The scene is a prison in the Caribbean in the early 1990s. A young, overeducated Marxisty-looking English guy wearing an ill-fitting olive suit is ushered by wardens to the maximum-security section where his newest client is lounging on a concrete slab in a string vest.
“Hiya, my name is Keir,” the man says, “and I am here to help get you off death row.”
The prisoner eyes him up, chewing a matchstick.
“Whats happun mai name e Denzil,” the man responds in his Jamaican patois.
Keir settles into a chair opposite the inmate’s cage.
‘‘First I’d like to ask you Denzil: what did you do to get put in here?’
“I barbecued mai family, de include mai mother-in-law whilst dem de watching television. Later di ekelebe (police) accuse mai for serving dem to mai friends.”
“You served them as food?”
“No bi mai fault broda,” Denzil says breezily, “Get mixed up wit di goat.”
I can’t be certain this actually happened of course, but by his own admission, Keir Starmer found encounters with very dangerous people guilty of heinous crimes “moving”.
This issue, of locating his animation in unexpected places, would haunt Keir Starmer not ten days into his premiership.
Starmer arrived, looking uncomfortable, at the scene of one of the country’s worst atrocities in living memory: the brutal murder of three young girls by a maniac repeatedly unsanctioned by liberal white lanyard-wearers because of ‘racist stereotypes’. Why? That couldn’t be answered.
He didn’t hang around, laying down some flowers before gapping it. Any normal man would have acknowledged the impulse, under the circumstances, to part with his security detail and try, just try, to embrace one of the multiple, inconsolable mourners. The thought never occurred to him.
Later, this moment would be viewed through his experiences in saving convicts from the firing squad. Perhaps Starmer did empathize with one party involved in the tragedy… just not the one that sprung to mind.
Mercilessly pursued the enraged
“Two-tier-Keir” became a popular sobriquet following the riots sparked by these murders. Unlike with his performance in Southport, Starmer was anything but apathetic. He tooled up his vindictive little Attorney General, Richard Hermer, and together they mercilessly pursued the enraged, cajoling them into guilty pleas, even going so far as emptying prisons of real thugs to make space (many of whom were jailed again shortly thereafter). Rioters, Facebookers and parents were eerily puzzled at the ruthless efficiency of Starmer and his determination to make a point. They shouldn’t have been.
It was already apparent in his gutting of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. Shortly after assuming leadership of an almost bankrupt, failing party, Starmer rounded up the characters involved in Momentum, Labour’s grassroots movement, which was fond of generating conspiracy theories involving the Rothschild banking dynasty and lizard people. This group consisted of middle-class students whom Starmer blamed for the crashed fortunes of Labour. They were painfully dim most of the time, no contest for a lawyer married to a Jewish lady. It was a massacre; many of them would later find a home in the Greens, a party not too fussy when it came to the whole antisemitism thing.
Some investment bankers shouted at me in 2020 when I cautioned against the prospect of a Starmer administration. I had tried to warn people that something that Starmer had done in June was an expression of profound menace.
On 9 June that year he knelt for a photoshoot in his parliamentary office. The gesture, he’d have you believe, was in solidarity with George Floyd, and that was that. But it wasn’t. Taking the knee is generally not an innocent, kind, politically neutral act. It is a downward ‘sieg heil’, a physical demonstration of ideological commitment.
But in the past few years, I’ve come to accept that he didn’t actually know what he was doing. He saw a black man who died, so responded in the way he had conditioned himself to: a blend of overcompensation and pandering, eliminating all nuance. Four years later he’d thrust a female MP in front of opposition MPs to excuse his actions that day.
Precious time
Almost embarrassed, she dismissed the event: “I don’t think he should be judged on something he did all those years ago.” Precious time was wasted, with people thinking the guy was some Stokely Carmichael-inspired radical who hummed John Lennon as he conjured up ways to persecute white people who smoke or play darts.
But what did Starmer actually accomplish in the one year and 350 days he was in office? What has it been like living under such a plain, uninspiring man, so bland that even when he was enraged, his complexion resembled Chinese-branded luncheon meat?
There is a misconception that because Great Britain’s unemployment rate sits for now in single digits, leadership turbulence doesn’t matter. It does. Leadership remains one of the most profound traditions unmolested by MeToo, or slapped with trigger warnings. It matters a great deal, and in Starmer, Great Britain did not get a leader.
They got a manager, and not the nice manager of a suburban bank branch, but the manager of a medium-priced Irish pub franchise. He delegated poorly, making a laughing-stock of finances and diplomacy.
He skewed priorities and endlessly tried to gain popularity among groups he never stood a chance of winning over. He’d make bold pledges, then renege on them, then apply double standards to his judgement of events. Worst of all, he tried to align the culture with something people hold zero interest in: ‘international law’. These are possibly the themes he discovered counseling psychopaths all those years ago.
Ultimately, one gets no impression. He was there, then not. You walk into a supermarket. The spam display is on sale. You see it. You move on.
[Image: By Chris McAndrew – https://api20170418155059.azure-api.net/photo/X9dwBvuR.jpeg?crop=MCU_3:4&quality=80&download=trueGallery: https://beta.parliament.uk/media/X9dwBvuR, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61331023]
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