The man who would be prime minister
FINTAN O’TOOLE
KEIR STARMER The biography
TOM BALDWIN 448pp. William Collins. £25.
THE UNITED KINGDOM is in the peculiar condition of suffering from post-revolutionary disillusionment without having had an actual revolution. It has performed the rituals of a successful popular insurgency: the sudden toppling of a whole layer of governance, the declaration of Independence Day, the elevation of a lord of misrule, the denunciation of traitors, the purges, the rapid succession of juntas, the years of political chaos in which marginal fanatics preen themselves as tribunes of the people before fading back into obscurity. The great Brexit revolt and its aftermath played out all the acts of this drama while doing nothing to change the distribution of power and privilege in the country. And then most of its audience simply went home. As a political project Brexit has burnt itself out with astonishing rapidity, leaving drearily familiar streets strewn with the charred stumps of vaporized fireworks.
There is thus all the ennui and exhaustion, the bitterness and cynicism, that follows a period in which a country is living on its political nerves and its governance is in constant flux. But the very British twist is that this is also now a polity in real need of a peaceful revolution, of the courage to undertake a big break with the status quo, the willingness to accept large-scale change, the boldness to overturn orthodoxies. But its resources have been depleted through misapplication. The vast waste of energy on Brexit has drained the reservoirs of audacity on which the UK must draw.
This is Keir Starmer’s dilemma. He has to fashion an electoral victory that feels as epoch-making as the Liberal landslide of 1906, the Conservative resurrection of 1931, Clement Attlee’s Labour triumph of 1945, Margaret Thatcher’s revolution of 1979 and Tony Blair’s New Labour avalanche of 1997. But he must do this at a time when the rhetoric and imagery of sweeping political change have been utterly debased. He has to offer something big in a country made wary of hype, to proffer grand possibilities in a place where the purveyors of promise have been so recently exposed as cynical charlatans. All really successful political leaders manage to square such circles, and to embody opposing impulses without being immobilized by contradictions. So far – and notwithstanding last week’s double by-election success, on extremely low voter turnouts – Starmer is struggling to do so.
One way of framing his predicament is to note that, for him, the bar is at once extremely low and dauntingly high. To become leader of the Labour Party Starmer had to be somewhat more convincing than Jeremy Corbyn, a task that even Boris Johnson found rather easy. To look like a potentially good prime min
