On a bone-chillingly cold morning in January, it felt as if I had suddenly found at least part of the reason for Keir Starmer’s chronic unpopularity. I was in the Mancunian constituency of Gorton and Denton, where the prime minister and his people’s decision to block Andy Burnham from standing was about to hand victory to the Green party. More specifically, I was in a forlorn covered market about to be regenerated into a “food and drink cluster”, talking to a sixtysomething man nursing a mug of tea.
What a strange thing to go looking for, but that’s the Guardian for you!
What, I wondered, did he think of the man at the top? He gave me roughly the same answer that I’d heard from a lot of my other interviewees: “I really don’t like him at all.” But like most other people I met that day, he couldn’t quite explain what fired his antipathy, which seemed to make it worse. His face scrunched into a mixture of scepticism and exasperation. “I don’t know why – I just don’t,” he said.
It’s visceral. It defies description.
The most specific answer I got from anyone else was: “He hasn’t done what he said he’d do.” So there it was: as well as a modern tendency to loathe politicians that regularly seems arbitrary, whipped-up and way over the top, a sense that Starmer’s sheer blankness – his painful lack of clarity and the absence of a halfway coherent story about his own government – was making a lot of people dislike and mistrust him all the more.
It is not unreasonable, I think, to see the entire Starmer project as one gigantic volte-face, given what he promised to the 275,000 Labour members who gave him the job of leader: a 10-point leftwing shopping list that included everything from multiple nationalisations to the defence of migrants’ rights.
And in the end, how many of them did he actually provide?
When Starmer was the leader of the opposition, moreover, the public got a sharp flavour of his seemingly limitless flexibility. In June 2020, he and Angela Rayner were photographed taking the knee in support of Black Lives Matter; by 2022, Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum jubilee had begun Starmer’s passage into an increasingly bizarre world of flags and zealous patriotism. By that point, I could not help but think of a pearl of wisdom beloved of the market traders of the West Midlands: “Never make a mug of your punter.”
He stood for nothing, so he fell for everything.
His government – and yes, it did quite a few good things, from gradual rail nationalisation to the Renters’ Rights Act, improved rights at work, more NHS funding and finally taking a step back towards Europe – was seemingly locked into regular bursts of confusion and absurdity: witness a reference on the Labour List website to “six milestones, five missions, [and] three foundations”.
And of course to the average Guardian reader, those do look like positive things. Back to the rest of us, and they don’t.
From such murk emerged the endlessly unfolding Peter Mandelson affair, and that was pretty much that. “No 10 symbolises the principles of public life in this country: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership,” Starmer said in 2022. If you were now to read those words out to the average member of the public, they would surely collapse in contemptuous mirth.
Such qualities, of course, are more important than ever. But in the era of TikTok, Instagram and all the rest (if you are old enough), people now favour leaders who are flamboyant, outspoken, capable of delivering surprises and able to look as if they enjoy what they do. Surreal modern levels of scrutiny also mean that basic consistency – or a talent for faking it – is usually an absolute must.
We’ll see how good bodybags Burnham does in the popularity stakes soon.
