Keir Starmer wasn’t weird enough for Westminster
A Prime Minister more comfortable on football stands than the dispatch box, Keir Starmer didn’t have the love for politics that Prime Ministers need, writes Tom Harwood
Time and time again, voters tell pollsters they want normal politicians. The country demands people with real jobs, and real interests. Politicians are expected to pretend to follow a football team, and be able to make small talk about Thomas Tuchel’s tactical brilliance or blunders.
And yet, revealed preference often differs from stated preference. People tell pollsters that they want to shop ethically, but instead overwhelmingly opt for fast fashion, and fast food. Just as the voters of Makerfield chose the Cambridge graduate who has only ever worked in professional politics over the ordinary plumber from their patch, the same is true for ‘real’ politicians.
Keir Starmer loves football. I have never seen him more at ease than when talking about how Arsenal performed or who’s up and who’s down in the Premier League. Perhaps his genuine passion for football was behind a slip up this week when Starmer called on Beth Rigby, the Political Editor of Sky News, as Beth from Sky Sports.
No politician has ever made that slip of the tongue before, likely because no other politician has watched more Sky Sports than Sky News before. In this respect Keir Starmer is far closer to the average Brit than pretty much anyone else at the top of politics. And yet, he has presided over a government in shambles.
Voters loathe him, though are often largely unable to articulate as to why. The simple reason for what can honestly often be described as their outright vitriol is that their lives are not getting better. Living standards remain on the floor, and it’s clear that there are other countries managing the global headwinds with more tact and deftness than us. The Starmer ministry has delivered sluggish growth, high inflation, high borrowing and high tax.
Do voters really want ‘normal’?
Part of the reason, in my view, is that Keir Starmer is too normal. He is not an instinctive politician. He lacks a love of the game. He would far rather discuss the offside rule than offshore processing.
It has been reported before how Starmer says little in meetings on policy, sees it as work rather than a vocation, and relies too heavily on his far more political advisers. As one book quoted of an anonymous member of the Prime Minister’s inner circle: “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.”
Starmer’s premiership was perhaps doomed from the moment that he – despite his enormous parliamentary majority – lost a crucial vote on welfare reform. The package of reform was due to limit the projected increase in defence spending by £5bn. Despite the welfare budget still rising under the plans, just not by as much as before, an overwhelming number of Labour MPs rebelled, destroying his parliamentary majority on the issue.
Had Keir Starmer relished an argument over policy in the way Margaret Thatcher or even Tony Blair clearly did, had he personally relished having those debates with his own MPs, it’s entirely probable he would have carried that vote. That’s exactly how Tony Blair delivered similarly difficult disability benefits reforms in 2001, meeting with rebel groups and selling his vision to them. He didn’t quash the entire rebellion, but he convinced enough potential rebels to put down their pitch forks that the vote carried the day.
People say they don’t want political obsessives, but no one other than political obsessives can navigate our political system. An effective Prime Minister has to win over the strangest of all beings, members of parliament. He has to talk to professional political obsessives who love nothing more than talking about politics.
To be an effective PM you have to live and breathe politics. You have to relish the job and the argument. You simply can’t be the kind of person who would rather watch Sky Sports than debate welfare reform.
Tom Harwood is deputy political editor for GB News