I don’t know about you, but I had an odd sort of election. The bits that I thought were going to thrill and excite me did not; and the bits that I thought couldn’t thrill and excite anybody made me feel quite emotional. That is, I gave up on the live coverage at about half two in the morning. Not even the prospect of watching Liz Truss get her cards seemed as appealing as a few hours’ kip. The 1997-style jubilation I might have expected to feel, as a representative of those keen to give Labour a shot at governing, just wasn’t there.
But the following day, as announcements of ministerial and cabinet posts trickled out, I felt genuinely buoyed up. You may – we may – dislike the ideological slant of some of these appointments. There will be Spectator readers, I know, who will regard the prospect of Angela Rayner as deputy Prime Minister, or David Lammy as foreign secretary, with unmitigated horror. It’s not a Tory cabinet, obviously. But setting aside its ideological character, it does seem to contrast with the recent history of ambitious second-raters chosen for loyalty rather than quality.
Asking to be judged on his results is risky enough for Starmer
A fair-minded appraisal of these appointments would, I think, see them as being a good-faith attempt at installing people who will do those jobs well. Here is a government of ministers with domain-specific experience (most obviously a well-regarded and experienced silk in Richard Hermer as Attorney General, a highly intelligent former banker as chancellor in Rachel Reeves, and the eye-catching appointment of James Timpson as prisons minister), for many of whom the posting will be an end in itself rather than a rung on the ladder, and a number with enough clout (Yvette Cooper or Ed Miliband, for example) to stand up to the leader if the job requires it.
Equally, I think these appointments bear on a fair-minded appraisal of what Sir Keir is trying to do. None of the three wholly contradictory lines of attack on him – that he’s a deranged woke Marxist whose mask is already slipping, that he’s a man with no principles whatsoever, and (from the Left) that he’s a right-wing neoliberal shill – seem very persuasive. What if we allow for the possibility, at least at first, that he is what he has repeatedly advertised himself to be: a cautious, pragmatic, not especially ideological politician who adjusts his attitudes to the way the world wags.
This, after all, is the account of him that the Times columnist Lord Finkelstein – who has known Sir Keir for a very long time and is no sort of ideological fellow traveller – affirms. He describes Sir Keir as a man of ‘left-wing instincts’ but says that ‘Starmer is bright and extremely diligent and often finds that evidence and reality push him away from his ideological starting point’.
It is the account of him, too, that his biographer Tom Baldwin affirms. He cautions against the idea that ‘Starmerism’ even exists, saying that Sir Keir is the representative ‘not of a big idea but of a set of values’; a ‘muddled set of values, with loose ends and exceptions’ – but one representing a ‘life-sized politics’ intended (as I heard him put it recently) to ‘fit into the folds’ of our national identity rather than seeking to ‘drive a straight line through it’. That account of him is one to which those of a small-c conservative mindset should, I’d suggest, be able to give a cautious welcome.
All the polling data suggests that the last election was not won but lost; and that it was lost above all on the issues of competence and trustworthiness. Sir Keir’s first speech in Downing Street – sombre, conciliatory, free of gloating – seemed to underscore that theme. He didn’t sing the Red Flag, declare ‘we are the masters now’ or predict some overnight national renewal: he promised a sincere attempt to improve things, bit by bit, patiently and without show, and implicitly invited us to judge him on the results.
That too, I think, is how he intends to deal with what we’re already hearing repeatedly is the ‘mile-wide-but-an-inch-deep’ nature of his mandate. I suspect he takes the view that populist insurgencies arise when ordinary people feel government isn’t addressing their concerns, and that if he can get practical, real-world results it will quietly lure defectors to Reform and the radical Left alike back to the centre. An inch, he reasons, is deep enough to sow seeds. Trying to play the Faragists at their own game didn’t exactly work out for the Conservative party.
Asking to be judged on his results is risky enough. God knows – which is perhaps why that 1997-style jubilation wasn’t there even for those of us on the centre-left – he has very little room for manoeuvre. And as Sam Freedman’s new book Failed State argues persuasively, even the best-intentioned and most competent prime minister inherits a job that years of centralisation have made unmanageably overwhelming, horribly atrophied state capacity, and government machinery that just doesn’t work.
Sir Keir will probably come a cropper. He’ll almost certainly come a cropper. Coming a cropper, in fact, is what all the available data and the wisdom of ages suggest he will do. And he’ll get his lumps then. It’s a bit previous, though, to claim to know exactly what sort of cropper he’s going to come.
In the meantime, it seems to me that if we take a step back and a deep breath we can see that he’s determined to take a serious shot at the incremental, detailed, unglamorous improvements he says he wants to bring about. And speaking for all the centrist dads out there, I’d like to say: could it hurt – I mean, could it make things any worse than they have been – to give him a bloody chance?
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