The creative ambiguity from Keir Starmer is now rapidly breaking down

The National

6 hours ago

Nobody, I think, would be at risk of mistaking Sir Keir Starmer for this kind of easy character. He doesn't even have superficial charm. But his political career demonstrates a keen awareness of the importance of telling the audience in front of you what you think it wants to hear, even if that message is wildly at odds with what you might have said a couple of days, weeks, months or years earlier. For fans, I suppose you might describe this as evidence of Starmer's strategic flexibility. To critics, it looks like mendacity. They probably amount to the same thing.
These days, savvy modern political analysis tends to assume people-pleasing ambiguity is what cunning political operators should do, particularly before elections. When everyone hates you a few months later, you can wisely look back and observe 'you campaign in poetry and govern in prose'. By then, everyone will have forgotten how prosaic your campaign really was.
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Roll out a platform of policies before an election, and you are guaranteed to get yourself mired in the details, some of which are likely to be less than fully worked through. Is this scheme fully costed? Are the costings credible? Have you fully thought through the eligibility requirements?
If you commit to a particular platform, it's inevitable that your policies will both generate and alienate elements of your support. Almost all policy choices create winners and losers, and the losers may not be inclined to vote for you. Imagine Labour had included winter fuel cuts or Pip clawbacks and cuts in their manifesto. The reaction, I imagine, would have been interesting.
And thus the conventional political wisdom says – don't give your enemies a large target. Be vague. Don't commit.
As far as possible, don't specify. Deal in vibes instead. Speak of visions and moods and abstract goals. Talk about change by all means, but don't overcommit. Maintain a tight political silhouette.
Stay ambiguous.
By avoiding standing for anything in particular, there is much more scope for the voters – and indeed, parts of the media – to invent for themselves the details you have failed to fill in. If you have goodwill in your favour, or at least enough antipathy to your opponents to work with, your bland features and featureless policy platform will become a cluster of hopes and expectations. Present the voters with a blank canvas, and the electorate can project their aspirations and hopes on to you, without experiencing anything so discouraging as being alienated by your actual policy ideas or repelled by the principles you actually stand for.
(Image: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire)
The political cynicism of the press and general public adds a whole other layer to this because if people assume you're speaking out of both sides of your mouth, they might persuade themselves that they – unlike the credulous saps taken in by your fencing and hedging – know what your real intentions are, and happily suppose these real intentions align with their own political preferences. The easiest people to lie to are always those who want to be deceived, after all.
And one of the most remarkable – and remarkably prevalent – thoughts about the incoming Starmer administration was the widespread belief, especially among its supporters, that it was basically lying to get elected, on everything from the economy to welfare to immigration.
On immigration, I've lost count of the number of folk of more liberal persuasions on the issue who persuaded themselves, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that this embattled Labour administration would herald a shift in official attitudes towards refugee policy and immigration. This is just one area where the creative ambiguity which lifted Labour to power is now breaking down.
When you elect to appoint someone from your party's hard right as your Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who already has a track record of crying for 'crackdowns', you know what you're getting, even if it takes 12 months for everyone else to cotton on.
Liz Kendall, you might not remember, stood for her party's leadership in 2015. Steered by Morgan McSweeney – now Starmer's eminence gris in Number 10, after the defenestration of Sue Gray, killed off in classic British establishment style with the pointy end of a peerage – the Kendall campaign secured a mighty 4.5% of the vote, trundling in in fourth place, despite widespread and apparently sympathetic boosting of her candidacy in the right-wing media, claiming that the Leicester MP would be the only Labour leadership candidate to 'strike fear' into Tory hearts, presumably because she'd be advocating a policy platform most of them would recognise.
(Image: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire)
Disabled people have well-founded fears about what Kendall has in mind for them. I imagine the average Tory sleeps soundly in contemplation of this pint-sized terror. This last week suggests her Labour colleagues have been tossing and turning more anxiously of late.
So, it seems, has Sir Keir. In an interview published in The Observer on Friday, Tom Baldwin outlined what he characterised as the 'private trials of Keir Starmer', using the tormented metaphor that like Downing Street's front door, Starmer can only be 'unlocked from within'.
Baldwin advances the dubious thesis that Starmer has always been most effective when he is making and recognising his mistakes. 'Like someone crossing a minefield, he takes steps backwards, to the left and the right, before moving forward again,' Baldwin writes, claiming this 'may look inelegant or uninspiring, but it's still probably the best way of getting to the other side'.
I don't know if Baldwin has any more experience than I do of traversing a killing zone packed with unexploded ordinance, but I'm not sure the lolloping slosh he describes is a particularly sound way of maintaining forward momentum with all your limbs intact – whether you're forging through the Korean Demilitarized Zone or attempting to survive as Prime Minister for more than a calendar year.
But alongside the fawning dribble, Baldwin has tempted Starmer into making a series of fairly remarkable admissions in this interview. Baldwin's thesis, essentially, is that when Starmer – a man who claims he has no capacity for introspection, no favourite book, no favourite poem, no landscape of dreams – experiences a clash between the public and private dimensions of his life, emblematised by his front door, a self-pitying truculence surges up and dominates the Prime Minister's political responses. I may have editorialised a bit in this summary – but not by much.
Take the first few months of Labour's time in office, dominated by the decision to prioritise cutting Winter Fuel Allowance, Downing Street turf wars over which henchperson should be the henchperson in chief, and uncontrolled briefing about just how many freebies different members of the new government were taking from donors and firms in the form of designer clothes, new specks, sports tickets and corporate hospitality.
For this expenses scandal, Starmer blames the dirty-minded people of the press for dragging his wife into it, on the shabby pretext that Mrs S (or 'Lady Victoria Sponger' as some unsympathetic platforms described her) accepted a mere £5000 worth of contributions to her personal wardrobe from Labour donors.
The problem, according to Starmer, is that he 'got emotionally involved', losing his usual 'calm' because 'they dragged Vic into it through no fault of her own'. Optics, he tells us, aren't 'substance', and if you think his family shouldn't be cashing in to the tune of thousands of pounds in expensive costumes, then he seems to think you're the one being insubstantial and optical. The adults are well and truly back in charge, as some of you centrist dads used to coo.
The Labour leader also seems to blame emotion for his decision in a recent immigration speech to caution us all about the imminent prospect of Britain becoming an 'island of strangers'. Starmer told Baldwin that he delivered this speech in a fog of emotion and minimal preparation after an arson attack at his family home.
'I wouldn't have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of Powell,' Starmer says. 'I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn't know either.'
Starmer admits he should have read through the speech properly and 'held it up to the light a bit more' before opening his mouth in public – a remarkable suggestion from someone whose supposedly forensic approach to politics is one of his few and diminishing virtues. As human responses to high-stress situations go, 'accidentally evoking Enoch Powell' is a new one for me.