48 Britain The Economist February 20th 2021
Starmer stuck
W
hen he wonthe leadership of a shattered Labour Party in
April 2020, Sir Keir Starmer got off to a blistering start,
wresting control of his party from the far left, rebuilding bridges
with a Jewish community that had been alienated by anti-Semi-
tism and impressing middle England with his smart suits and nice
manners. Ten months later he is stuck. He swats at the govern-
ment without ever landing a blow. He has appointed a shadow
cabinet that has done the seemingly impossible and underper-
formed the worst cabinet since the second world war. After
months of level-pegging in the opinion polls, the Conservatives
have established a solid lead.
There are lots of excuses for this. Sir Keir got off to such a strong
start that a loss of momentum was inevitable. The pandemic
makes life easier for governments than oppositions because peo-
ple rally behind their leaders. Sir Keir’s sensible attempt to deal
with this problem by focusing on competence was fatally under-
mined by the government’s world-beating vaccine programme.
But Labour is gripped by the fear that Sir Keir’s current doldrums
also point to troubling weaknesses in his political abilities.
The most obvious of these is his formulaic approach to his job:
he identifies obvious problems and presents solutions to them
with a mechanical precision that lacks style or panache. Not patri-
otic enough? Display a flag. Too London-centric? Go on about “the
North''. Too left-wing? Expel the chief lefty, the former party leader
Jeremy Corbyn. Too anti-business? Unveil “an unashamedly pro-
business agenda”. The danger is that this paint-by-numbers poli-
tics alienates core supporters (who were particularly incensed by
the flag business) without convincing the target audience that he
means what he says. It’s all uncomfortably reminiscent of Michael
Dukakis’s attempt to de-wimpify himself by sitting in a tank.
The second is excessive caution. Labour’s talent pool is neces-
sarily limited following the departure of rising stars such as Tris-
tram Hunt and Andy Burnham during Mr Corbyn’s nuclear winter
and the reduction of mps as a result of losses in the 2019 election.
But the leader’s defensiveness is preventing him from making the
best of what material he has. His insistence on leaving established
talents such as Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn on the back benches
while keeping the few stars that he has such as Angela Rayner andLisa Nandy in the cupboard suggests either an obsession with con-
trol or, worse, fear of being overshadowed.
These two weaknesses add up to a bigger problem: a failure to
produce a vision of the future. The most successful Labour govern-
ments have all been powered by a distinct idea: think of 1945 (New
Jerusalem), 1964 (White Heat of Technology) and 1997 (Cool Britan-
nia). Sir Keir tried to provide a hint of this on February 18th in a
speech full of references to “a new chapter for Britain”, a “partner-
ship between government and business” and a willingness to em-
brace “the change that’s coming in science, technology and work”.
But who these days doesn’t believe in new chapters, partnerships
with business and embracing change?
The current doubts on the left about Sir Keir’s leadership may
blow away as quickly as they have blown in. A victory, let alone
two, against Tory mayoral incumbents in Birmingham or Teesside
in the local elections in May would panic the Tories. The govern-
ment’s successes—getting Brexit done and rolling out the vac-
cine—conceal deeper failures: the economic damage Brexit is do-
ing and one of the highest death rates in the world from covid-19.
Yet what if Sir Keir is stuck because he’s got nowhere to go?
What happens if, for all his positive qualities of decency and deter-
mination, he just doesn’t have what it takes? Natural politicians
are storytellers and preachers: they not only hold their audiences
in the palm of their hands but also persuade them to see the world
through their eyes. The three great lawyer-politicians of recent
years—Tony Blair in Britain and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in
the United States—changed the political world precisely because
of their ability to turn the political stage into a pulpit. Messrs Clin-
ton and Blair preached about civilising capitalism (the Third Way),
Mr Obama about blue and red America melting happily together.
Sir Keir, by contrast, is a lawyer first and foremost—brilliant at
tearing down an opponent but mediocre when it comes to creat-
ing a compelling narrative.Boris’s scrapes
The contrast with the man in Number 10 is particularly worrying
for the Labour Party. Mr Johnson is Horrid Henry to Sir Keir’s Per-
fect Peter. He’s forever getting himself into terrible scrapes—li-
kening Muslim women to post boxes, for example, or finding him-
self stuck on a zipwire because he had lied about his weight. His
career sometimes looks like a series of disasters: getting sacked
from his first job in journalism and from one of his first political
jobs for lying about an affair, messing up his first few months as
mayor and making a hash of his time as foreign secretary. But he’s
also a natural politician who thrives on the whirligig of events. He
has never missed an opportunity, from Eton onwards, to get stuck
into the fray, the dirtier the better. He knows how to tell a compell-
ing story: indeed, his career was built on an embroidered tale of
the pompous incompetence of the eu, which he dreamed up as a
journalist in Brussels. Perfect Peter, by contrast, enjoyed his great-
est success doing the strictly apolitical job of director of public
prosecutions and spent four years criticising the government’s
Brexit policy without changing the debate, or even coming up with
a single phrase to match “take back control” or “get Brexit done”.
Mr Johnson has learned from his mistakes: despite messing up
when he became mayor he got his act together and won a second
term with an enhanced majority. The Conservative Party’s biggest
worry is that he has many more mistakes in him. The Labour Par-
ty’s biggest worry is that Sir Keir will go on being competent, and
not much more than that. Bagehot
The Labour leader is Perfect Peter to Boris Johnson’s Horrid Henry