The Vibes-based Order

According to Polly Toynbee, the Labour government is already being treated harshly by the press: "The honeymoon for Labour is over, say the massed ranks of the rightwing media. What honeymoon was that? It seems to have been over since 5 July." The party's honeymoon started immediately after the 2019 general election. In retrospect, Keir Starmer has enjoyed the longest personal honeymoon, in the sense of a period of indulgence by the media, of any party leader in history. Indeed, he has faced a quite remarkable lack of scrutiny ever since he entered Parliament in 2015. You could attribute this to his good fortune in facing a succession of incompetent Conservative Prime Ministers after 2019, but then the comparison with Tony Blair suggests otherwise. Labour's fresh-faced new leader in 1994 was ridiculed by much of the press as "Bambi" for his inexperience. The backdrop of sleaze and the loss of the Conservative government's reputation for economic competence after Black Wednesday in 1992 meant that a change of government was expected. The only question was whether Blair was an adequate replacement for John Smith, not whether he was an adequate replacement for John Major.

The truth is that the media knew that Boris Johnson would be a disaster at some point and accepted that Labour had to be positioned as a credible replacement government once it had been secured against the left, and once Brexit had been "delivered". While the press was divided on the merits of the latter, there was unanimity on the former. It remains notable that the pro-EU commentators of the Guardian feel that Starmer deserves a long honeymoon despite his central role in sabotaging both the chance of a soft Brexit and a Labour government following his intervention at the 2018 party conference. It's likely that over time some will come to regret their order of priorities, accepting that their instinctive and irrational determination to stymie Corbyn and the left should not have trumped their pragmatic and rational desire to remain in the EU Single Market or Customs Union, but that day is not yet come, hence the petulant whining now about the triviality of £100,000 in goody-bags and the unacceptability of leaks about Number 10's office politics.

Before the sleaze and bitching took centre stage, the attitude of the liberal media towards the government could best be described as one of studied bemusement, both at its apparent priorities (cutting pensioner benefits) and its poor public relations (cutting pensioner benefits). John Harris insisted that "This country needs a lot more than the myopic parsimony of pen-pushers and bean-counters", while Jenni Russell pleaded "Keir, we can’t thrive if all you offer is misery". It's as if neither had spotted at any point over the last 5 years that Starmer had relentlessly moved Labour to the right and appointed a Shadow Chancellor committed to the Treasury View, or that his rhetorical style from day one has centred on the negativity of threats to the party (antisemitism) and threats to the country, both of which would require authoritarian crackdowns. Jonathan Freedland was a little more realistic in his take, claiming that "It’s hard to say that the honeymoon is over, because it never really began. You can’t blame Labour for that: it warned voters before the election not to get their hopes up, and it has stood firm against the menace of optimism ever since." Of course, he has always been an authoritarian masquerading as an even-handed liberal, so his sympathy for the Prime Minister comes as no surprise.

Freedland believes that Rachel Reeves is on the right track because lower interest rates mean "Investment becomes attractive, so the economy begins to grow", and from this all sorts of wonders will arise. He'll not thank you for pointing out that we had near-zero rates for a decade after 2008 during which investment was weak and growth anemic. His attempts to convert from his usual Eeyorish hand-wringing (see any article he's ever written on Palestine) to a Polyannish optimism doesn't convince, but he gives it a good go: "There is an extra prize in sight too. Britain with low interest rates, governed by a new, ostentatiously sensible government with an enormous parliamentary majority, will look like an island of political stability, especially as France and Germany contend with a surging far right. That will attract overseas investment, previously frightened off by the Tory follies of the Brexit years, which means yet more money in Treasury coffers available for public spending." Finally, those sunny uplands are in sight and the damage of Brexit is consigned to history. The purpose of all this nonsense is not to suggest that Reeves should alter course but that Starmer (subtext: still needs to develop political antennae) should make some popular gestures to signal "that better times are on the way". It's all about the vibe, man.

