“Keir doesn’t engage in the political process. He got this far by not expressing any political opinions … He’s good with people, but he doesn’t debate big ideas.”
After 200 pages of a compelling new book about the Labour party’s return to power, the story falls into a run of these quotations. Get In, by the Westminster journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, makes it clear that after he became the Labour leader, Keir Starmer developed an incredible ruthlessness. Casting him as the kind of operator who ought to be renowned for the trail of human wreckage they leave in their wake, the book highlights the “many people whose careers have come to a brutal end at Starmer’s remorseless hand”. His readiness to behave like that, however, does not come from any ideological zeal, but rather its opposite: an absence of convictions and ideals that means he can shape-shift – and dispatch colleagues and allies – with a blithe ease.
In 2021, we are told, the Labour leader was visited at home by one of his predecessors, Ed Miliband, and Tony Blair’s old flatmate, Charlie Falconer, who presented him with a handful of challenges: “Are you left? Are you right? Are you middle? Why should we be in power?” No answers seemed to be forthcoming: the problem, among others, was that Starmer was “a leader who did not much like politics”. This revelation explains the other defining feature of his time at the top: the fact that, as Maguire and Pogrund tell it, Starmer has taken his most basic political orders from a coterie – or “project” – centred on his all-powerful strategist and mentor Morgan McSweeney.
In that sense, the directionless mess the government has fallen into has two interlocking causes. Having cunningly manoeuvred Labour to victory, Starmer’s advisers have apparently failed to supply him with a coherent governing script, exposing his lack of politics, and leaving him panicked. Onlookers sense this as a matter of instinct: his approval ratings, for what they are worth, have lately registered numbers even worse than Rishi Sunak’s low point. In focus groups, voters reportedly offer such opinions as “He looks like a rabbit caught in headlights.” Aside from his obvious liking for international diplomacy, his famed ruthlessness seems to sit alongside the kind of discomfort with his job that people always find troubling – witness the way that such ill-at-ease premiers as Gordon Brown and Theresa May never really connected with the public.
There is still – just about – an identifiably social-democratic strand in some of what the government is doing – from Angela Rayner’s mission on new workplace rights, through moves on public transport, to plans for new investment in our hospitals and schools. The problem is that the relevance of this stuff to Starmer and his colleagues’ sense of purpose is falling away. Worse still, the resulting vacuum is now being filled by manic, feckless lurches into places that no centre-left government ought to go.
Reboots and relaunches now seem to arrive on an almost weekly basis: the latest is all about being “disruptors”, and delivering shocks and surprises that may not actually be shocking or surprising at all. Last week, Labour launched online adverts seemingly purposely created to look like Reform UK propaganda, complete with such slogans as “Labour hits 5-year high in migrant removals” – the kind of flimsy posturing that surely makes it look like Nigel Farage is dictating the political weather, and encourages even more people to support him. The same applies to an imminent run of grim campaigning videos that will focus on deported immigrants, following them “from detention in early morning raids to transfer from bleak immigration removal centres to waiting planes and … footage aboard flights out of the country”.
At the same time, the kind of moves that might substantially weaken Reform UK’s insurgency in old Labour heartlands seem to be off limits. Angela Rayner today talked up Labour’s determination to meet its target of building 1.5m new homes, but who sees any signs of that? And amid plans to drastically develop the corridor between Oxford and Cambridge and build a third runway at Heathrow – eventually – what of the seemingly flatlining prospects of the old coalfields and manufacturing centres where Farage and his party may soon clean up?
Which, once we are past a work and pensions secretary claiming that many people on sickness and incapacity benefits are “taking the mickey” while her department threatens cruel cuts, brings us to the current defining feature of Starmerism. The government’s re-energised belief in economic growth at all costs is exactly what people with precious few substantial ideas would pick as their chosen cause. Given that it now entails brazen strides away from the green agenda that Starmer and his allies once claimed was the absolute fulcrum of their politics, it heightens their air of twitchy desperation.
Monomaniacal growthism is also making Starmer’s administration sound discomfitingly weird, something highlighted by a quote from a government spokesperson included in a recent run of stories about the UK’s childhood mental health crisis: “We are committed to raising the healthiest generation of children ever and recognise the importance of this to our number one mission – economic growth.” The tone suggests one of Stalin’s five-year plans being fronted by Alan Partridge.
More troubling still, growth’s motor will be the government’s latest drive: deregulation. A recent Starmer piece in the Times suggested that his lack of values is also manifested in an odd historical amnesia, and the choice of language it produces: he compared “a morass of regulation” to “Japanese knotweed”, and insisted on the urgent need to “curb regulator overreach”. Most of us know what that kind of zealotry has led to: the financial crash of 2008, the Grenfell Tower disaster and a country full of sewage-strewn rivers. And flirting with it gifts Labour’s opponents with ready-made attack lines. Watch what happens next time Rayner breaks cover to extol the wonders of limits to zero-hours contracts and restrictions on fire-and-rehire tactics: the right will trill endlessly about new additions to what Starmer calls “thickets of red tape”.
At the end of Get In, the authors tell the story of the night that went from 4-5 July 2024, which now feels like it happened a very long time ago. Starmer is caught making a speech at Tate Modern at 5am, to a crowd full of Labour party insiders: “Change begins now! … Four and a half years of work changing the party. This is what it is for.”
Seven months on, those words have an unsettling quality, centred on how flimsy Labour’s programme now feels, and the glaring political void at the top. Starmer’s emptiness, moreover, is not just a problem for his party: it blurs into the even bigger story of how weak orthodox politics seems in the face of global threats that are still unfolding. As the new right runs riot around the world, does this government feel like it might blaze a trail away from all the chaos, or soon be swept away by it, as another confused relic of a faded political past? Increasing numbers of people seem to know the answer to that question. The fact that it feels so likely is surely terrifying.