerved when Putin, Xi or Kim look happy. Perhaps this has entered our collective consciousness from seeing pictures of Stalin, Mao or Hitler in occasionally jovial mood: we recognise it as the glee of a nasty child pulling the wings off flies.

But today we have a surfeit of political gloominess. We must want it that way. Boris Johnson was reviled for inappropriate levity. Cake was his nemesis as it was for Marie Antoinette. Cake has a deep significance in British culture, standing for luxurious self-indulgence if not dubious morals (“having one’s cake and eating it”). Sir Keir Starmer got away with drinking beer. Had Boris been swigging a stiff scotch, it might have been put down to the strains of office. Cake, no.

Personality has always mattered for rulers. Medieval monarchs travelled around showing themselves to the people. Cheap newspapers, railways and a mass electorate made personality a political force. The first example in mid-nineteenth century Britain was probably the rollicking Lord Palmerston (‘Pam’), when we were an insufferably self-confident country. At other times, people need calm and reassurance – think of Attlee replacing Churchill.

Today a pessimistic world wants sententious and dogmatic politicians. In America, Kamala Harris’s laugh notwithstanding, it is impossible to imagine Trump, J.D. Vance or Biden in a genuinely jovial mood, as Reagan, Kennedy, Roosevelt and Lincoln often were. On the European scene Macron is the classic humourless intellectual. Mélenchon and Le Pen are too angry to crack jokes. Scholz seems to be naturally miserable.

Zelensky was a comic actor, but professional comedians are supposed to be sad inside, and for understandable reasons he has put humour aside for the duration. Yet even the bloodiest war does not necessarily require gloomy leadership – at least, there has been one glorious exception. Churchill’s public cheerfulness, with cigar and optimistic grin, was partly a tactic for raising the nation’s mood, but everyone knew it was based on genuine ebullience.

At the moment, Britain is in poll position in international gloominess, with Sir Keir effortlessly glum and spreading it by the bucketful. Is this, I wonder, a Left-wing characteristic? The British Left has deep roots in religious Nonconformity: Methodism more than Marxism.

The founder of modern progressive politics was Mr Gladstone, whose religiosity enthralled the Nonconformist masses, the “woke” of their day. One Middlesborough Baptist congregation hailed him as “a prophet of the most high God”, and many prayed for his victory. He seems to have agreed: “I have hammered with all my little might at the fabric of the present Tory power… the triumph grows and grows: to God be the praise.” God, he thought, was ensuring good weather for his public meetings and slipping the occasional political ace up his sleeve.

Such confidence in one’s own moral mission, and the dismissal of opponents as unrepentant sinners, is a formidable barrier to geniality. Prophets of whatever religion do not joke (Jesus was an exception). Indeed, they are suspicious of laughter, a sign of impiety. Nearly all witty or humorous sayings by politicians come from sceptical Conservatives, with Disraeli and Churchill well in the lead.

Sir Keir’s rather leaden solemnity is therefore more than just a personality trait. It reflects the zeitgeist, our new Puritanism. I can’t think of a better term, though as readers will know it properly relates to 17th century religious conflicts, and before that to Jean Calvin, and way back to St Augustine. The characteristics of Puritanism are shared more widely: the fundamentalist application of ideology; the identification of oneself with a similarly-minded virtuous elect; the conviction that opposition or disagreement is immoral; readiness to use power to accuse, silence, censor and ban; and refusal to allow any questioning of sacred dogma.

Hence, pensioners’ heating allowances are cut and billions lavished on “renewable” power that will plunge us into darkness – until the age of miracles returns and after renouncing our consumerism we are wafted by wind power to a frugal green Celestial City. Hence, too, free speech legislation is dismissed as a “Tory hate-speech charter” – “hate speech” being today’s term for heresy.

The witch-hunt is the heart of Puritanism. Sin and the devil were omnipresent and had to be rooted out. Today we have “systemic racism”, “transphobia”, “Islamophobia”, “misogyny”, and the “far Right”. Social media offers a novel way of finding and punishing today’s witches. And if you don’t believe in witches, it proves that you too are a witch. Thus, the snowball grows, picking up the ambitious, the conformist and the scared.

I am not for a moment suggesting that Sir Keir is a modern avatar of the Witch-Finder-General. He is a decent man, a liberal, and a democrat. But he does display some of the milder symptoms of Puritanism, namely its suspicion of self-indulgence, its haste to forbid things, its rather alarming gusto for punishment, and of course a strong tendency to sermonising.

The Labour Party – when it had a sense of history – used to identify with the Roundhead struggle against Charles I. Perhaps this is part of the problem.

The Puritan Republic tried to ban Christmas because of its “carnal and sensual delights”, and forbade “revellings at country weddings”. “Dens of Satan” (pubs) were shut down en masse. They banned bull baiting, outraged less by the pain of the animals than by the pleasure of the spectators. We know how it ended: with the joyful restoration of the “Merry Monarch”, Charles II, and the death of British republicanism.

Today’s Progressives would be wise to learn from history. Eventually, people reject being hectored, depressed, and made to feel guilty. They want something and someone positive. Suffering may be good for the soul, but not for the poll ratings.