The Lord Protector

It has been amusing to see the reaction of centrist commentators to Keir Starmer's decision to welcome Natalie Elphicke into the Labour Party as a sitting MP. One school of thought sees this as strategically sound (Rafel Behr's "advertise [an] open door to Tory voters") but tactically maladroit, the subtext being that Starmer still lacks the sensitive antennae of a more seasoned political operator. The other school of thought espies the hubris of a leader who thinks his entry to Number 10 by Christmas is nailed on. For example, John Crace in the Guardian reckoned that "Starmer could have told Elphicke: “Thanks, but no thanks. We appreciate your offer but don’t think you’re quite the right fit. ...” Then the party might have claimed the moral high ground and still banked the win. Instead, it got greedy." Crace suffers from the deformation professionelle of the Parliamentary sketch-writer in that he sees politics in the combative terms of "sides". What he struggles to acknowledge is that Starmer is engaged in a campaign to make Labour the national party of Britain and to that end will not refuse entry to anyone on the right of the political spectrum short of Nigel Farage.

The suggestion that Starmer remains occasionally tone-deaf, even naive, is a useful fiction. While he is clearly a cuckoo in the nest of the Labour Party, he is also an experienced member of the establishment who lives and breathes the particular governmentality of the UK state. The embrace of Elphicke and the rhetoric of "stopping the boats" is not merely an opportunistic attempt to attract xenophobic voters that in turn worries progressives. It is a more fundamental reassurance to the state apparatus that a Labour government will increase disciplinary powers, hence the pledge to create a new "border security command" by diverting the funds earmarked for the misbegotten Rwanda scheme, and hence the absence of detail on the creation of "safe and legal routes" for asylum-seekers. This conscious identification of Starmer with the state and its rhetorical proxy "the country", and the incongruity of his leadership of the Labour Party, will only become more pronounced once he is installed in Downing Street. It is the suggestion that he doesn't "get" Labour or politics more generally that will come to seem naive.

Liberals are never even-handed in their treatment of the "extremes" of left and right. The one cannot be tolerated under any circumstances; the other can be both tolerated and negotiated with. An example of this was David Lammy's recent speech to the Hudson Institute in Washington where he both insisted that the UK could find common cause with a future President Trump and that "the lowest point of his political life had been Labour’s failure to tackle antisemitism under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn". The first claim goes beyond Atlanticist Realpolitik to emphasise that from the elevated view of international relations there is no discernible difference between a self-proclaimed "centre-left" Labour Party and whatever stripe of centre-right or rightwing administration is in power in the US. In contrast, the second claim is almost bathetic in its mundane focus on bureaucratic procedure and office politics - the grubby reality of the sabotage undertaken by the Labour right and the hypocritical connivance of the "soft left" represented by the likes of David Lammy and Lisa Nandy.

What Crace and his mates at the Guardian cannot admit is that if your priority is keeping out the left, then any expansion towards a big tent politics necessarily means accommodating the right. And what Lammy and others in the PLP cannot admit is that Starmer does not see himself as a Labour man but as the representative of the state, and as such has little compunction about challenging the party's shibboleths and will display zero loyalty to those MPs who helped him into power. One thing you can be confident of is that Starmer will be increasingly brutal in his reshuffles once he has become Prime Minister and that there will be a lot of disgruntled ex-ministers on the backbenches who suddenly discover their political conscience after their sacking. It is becoming more and more clear that Starmer will head not only an authoritarian government but a distinctly nationalist one as well. Those Union Jacks aren't just for show. Though the SNP are likely to take a battering in the general election, this will ironically help them thereafter as Labour offers a revived unionism that will be light on further devolution and heavy on the cultural insensitivity.

In terms of his personal style, Starmer has started to display the characteristics more usually found in French public life: the idea that the head of government should be above the fray of mere politics and not subject to the "tribal" loyalties of party, which is straight out of the Charles De Gaulle playbook that lives on today in the "Jupiterian" style of Emmanuel Macron. But where Starmer and Macron differ in their performance of the role is that the latter appreciates the need for dramatic panache, hence the often ridiculous interventions on the European stage and the traditional obsession with domestic biopolitics. In contrast, Starmer sees his role in less quasi-monarchical terms, but he also appears to see it in more puritanical and small-c conservative terms, hence his tendency towards the condemnatory (outside of football fluff you rarely hear him ehthusiastically celebrating anything) and his use of an antiquated iconography (the flags, the toolmaker dad, the pebbledash semi etc). If Macron is inescapably bound to a tradition established by Napoleon Bonaparte, Starmer appears more in the mould of Oliver Cromwell.