Labour MPs have chosen to make themselves accomplices, to take on their leader’s guilt by association. Until yesterday evening, they might plausibly have piled the blame onto Keir Starmer, booted him out and had another go. With his propensity for flip-flopping, his self-contradictions and his terrible judgment, he might have served as a sin-eater or scapegoat.
But, as the Cabinet endorsements came in one by one, each hailing Starmer as a visionary leader with a thumping mandate from the nation, it became clear that Labour was opting to take ownership of his failures.
It was hard not to think of the Ancient Mariner’s crewmates, who condemned themselves to his fate when they applauded him for shooting the albatross:
Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,
The glorious Sun uprist:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
’Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.
In much the same way, Labour MPs who hammered on the desks when he entered Committee Room 14 on Monday might as well have been hammering themselves into the ground.
For there is, let’s be honest, absolutely no chance of things turning around under his leadership. His failures are intrinsic, inevitable, inescapable. As long as he is in Number 10, the country will get poorer, public services will deteriorate and we shall carry on with the extraordinary achievement of having simultaneous immigration and emigration crises.
Why? It comes down to character. While it is theoretically possible to do things that will generate economic growth, such as cutting spending and removing regulations, there is zero possibility that a man like Starmer, mediocre, focused on process, would countenance the short-term unpopularity involved.
Similarly, while one could see a way to secure our borders, it would involve doing radical things, such as quitting international conventions, curtailing the powers of judicial review and constraining activist judges. Again, there is zero possibility of Starmer doing any of those things. As he told his biographer, Tom Baldwin: ‘There is no version of my life that does not largely revolve around me being a human rights lawyer.’
It is sometimes said that Starmer has no convictions, but one belief has motivated him at every stage in his life, whether as the editor of a Trotskyite newspaper, as Director of Public Prosecutions, as a Corbyn yes-man or as a hapless prime minister, namely his belief that, while national loyalties are arbitrary and transient, human rights are universal and absolute.
‘It would be to this country’s shame if we lost the clear and basic statements of our citizens’ human rights provided by the Human Rights Act on the basis of a fundamentally flawed analysis of their origin and relevance to our society,’ he declared in 2009. ‘The idea that these human rights should somehow stop in the English Channel is odd and, frankly, impossible to defend.’
Sure enough, we got confirmation this week that more people had arrived in illegal Channel crossings under Starmer than under any previous prime minister.
Odd, isn’t it? The last government was thrown out because of public anger about two issues above all: a failing economy and excessive immigration. People were so angry with the Tories (understandably in many ways) that they did not look too closely at the alternative. Starmer took office, firehosed cash at public sector workers and benefits claimants and cancelled the Rwanda scheme. That is the record Labour MPs are now choosing to extend.
Even if they later change their minds, the damage has been done. I remember my incredulity when, as late as December 2018, 200 Conservative MPs voted to keep Theresa May as their leader. True, she was later ousted, and Boris Johnson briefly turned things around. But the long-term reputational damage is felt to this day. When disgruntled former Tories damn the party collectively, it is this record, consciously or not, that informs their mood.
Similarly, while a new Labour leader might have a brief honeymoon, the party has doomed itself. The next election will do for them as surely as the curse did for Coleridge’s sailors:
One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.
Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.
