The Disguise of Dullness

UK/Europe

The Disguise of Dullness

Keir Starmer’s presentable leftism is more radical than Jeremy Corbyn’s, not less.

The most memorable moment at the recent convention of Britain’s governing Labour party was too absurd to report properly. It always will be. I feel it is slightly improper to mention it here. Yet, as you will see, it would be strange not to. In a sprawling, unmemorable speech setting out his dull, vague, and predictable policy priorities, our prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, inexplicably called for “the release of the sausages” in Gaza when he was supposed to be calling for the release of the hostages. The slip was so ludicrous (his face remained throughout in “serious” mode, especially when he rapidly corrected himself), and the subject was so grave and painful that it felt wrong to laugh. Sir Keir has a strange, nasal voice which lowers the temperature of everything he says.

Yet we did laugh. People all over the country were calling and messaging each other to share the comedy. And he will never fully recover from it, just as a former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, has never fully recovered from tumbling into the surf in front of TV cameras while taking a walk with his wife on Brighton beach in 1983. It is odd that being ridiculous is so much more damaging to a public figure than being wicked. Yet it is so. Such slips strip away the grandeur and importance with which political figures seek to armour themselves.

There was no doubt of what he had said. The recording is easily found and very clear. He really had spoken of “sausages.” The BBC did not know what to do about the inadvertent sausages on its TV and radio bulletins, and ended up skating past them at speed, noting swiftly that the event had taken place. Nor did any serious newspaper give them the prominence they had in fact attained in the national mind. It all had to be confined to humorous sketches and gossip items. One writer remarked that Sir Keir had made himself “a sausage to fortune.” Some recalled Otto von Bismarck’s remark that, if you like either politics or sausages, it is best not to watch them being made.  

To me, it added to a worry I had already been feeling. Has Britain elected a bumbling nobody to the highest office in the land? Or does his dullness conceal a driving purpose? When I say “nobody,” I am not seeking to be snobbish about the humdrum origins of the King’s First Minister, Sir Keir Rodney Starmer. I am just amazed that somebody with so little apparent hinterland or character has sought and obtained a job which immerses him in history and drama. Yet when asked a few months ago which was his favorite book, he said he did not have one. It was the same when he was asked about his favorite poem. His only obvious enthusiasm is for soccer, though in his Sausage Speech he proclaimed an interest in music dating from his schoolboy years. When he found a portrait of Margaret Thatcher in a study in No. 10 Downing Street (which is his office, not his home, and where many former premiers are commemorated), he displayed a strange pettiness by having it moved, nobody knows where. 

Sir Keir, who curiously prefers not to use his knighthood even though he accepted it, is high in the ranks of English chivalry.  He is a Knight Commander of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, an honour usually given to civil servants and generals.  If anything, his beginnings are more elevated than he likes to let on. He prefers to stress (incessantly) that his late father was a toolmaker, a highly skilled occupation less proletarian than it sounds. Sir Keir, who has now been our prime minister since July, was a noted lawyer who was for some time the director of public prosecutions (DPP), a kind of national district attorney. He went to a first-rate fee-charging high school on a scholarship. He received a better-than-average college education.

So far, so tedious. But there is more. He plainly has the Mandate of Heaven as far as Britain’s left-wing establishment is concerned. Back in 2014, he was selected for a highly desirable parliamentary district in North London, safe and convenient, after just a year as a member of the Labour Party. It was said at the time that he had rejoined the party after stepping down as DPP, a non-political post which required political neutrality. But when had he first joined it? As we shall see, this is an interesting question. In any case there was some resentment over the way he had been parachuted into the seat, blessed with high level support which overwhelmed others in the race. One of his rivals, a senior hospital doctor, complained, reasonably, that Labour already had quite enough lawyers in its senior ranks, saying, “There are more than 20 lawyers in the parliamentary Labour Party and not a single doctor.”

Where had he come from? In his early professional years, he edited the unreadable magazine of a tiny but intense and adventurous Trotskyist sect, followers of the rather racy Greek revolutionary Michaelis Raptis. Raptis, as romantic a figure as Keir Starmer is a prosaic one, served prison time for running guns to the rebels in the French-Algerian war, and when he died in 1996 was given a state funeral in his native Greece by his lifelong comrade Andreas Papandreou. Raptis had many aliases but his best known nom de guerre was “Pablo.” So his followers, who support a clever mixture of cultural and sexual revolution and Green zealotry, are known as Pabloites. I know of no other head of government in any country who has actually been a Pabloite, or may even still be one. Sir Keir has not taken chances offered to him to disown his old enthusiasms. To his credit, he has not publicly betrayed his real beliefs or his long-time comrades. So when the left-wing New Statesman magazine asked him in 2020  if he was still a “red-green,” Sir Keir enthusiastically responded, “Yeah!”

In a crucial exchange in the same interview, he made it impossible for himself to later claim that his political past was not relevant to his political present, saying, “I don’t think there are big issues on which I’ve changed my mind.”

The big issue we were grappling with then was how the Labour Party, or the Left generally, bound together the wider movement and its strands of equality—feminist politics, green politics, LGBT—which I thought was incredibly exciting, incredibly important.

