The Eras Torture

Keir Starmer has crammed a decade of Tory missteps into 18 months

Peter Mandelson and Keir Starmer (Number 10 Flickr)

In the almost two decades since 2007, the UK has been buffeted by a series of exogenous shocks. The Global Financial Crisis blew a hole in the country’s public finances. The Brexit referendum unleashed years of investment-sapping uncertainty before dismantling Britain’s economic model. The Covid-19 pandemic pushed already frail public services to the brink. And the energy crisis sent the cost of essentials — from fuel to food — skyrocketing.

Unsurprisingly, this volatility filtered down into the way in which Britain is governed. Prior to 2007, it was fairly unremarkable for a first-term government to win re-election, before the prime minister bowed out (with varying degrees of reluctance) at around the 10-year mark. Since 2016, we have become rather more Italian — albeit without the impossibly broad-shouldered central defenders — as prime ministers have come and gone.

The election of a Labour government was supposed to end all that. Keir Starmer was a steady hand for turbulent times, promising an end to May-ite impotence, Johnsonian sleaze, Truss-ite chaos and all-round Tory psychodrama. A man who stood outside of Downing Street on day one, promising to restore “service and respect to politics”, end “the era of noisy performance” and tread “more lightly on your lives”.

Forget staggering from news cycle to news cycle, here was a forward-looking leader intent on bringing about “a decade of national renewal”. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

The abridged version

One of my comparative advantages as a writer (but to my absolute detriment as a human being), is the ability to build bridges. Not actual bridges, obviously — that requires years of training as a civil engineer. But bridges between ideas or, more accurately, achingly unhip pop culture references to illustrate ideas. So to land my argument — that Starmer has condensed a decade of Conservative missteps and character flaws into 18 months — I considered using the following devices:

• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) — in which three actors attempt to perform all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays in roughly 90 minutes

• Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation album

• Listening to a podcast or audiobook at 1.5x speed

• The Eras Tour, a concert that celebrated Taylor Swift’s artistic evolution by dividing the show into distinct segments based on each of her studio albums

(Number 10 Flickr)

In this way, the Starmer premiership is an abridged version of the last four Tory prime ministers, a compilation album I genuinely thought had been discontinued or a billion-dollar musical extravaganza distilling a legendary discography into three hours. But it all felt a bit… unnecessary? Frankly, the last year and a half speaks for itself:

• The inability to get legislation through the Commons, the backbenchers obsessed with removing a disliked chief of staff and a humble address demanding the release of legal advice? That’s the story of Theresa May’s premiership.

• The eruption of scandal in which the prime minister is implicated because of what he already knew when he appointed the culprit¹ to high office? That’s Boris Johnson.

• The chaotic response to an opposition day debate² that accelerated the political crisis? That’s Liz Truss.

• And the absence of a compelling narrative or strong political antennae? That’s Rishi Sunak.

I don’t think it was obvious or predestined that it should go this way. I had considered Starmer to be, well, reasonably good at politics. A guy who got himself appointed Director of Public Prosecutions, selected for a safe Labour seat, who served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet while at the same time calling for a second EU referendum. Pitch-perfect preparation for a tilt at the leadership.

Becoming party leader, chasing out the antisemites before denouncing Corbynism with such force it would have made Nikita Khrushchev blush. Winning a landslide majority… this is a damn sight more than most Labour leaders achieve.

And yet, here we are. Starmer squats in Number 10, his MPs unsure what to do with him. He no longer commands a majority in parliament — and looking back at U-turns stretching all the way back to last summer, it’s not clear he has for a while.

I had assumed Starmer would hang on until grim defeat because that is what Labour leaders get to do. But that the party’s best chance would be — like the Liberals in Canada — to ditch him in the final year of government for a shiny new model. To use words Labour people will instinctively understand, that option no longer exists.

Come the May elections, the party could conceivably come fourth in Scotland, fifth in Wales and get a bloody nose in London. Even a prime minister capable of getting legislation through parliament and clear-eyed enough to avoid appointing Peter Mandelson ambassador to Washington would struggle to survive such a thrashing.

1. In Johnson’s case, it was the Chris Pincher affair

2. A debate on fracking, of all things