In 1868, Charles Dickens was on a train in the United States when a 12-year-old girl slipped into a seat beside him and said that she had read almost all his books, some of them six times. Dickens was surprised and delighted by praise from the young fan, but she then added: “Of course I do skip some of the very dull parts once in a while; not the short dull parts, but the long ones.” Dickens thought this very funny and asked her to tell him which were the boring bits and wrote down what she said.
Could it be that the Labour Party finds some equally sympathetic but straight-talking admirer of Sir Keir Starmer who might be able to coax him into cutting out the long dull bits of his speeches and even omitting some of the short ones (on the other hand, if both went, there would not be much left).
While the young adviser had Starmer’s ear, he or she might point out to him that his public pronouncements would have greater impact were they less chock-a-block with overused words and clichéd phrases.
Dubious ideas
Reviewing his remarks in recent days, he said that “the Southport killings must be a line in the sand for Britain” and “no stone must be left unturned” to discover failings that permitted them. Plans for change are to be “turbocharged” by AI.
The transport system is “broken”, while Britain turns out to be suffering “from a challenge culture” at the service of Nimbyism which is inhibiting growth.
These dead in the water speeches sound as if they were poorly translated from an original Latin text. But the problem is not simply their tired, unpersuasive vocabulary, but the way in which they brim with dubious ideas and discredited chunks of conventional wisdom.
Starmer praises technology as Britain’s saviour, but so did every prime minister since Harold Wilson, who said in 1963 that “a new Britain” needed to be forged in the “white heat” of “scientific revolution”.
A British version of Joe Biden
The UK transport system is not “broken” because it is possible to travel anywhere in the country, but it does need better planning and an upgrading of the existing system with no gargantuan projects. The pro forma attack on Nimbyism stalling big infrastructure projects is factually mistaken and it is absurd to denigrate people fighting for their own backyards or, in other words, their homes.
What makes Starmer’s failings dangerous is that he may turn out to be a British version of Joe Biden, whose weaknesses as a political leader opened the door of the White House to Donald Trump and the semi-fascist right.
Both Starmer and Biden are poor communicators in an era when the internet connects leaders directly to the public on an unprecedented scale. Trump, by way of contrast, is vastly skilled and experienced in manipulating the media to his own advantage, drawing on his experience hosting The Apprentice. He and Vice President JD Vance are politically streetwise in a way that Starmer and his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, are not.
‘Blatantly unconstitutional’
At a time when a majority of people in the US and UK want change, Starmer and Reeves, like Biden and Kamala Harris before them, are coming to symbolise an unacceptable status quo.
Compare the first 100 hours of Trump’s second presidency and the first 100 days of Starmer’s Government. On day one, Trump announced “a new golden age” for America and rolled out a long list of executive orders that gave his followers a sense of revolutionary change, even if many orders will remain a dead letter.
For example, a federal judge has already blocked Trump’s order to restrict the automatic granting of US citizenship to babies born in the US, including those of illegal immigrants, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional”. Yet for Trump this will still be a political win because he has shown his voters that he is being tough on immigrants, an issue that always works in his favour.
Had Trump been the newly elected Labour prime minister he would probably have begun by trying to imprison the heads of the water companies, punitive measures against whom are approved by 82 per cent of the UK electorate. Yet Starmer and Reeves repeatedly do the exact opposite, visibly relishing the sense they are “taking tough decisions” to the detriment of their own supporters.
Poor political instincts
Unsurprisingly, a YouGov opinion poll at the end of their first 100 days showed that 43 per cent of people thought that they had done nothing positive and 22 per cent did not know what they had done. Some 34 per cent of Labour voters, exactly the same as the population at large, saw the means-testing of the winter fuel allowance for pensioners as the Government’s worst mistake, as did 42 per cent of Reform UK voters and 52 per cent of Conservatives.
The next biggest mistake for 12 per cent of Labour voters was the Labour leadership’s freebies scandal – another sign of Starmer’s political tin ear. As with Boris Johnson and “Partygate“, Starmer did not realise how deeply people resent the feeling of “one law for us, another for them”.
Starmer’s poor political instincts are often explained by his background in the law and the Crown Prosecution Service. The same is said of Rachel Reeves and the Bank of England. But this argument does not quite work because Tony Blair, far and away the most formidable British politician this century, was likewise a lawyer.