Right on cue we are now told that Starmer is under pressure to ensure his upcoming conference speech offers "hope", though hope of what exactly is unclear. When Peter Mandelson is reduced to lauding Ed Miliband as "a man with a plan", you know they are scratching around. That this demand for optimism comes not only from "party insiders" but "business leaders" is significant. It's clear that the government's focus on doom and gloom is beginning to undermine consumer confidence, and while some of this may be a deliberate ploy to cast whatever crumbs of comfort Starmer comes up with in a better light, it's also clear that this government will be no different to previous Labour administrations in having to toil under the yoke of "business confidence". As Michal Kalecki long ago pointed out, that is merely a way of disciplining governments, who in turn are expected to discipline labour. The idea that business leaders want a better vibe is absurd. What they want is for the government to ease off on any plans to increase tax on capital or to extend workers' rights. And it sounds as if Reeves considers delivering that, aka "stability", as her chief goal.

In this light, the decision to abolish the Winter Fuel Allowance, the lack of embarrassment over donations and freebies, and the insistence that the autumn budget will be painful are all of a piece, intended to reassure business that this government will prioritise the interests of capital. As Phil Burton-Cartledge notes, "Starmer's lorry load of shopping bags and weeks spent in corporate hospitality boxes says loud and clear whose side he's on." But there's another signal being transmitted here, from the media to Starmer himself. The focus on petty corruption among politicians is always a matter of tone. For example, the real critique of Johnson's refurbishment plans for the flat at Number 10 was the assumed vulgarity of the wallpaper. This was held to reflect a lack of taste and (the misogyny being all too apparent) a wife out of control with ideas above her station. The more serious threat to take Johnson down came much later amidst Partygate. The refurb kerfuffle was simply a plea that he be more serious and statesman-like.

The liberal press want Starmer to be more Jupiterian, to borrow a French phrase, and thereby cement centrist, technocratic government as the natural order of things, even as France reveals the squalid reality of ostensibly progressive centrists allying with the reactionary far-right to block the left, all in the interests of "stability". You can also see this demand for tone at work in the British liberal press's coverage of the US Presidential Election, where the Democrats' turn to a strategy of ridicule directed at Trump and Vance has generated enthusiasm among centrists while successfully obscuring Harris and Walz's essentially conservative policy platform, thereby risking a repeat of the errors of condescension that did for Hillary Clinton. The Trump-Harris debate focused heavily on the character of the participants, with the only issue of policy substance being abortion, a topic that neither party is comfortable with and that has only appeared on the agenda as a result of the highly-political actions of the Supreme Court. 

Starmer will no doubt ride out the current wave of criticism over his designer glasses, his expensive if ill-fitting suits and his preference for a box at the Emirates, if only because there is no advantage to be gained in deposing a man who is clearly congenial to capital, to the British establishment and to Washington (regardless of who wins in November). The self-denying ordinance announced today - no more clobber, thanks - does not signal a retreat from his determination to cosy-up to donors, nor does it suggest that he particularly cares about the poor optics of having his expenses subsidised by the rich while some pensioners worry about whether they can afford to put the heating on this winter. What it does suggest is that he is sensitive to the framing of the press: the hint of haut couture is to be avoided as rigorously as sympathy for human rights while the freebies associated with the more demotic environment of football are dismissed as "fair dos", even though an executive box is the concrete form of de haut en bas. 

It amuses me to note that when he interviewed for his first chambers as a barrister after university he was almost turned down because of his poor dress sense, having turned up wearing a post-Punk cardigan. His interviewers could not see that this was a misjudgement of disguise by an ambitious young man determined to enter the liberal establishment and imagining that its dress code is the same in the Middle Temple as it is in a university. The question remains whether Starmer is more in the mould of Balzac's Eugène de Rastignac or Anthony Powell's Kenneth Widmerpool. Liberals secretly hope that he is Rastignac, a man who started penniless and ended up a peer of France by charm and administrative talent. Their fear is that he is Widmerpool, a vulgar petit bourgeois who lacks charm and whose process mania cannot compensate for his lack of elan or rhetorical skill. They wish he was a British Emmanuel Macron but he comes across like a more stuffy version of John Major, an adenoidal, narrow-minded suburbanite. No wonder they were secretly thrilled by the revelation that he wears (or at least inhabits) expensive tailoring.