Last week, the prime minister appeared to be governing against his former self. The barrister who came to public prominence as the (unpaid) representative of two misfit environmental campaigners in the iconic McLibel case took to the pages of the Daily Mail to denounce an agitator against the expansion of the A47 in Norfolk as a green “zealot.” Sixty-eight-year-old Andrew Boswell was helpfully identified by name in the accompanying Mail spread.
The aspiring Labour leader, who celebrated a 2020 Court of Appeal ruling against expanding Heathrow by congratulating climate campaigners, has in 2025 made a great show of narrowing the grounds for challenging infrastructure projects, as he paves the way for a bigger airport.
And after Prince Harry forced the owners of The Sun to acknowledge and apologise for their newspaper’s many years of law-breaking, the government of the one-time director of public prosecutions—who in 2011 called for a “robust approach” into investigating the Murdoch empire—opted to look away. We don’t hear Starmer publicly questioning whether former Sun editor Rebekah Brookes is a suitable boss for News UK. His government’s only substantive response has been to confirm that the once-planned second stage of the Leveson Inquiry into the ethics of the press will not be going ahead.
The ruthlessness—some would say shamelessness—with which Starmer jettisoned the 10 left-wing pledges he made to Labour members when he was running for the leadership of the party has been commented on often enough. His basic tactic of playing to the base before tacking to the centre was standard political fare. Yes, he pursued it with singular audacity, but then he faced special challenges in drawing a line under the chaos of the Corbyn years.
This is beginning to feel different, however, almost psychological. It is as if the prime minister has decided that the only way to hold on to power is to ensure his government repels the kind of person he used to be. Watch footage of the young Starmer as a campaigning lawyer, voicing indignation about inequalities of power, and it is very hard to imagine him joining today’s Labour party. Admittedly, as an earnest and unusually well-informed citizen, the young Starmer would find some things to his liking in the way that Britain is being run in 2025, such as moves to increase security for shift workers, or taxes being raised to shore up collapsing public services.
But would these positives really be enough to overpower the things that would likely put him off? Things including—again just last week—gratuitous stunts to ban benefit cheats from driving amid a deepening poverty crisis. Long before that, the young crusader against McDonalds’ corporate interests would have been flinching in dismay at a health secretary who boasts of his desire to open the door that (supposedly) keeps the private sector out of the NHS. Surely, the young human rights lawyer would have shaken his head in disbelief, too, at the determination of his future self not to describe Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza as “collective punishment” last year.
Yes, Starmer has since, very quietly, put some selective humanity back into the foreign policy mix, for example banning (a few) arms sales to Israel on the basis that the law required it. But to the sort of idealist he once was, this would sound like reluctant compliance with some humanitarian obligations from an administration that otherwise drags its feet.
Does it really matter if the likes of the young Starmer would not get behind his party today? We live in terrifying times. The mood is being set by the likes of Elon don’t-feel-too-guilty-about-Nazi-horrors Musk. If the price of keeping such wolves from the door is disappointing campaigning lawyers, perhaps it’s a price worth paying. Emboldened by the huge Commons majority that he secured with a reassuring, establishment pitch last year, my guess is that this is exactly the conclusion Starmer has reached. But as things stand, “safety first” is looking dangerous on three fronts: imperilling the retention of a winning social coalition; precluding a positive campaigning story; and taking a toll on the PM’s personal stock.
Before the election, Starmer fixated on a very particular voter demographic: ageing, small-town, Leave voters. Targeting this group, whose attitudes are a world away from those of campaigning, London lawyers, always risked turning off people like the young Starmer. Nonetheless, it worked brilliantly in last year’s circumstances: courting older Brexiteers who are over-represented in marginal seats helped Starmer win twice as many seats as Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 from, in absolute terms, slightly fewer votes.
Now that Labour has tanked in the polls, however, the danger is that the electoral system that worked wonders for Labour last time could swing into reverse. A projection from one survey last week had Reform ending up with most MPs. In these circumstances, Labour needs to holds its reliable friends close, and also build the broadest possible progressive coalition against the hard right. But instead of fostering such support, rather like their 1930s predecessors who kicked Aneurin Bevan and Stafford Cripps out of the Labour party for supporting a “popular front” against fascism, today’s Labour leadership prioritises looking “respectable” and settling sectarian scores. Some MPs who were suspended for rebelling on child poverty have just been told they will remain suspended because they’ve spoken up against arming Israel or the means-testing of pensioners’ fuel payment. A Labour party which attempts to police discussion of such widespread concerns will prove a narrow church indeed.
Even when it comes to the supposed number one mission of “growth” the government fails to be even-handed. It doesn’t seem to worry about how caricaturing development-blocking “Nimbys” will go down with millions of people, many of them floating voters, for whom local wildlife and landscapes are a big concern—the people we might call “RSPB Britain.” At the same time, it continues to indulge reactionary Brexiteers with an effective veto against gentle steps towards a growth-boosting customs union with Europe, such as was floated by the EU last week.
The failure to make a full-throated argument for a distinctively progressive economic agenda is also making it impossible for Starmer to tell a convincing story about what his government is for. Don’t get me wrong. The young Keir Starmer was a clear thinker, not a fuzzy-headed utopian. He would have grasped the reality that an expanding economy is necessary to bring in the revenues needed to solve social problems. He would have accepted, too, that the costs of very localised conservation (such as the exorbitant and much-ridiculed bat tunnel on the HS2 line) may sometimes become disproportionate and need to be qualified for the greater good.
But these are considerations of policy, not campaigning. Abstract promises of more GDP may soothe business nerves, but will not in themselves inspire anyone to get out to the polls and vote Labour. The concrete and particular always trumps the abstract and general in political communication. Whether or not you’ve got offsetting green policies, few will notice them if you’re most visible move is to push through a bigger airport.
It’s nearly 60 years since Bobby Kennedy warned that national income statistics miss most of what’s important in life, and more than double that since Oscar Wilde defined cynicism as knowing “the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Like any other young progressive, Keir Starmer would once have instinctively understood both thoughts. Prime Minister Starmer, on the other hand, finds it more convenient not to compute either.
Which brings us to the question of how the prime minister is seen as a leader. His sinking stock in the polls is unmissable, and exceptional. In the shadow of Trump’s return to the White House, one reading of this is that “the people” want shouting, scapegoating and nationalism—and Starmer must pander to those desires. Another take, however, is that the reason why a very narrow plurality of US voters decided to give Trump another go is that you “knew where you stood” with him.
Trump looks like a thug, and acts like a thug, because he’s always been a thug. For all those voters who are sick, above all, of politicians telling them one thing and doing another, this lends him a certain integrity. For as long as Starmer’s public presentation requires running against the sort of person he used to be, this is an asset he can’t accrue.
A47 activist Andrew Boswell’s response to the prime ministerial charge of “virtue signalling” last week was unsparing: “I don’t virtue signal. I’m doing this for my grandchildren. It is Starmer who is virtue signalling to Daily Mail readers and the fossil fuel lobby.” Would the young lawyer Keir Starmer really have argued with that? Or would he have judged instead that Boswell had understood Prime Minister Starmer perfectly?