Sir Keir’s past is, even so, confusing if you are versed (as I, alas, am) in the theology of Trotskyism. Trotskyists are usually shaped by suspicion of the Soviet regime. Yet the young Starmer, aged 23, took part in a “work-camp” in Communist Czechoslovakia in 1986, when that country was vigorously and openly persecuting dissent, under the regime imposed on it by Warsaw Pact tanks in 1968. He was also secretary of a London lawyers’ society sharply to the pro-Soviet left of the Labour Party he now leads. He could equally well have joined Labour’s own rival lawyers’ club, as, for instance, Sir Anthony Blair did around the same time. But there is no record of this.

What all this means it is hard to tell, since nobody in the British media apart from me thinks it is interesting, and so he is not asked about it. In his more recent years, he has shown a remarkable ability to alter his opinions on major policy issues, tacking and trimming most notably on Britain’s membership of the European Union. He also managed to serve the Labour Party in senior posts under its former leader Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn is a man of the ancient, obvious, embarrassingly frank steam-powered left. This tendency is despised by the Labour Party’s glossy, computer-era, efficiently camouflaged modern left, to which Sir Keir belongs. But that is because the 21st-century left are more radical than the old veterans, not less so. One of Sir Anthony Blair’s closest aides and best speechwriters, Peter Hyman, has confessed that the modern Labour Party created by Blair’s faction in the 1990s was devised “to take and hold the levers of power… winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st century was a Labour century with Labour values.”

He said the scale of that ambition was “breathtaking” and far more radical than Jeremy Corbyn. He explained: “If Labour could be in power for a serious amount of time, then the country would, we believed, change for good; not a burst of socialism for one time (if that), but changed institutions and values that could shape the country for all time.”

People like Corbyn are also useful to the Labour establishment. They can give the impression of moderation by attacking them. Sir Keir first supplanted Corbyn and then drove him from the Labour Party. If by any chance Sir Keir is still a revolutionary at bottom, this sort of thing would be no great surprise. Such people, as I should know from my own Marxist days, are taught to be wholly tactical about superficial and short-term matters, the better to attain the real long-term goals they seek.  

But what are Sir Keir’s real goals? He became prime minister on July 5, and his premiership has more or less liquefied in the weeks since. There has been foolish, avoidable uproar because Sir Keir and many of his senior colleagues received embarrassing gifts from a multi-millionaire donor, a TV mogul called Waheed Alli who sits in the House of Lords and more or less embodies the Cultural Revolution. The Premier, who is not poor and has a pleasant London home, received suits and spectacles, plus the use of a lavish apartment, from Baron Alli. Alas, the modish eyewear was plainly not of the type that sharpens the vision. It took him rather a long time to come clean about these presents (British members of parliament must open up about such things in a public Register of Interests). Nobody, including Baron Alli and Sir Keir, has actually done anything wrong. It just looks wrong, in a simple, easily understood way. It has the blazing, unforgettable simplicity of a fairy tale, and in this case it also asks to be mocked

Then there are the economics. Starmer and his finance minister pretended, on arrival at their desks, that they were shocked, deeply shocked, by the appalling state of the national finances (which they had known perfectly well, as it is visible from space). On this excuse they immediately began predicting harsh measures to come, with a kind of dismal glee. These included the abolition of an annual handout of money to the elderly, supposed to help them heat their homes. There are in fact many faults with this payment, one of them being that you receive it even if you are a multi-millionaire (Baron Alli, perhaps fortunately, is too young to qualify). It was as if the new Labour government had in fact been taken over by its enemies.

Yet all this may turn out to be foam and froth. Sir Keir’s government still faces no serious opposition. The Conservative Party, prostrate after its worst election defeat for decades, is groping for a new leader. But none of those seeking the office has anything of interest to say. They have in reality all accepted the Blairite legacy: cultural, moral, sexual and social revolution, hard egalitarianism, especially in education, plus heated Greenery (Modern Toryism also seems to have had a brush with Pabloism). It was thanks to the Tories that Britain last week closed down its only remaining coal-fired power station, a futile dogmatic gesture even if you accept the ideology behind the decision. China, from which Britain now imports all the things we used to make, builds dozens of such establishments every year and is digging up much of Inner Mongolia to satisfy its huge appetite for coal. Nobody has any idea how Britain can reach its Green targets without more or less de-industrializing. 

The only opposition with any spirit and verve is currently England’s new Trumpoid movement (it is all but unknown in Scotland or Wales). This is a coalition of Thatcherite nostalgists (formerly Tory voters) and working-class opponents of mass immigration (formerly Labour voters), which can summon up quite a large number of votes and helped to destroy the Tory majority in July. In a severe crisis, it might become very strong. But what would it actually do if it attained office? Like the Tories, it has a very vague idea of the forces it faces, and so has very little chance of overcoming or reversing them.

The worst mistake of political conservatives in the western world has been to refuse to understand and examine the length, breadth, depth, and height of the post-1968 left in Europe and North America. If you do not know what you are fighting, you will never find out why you are fighting, or how you should fight it. By becoming dull, and by speaking in code, the revolution has overwhelmed those who would have fought it with all their might if it had appeared in the guise of the Bolsheviks or the Jacobins.

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