Keir Starmer: Locating the Man

by Sean Bw Parker (September 2024)

Since baby Starmer’s parents looked down and named their new son Keir in honour of respected past Labour leader Keir Hardie, he has surely been a Person of Destiny. From check-shirted 80s indie kid to human rights lawyer, young Keir looked at Tony Blair and no doubt said: That’s the way.

Keir’s burning sense of injustice at the way the poor were treated all over the world grew quietly in his belly, but covered itself in strategy through law school. But Keir was a New Man—he was in touch with his feminine side, while knowing that there was an old-fashioned, slightly retarded—as he privately saw it—Dad’s Army spirit in corners of Britain that he needed to convince, along with the progressive class.

Keir looked on in awe as Tony Blair smilingly said universal positives in the media and the House of Commons, while sliding through policy through quangos and influence, from tuition fees to the Iraq War to the Equality Act. Keir saw that good, progressive politics was not about being staunch and dependable, but pragmatic and flexible. He would hold on to his parents’ Old Labour roots while supporting Jeremy Corbyn, but quietly learn from and whatsapp Tony in order to make sure everyone was onside. And then he’d do the same thing with the country.

He’d learnt how to win a case as a human rights lawyer, which meant seeing all sides while not answering any questions directly, and saw that was the best way to approach the media, too. Rising to Director of Public Prosecutions at the Crown Prosecution Service, he immediately followed the Democrats lead in the US and introduced the ‘believe the victims’ policy, essentially inverting the innocent until proven guilty principle in British law. That was before the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trials mind, let alone the Postmasters and Andy Malkinson cases, which set that project back somewhat.

Still, the progressive left’s ‘victimhood’ narrative was an expedient one, and suited Keir’s ‘perpetually concerned on camera’ presentation well. Watching his successor Alison Saunders fall on his sword for systemic disclosure failings at the CPS, Keir now manoeuvred in the Labour Party behind Corbyn, knowing which side his bread was best buttered before the latter went down in a firestorm of alleged antisemitism.

Keir replaced Corbyn as leader, and knew he just had to outstay Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak over the space of four or five post-Covid years without ‘dropping the Ming vase’. And he did, seeming never to answer a question but seeming reasonably decent and non-political, rising to exasperated power on an ‘enough of bloody them’ vote in 2024.

Behind the pipe of Tony Benn was a fierce, fair-minded ideologue, committed to telling the truth of his times. Behind Tony Blair’s ruthless, three-term ambition was a fierce, pragmatic intelligence, cunningly pursuing power at all costs. Behind Keir Starmer’s small, worried-looking blue eyes? No one, still, has any idea, and possibly never will do. All the right words are there, but they don’t seem connected to the core of a person at all. Of course we assume there must be a man there, behind all the platitudes, but politics, despite the twenty-first century’s imprecations to emotional honesty and transparency, is still apparently not ready for it.

In his first few weeks in power Starmer was met with riots across many towns and cities in Britain, kicked off by the murder of three little girls in Southport, Merseyside and lighting a tinderbox of anxiety caused by mass immigration. But Keir only called out the ‘far right thugs,’ not the pressures that the country was feeling, played out on the frontline by a handful who went too far.

He then ditched the winter fuel allowance, putting poor old people at increased risk of hardship; and also repealed the academic freedom bill, which had been passed under the Tories, but was removed by Education Secretary Bridget Philipson at the eleventh hour. This bill would have respected lecturers and academics to speak freely at universities without threat of sacking, mobbing or cancellation, a moved deemed necessary in an era of ‘cancel culture on campus.’

It’s been said that politics is mostly theatre. To the extent that that’s true, Starmer’s method must be stuck in a Ken Loach loop, and will probably keep repeating until his own time is up.

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