Keir Starmer is not a politician by training or inclination. He
was drafted into civilian office late in life and immediately lowered
into a stately place on the front benches.
In this way, Starmer
is part of a long tradition. Political systems in trouble often lose
faith in their native class of civilian leaders, and turn instead to a
distinguished outsider who seems to stand above the factions.
These
people are not ‘political’ – politics has failed. These are figures of
unity, and of command. The senile Field Marshal MacMahon; the senile
Field Marshal Hindenburg; the policeman Starmer; the police spy Sue Gray
– harder, simpler people for a harder, simpler rule.
But there
is a reason why most governing classes try to avoid the open rule of its
bureaucrats, spies and major generals. Social orders need to maintain a
mythology of some kind – that power does not simply flow out the barrel
of a gun. Whatever else the next few years may hold, it does not
ultimately bode well for Blairite society that it must now have recourse
to people like Starmer.
Much has been said about Keir Starmer’s
‘Pabloism’, and of his youthful sojourn in a work camp behind the Iron
Curtain. All valid things to raise. What should be remembered, though,
is that this general tendency – the collected fissile elements of
Marxism Today – has now been in power for over a quarter century and is
showing its age. Whatever radical or subversive edge it may have had is
many years gone. It is also, in its way, unduly flattering. New Labour
was always proudly philistine. The sneering conformism, the monomaniacal
obsession with football. This was never a ploy to distract from more
chic ideas, as some have said. The two were always one and the same.
‘Pabloism’ in practice from 1997 simply meant the kind of chivvying ITV
morning show sensibility that has come to define the era; that
eccentricity is suspect, that everyone has to cheer for England, and
that Diana Spencer was the People’s Princess.
Forget class,
certainly. Forget, even, the Authoritarian Personality, or “all that is
solid melts into air”. What we’re faced with in 2024 is a stodgy public
moralism that owes much more to Ant & Dec than to Michel Pablo. And
more than anything else, it’s a public doctrine that was put in genuine
danger from 2016-20, placing it under a psychological state of siege
from which it has yet to emerge, and which Starmer’s victory will do
nothing to allay.
Starmer the man is the most apt symbol of this
new, baroque self-seriousness. This is a person who really does think
that a studio audience would laugh at him because his father was a
toolmaker. He speaks to an established order that has, in its paranoia,
lost whatever capacity for subtlety or irony it may have once possessed.
There is instead a deathly earnestness, and a fear for the future.
Shadows move on the walls – divisive ones. Look at the front cover of
Starmer’s manifesto. He is flinty-eyed; wearisomely resolute. The whole
picture is tinted grey. Even Theresa May in her full pomp would have
probably baulked at this. Keir Starmer is a dark and brooding man for a
dark and brooding age.
Starmer and the class he represents
believe that time is running out for them. The Financial Times speaks of
Starmerism as a last chance saloon for the Third Way. If Mr. Trump
re-enters the Oval Office, and if current political trends in
continental Europe persist, then the Starmer ministry will soon be the
last government of its kind in the Western world...<<<Read More>>>...