Killing Keir and admiring Andy
Two exercises in projection
The public eclipse of one man and the sunrise of another is a rich quarry for the mining of metaphor. As I think I have just proved.
Some are visual. The New Statesman magazine, which practically launched the Starmer Out, Burnham In campaign last September, chose yet another Bayeux Tapestry take-off for its Starmer resignation cover. Naturally Andy Burnham was William the Conqueror and Keir Starmer was Harold and, tellingly, the Norman Conquest had become the Northern Conquest.
Some sticklers for process might have regarded this as premature, but if so it was significantly more forgivable than Burnham’s triumphalist mass selfie in Westminster Hall. Would it really have harmed him had he waited until he had actually been elected Labour leader?
And though it’s probably best not to overthink the Conquest conceit (is Gordon Brown Edward the Confessor in this one, and Jeremy Corbyn Harald Hardrada?) any schoolchild knows that the Norman invasion led to a total replacement of the old ruling class by a new one, and not much benefit to the ordinary, hard-working Saxon yokel. And what exactly has the North conquered? Before indulging this ancient resentment it’s worth recalling that between 1992 and 2015 not a single Labour leader sat for a seat south of Doncaster—and the previous two had represented Welsh seats. In fact, before Jeremy Corbyn, Clement Attlee had been the last Labour leader to represent a seat south of Yorkshire and east of Swale.
More thoughts on the Northern stuff later. What interests me for the purposes of this piece is the psychology of projection. I’ve written before about the John Majoring of Starmer – the exaggerated contempt for him based not insubstantially on his “rizz” deficit. Both have boring voices which sound unconvincing the more convincing they need to be. Neither had that public-school charm which at least four prime ministers since 1997 have possessed.
Almost all of Starmer’s political obituaries that I have seen have been disobliging, as they try to explain the defenestration of a sitting prime minister by his party less than two years after a major election victory in terms of his failings.
Starmer was condemned as a flip-flopper, who couldn’t hold a course, and who dropped his subordinates in it when in trouble. He stuck by his chancellor, though. His growth record is not bad, he has boosted government investment, small-boat crossings are down, there are significantly fewer asylum seekers in hotels than when he came into office, net migration is right down – and these used to be things people cared about, up until last week. In a hostile international environment, you could argue for his steadiness.
Unemployment, however, is up, NEETs are a big problem, the housing crisis continues, the defence budget is a source of internal friction, welfare spending continues to baffle policymakers. The government champions measures which look to many to be expedient. And Starmer has been poor at tugging at the ear of the voters and getting them to listen to his arguments for what his government does.
It’s this that gives rise (I think) to what Sam Freedman has described as a lack of “directional ideology” – i.e. creating the feeling that the government doesn’t know what it is doing. So here is an interesting contrast: in October 1980 Margaret Thatcher made her defiant “The lady’s not for turning” speech to the Tory Party conference. At that point Labour was typically around 20% ahead in the polls, manufacturing output had plummeted, unemployment had just passed the two million mark (it would reach three million in early 1982). One year after that speech her Employment Secretary, Norman Tebbit (with unemployment at 2.8 million and following a summer of riots in inner-city areas), addressed the 1981 Party conference and told them that he had “grown up in the ‘30s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work and he didn’t give up till he found it.” This was certainly “directional ideology”.
True, Thatcher enjoyed press support that Starmer never would. Even so, it is hard to imagine a modern politician in the era of social media and 24-hour news taking such risks. Consider the disaster of the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance, widely cited by focus groups as the primal sin committed by the Starmer government. Yet for several years it had been a primary target of editorials, economic commentators and those arguing for generational equity. But when Labour did the deed, it found itself in that old Lone Ranger joke, where the masked lawman, surrounded by hostile Apaches, turns to his trusted Native American sidekick and says, “Looks like we’re in a bit of a fix, Tonto,” and Tonto replies, “What do you mean ‘we’, paleface?” So it was that no minister stood up at Labour Party conference and spoke of how her old granny had not sat around freezing but got on her mobility scooter and looked for firewood.
My point is that Starmer may not have been good but he wasn’t a disaster, and yet he ended up underwater by 40 points and with commentators claiming that he was “hated” by the voters.
In these polarised times it’s impossible to escape being hated by someone. Starmer was labelled a genocidal war criminal over Gaza by the Left and an abettor of antisemitism by Netanyahu supporters for his recognition of the state of Palestine. Some gender-critical feminists loathe him for being slow to appreciate the pitfalls of gender ideology, and transgender supporters for appreciating them eventually. Latter-day discoverers on the Right of the historic wrongs imposed upon the people of Diego Garcia (almost entirely a “Left” issue until 2024) now call Starmer a “traitor” over a Chagos deal that was very nearly the policy of the last Conservative government.
In recent weeks new kinds of crimes have been laid at Starmer’s door. He was a disappointment in the tearoom, failing to stimulate his backbenchers and thus displaying the parliamentary equivalent of erectile dysfunction. He was strangely incurious. He was unsusceptible to argument. He callously didn’t even tell his staff that he was about to resign (which, if they hadn’t realised it by last weekend, made them a political version of the WASPI women).
But the voters? Why would they hate someone who has tried pretty hard not to upset them? (In fact, polls seem to suggest that very negative feeling about Starmer is limited to around 30% of the electorate.)
I get the feeling of drift. I get the feeling among many that life is getting marginally more difficult rather than better. But I don’t really understand the desperate need to see a prime minister cut off less than two years after his appointment.
Killing the king
So it occurs to me that I may be looking in the wrong place. There seems to be a negative projection into Starmer, that makes him a scapegoat for all our dissatisfactions. It’s not that he is personally hateful but that he is the embodiment of our failures. Get rid of him and we can start again.
Anthropologists might well be unsurprised by this idea, which is that ancient, atavistic impulses are reborn in the age of social media.