Box of tricks
Starmer and Reeves remind me rather of newly appointed masters who came to my school and told us all to pull up our socks and buckle down to work with no slacking. They rather gloried in not courting popularity and “taking tough decisions” on this and that. Their efforts were invariably ineffective.
Starmer and Reeves’s ceaseless calls for economic growth as the be all and end all of Government policy requires watering down much-needed reforms like the Employment Rights Bill. This ought to benefit four million workers in precarious employment like care and hospitality workers.
Starmer and Reeves are making the same mistake as the anti-Brexit side in the referendum in 2016, who were baffled by why so many people could not see what damage the UK leaving the EU would do to the GDP. “What do we care what happens to the GDP,” a Leave voter from Walsall asked me. “We haven’t seen any of it for 40 years.”
A buffoon and demagogue like Trump should not have been elected US president in 2016 and 2024. There is nothing magical about his political box of tricks. He won on both occasions because he faced weak Democratic Party candidates. Starmer’s inadequacies might likewise “turbocharge” the further rise of Nigel Farage, Reform UK or some other variant of the extreme right.
There is still time for some candid adviser to put Starmer right about his speeches, though, unlike the young Dickens admirer, it may be difficult to find anybody prepared to read them six times over.
Further Thoughts
I used to comfort myself during the first Donald Trump presidency and Boris Johnson’s years as UK prime minister by reflecting that their rule was so chaotic that this limited their capacity to do long-term evil. A good dollop of wishful thinking made the argument sound attractive, but I am less sure today that incompetence, inability, division and corruption are much of a safeguard against authoritarian rule.
The greatest hindrance to Trump and Johnson was probably resistance from state officials and political elite – the courts and Congress, in the case of Trump; and Parliament, in the case of Johnson. Such opposition to Trump will be weaker the second time around, though still not negligible.
Incompetence and corruption did not mellow old style fascist regimes in the 1930s and it is unlikely to do much better under populist-nationalist regimes in the 2020s. Dictatorships are seldom efficient, whatever they may pretend.
Mussolini did not make the trains run on time in Italy (somebody once wrote a whole book disproving this propaganda claim). Nazi Germany was highly disorganised, as the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper was astonished to discover when he researched his classic, The Last Days of Hitler, soon after the end of the war. Power was parcelled out shambolically between competing Nazi satraps. Crackpots and crooks though many of these were, unfortunately this did not stop them slaughtering millions of people – and blowing up half the world through sheer stupidity.
Another depressing but significant point is that the world is far more unstable in 2025 than it was in 2016, when Trump first became president. The legacy of president Joe Biden is savage wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Trump may have pledged to end them, but they have their own momentum. President Vladimir Putin needs something close to a victory to justify his war, which has killed and wounded so many Russians.
Beneath the Radar
A cynic once derided the English capacity for delay by saying impatiently that, if England ever adopted a national motto, he would like to suggest, “How about Wednesday week?” Even this sounds uncharacteristically precipitate, given the glacial pace of decision-making.
This willingness to put off taking decisions ad infinitum while pretending to take action has become an art form. Its institutional embodiment is the public inquiry, whose investigations are meticulous and long but their conclusions unread or ignored. Another diversionary gambit is the creation of “taskforces” to deal with some state failure.
The furore over child sexual abuse and grooming gangs is a classic example of how demagoguery distorts public perception of a scandal and sabotages counter measures. The Tory government set up the sexual abuse task force in 2023 to tackle what the then prime ,inister Rishi Sunak called “evil grooming gangs”. But the force found that only 19 per cent of the cases it dealt with involved networks of abusers; 27 per cent of offenders were family members and 22 per cent other children.
These findings did not fit in with the government claim that child sexual exploitation had boomed because “woke” police were going easy on Pakistani gangs to avoid provoking racial tensions. Sunak said: “For too long, political correctness has stopped us from weeding out vile criminals who prey on children and young women.” The government called this new police unit the Grooming Gangs Taskforce, while the police referred to it as the Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce, showing their more realistic view of the issue.
Cockburn Picks
Here is a very good documentary on the great Belfast poet Michael Longley who has just died. A the time of his death, he was unquestionably the greatest poet in the UK or Ireland. Another very good series of interviews by Olivia O’Leary called Michael Longley’s Life of Poetry is on BBC radio.
Classic Dom: turns out Cummings was right all along