Keir of a Bland Planet
The newspapers' response to Keir Starmer's Labour Party Conference speech were decided before he even took the stage. The glitter was a bonus.
Previously: "It's only a game show."
The return of Big Brother and the history of the show as a 'news' source for hungry tabloids and sanctimonious broadsheets.
‘Let’s Get Britain’s Future Back’
Imagine being in the room where the Labour Party conference slogan was fashioned; the tang of dull sweat from the brows of a clump of political advisors, pollsters, and PR primpers in the air; drunk on vintage Blair, a wine that’s long since gone to vinegar: ‘Let’s Get Britain’s Future Back’1 — the catchphrase of a shonky Doctor Who / Quantum Leap hybrid made by some obscure ITV franchise in the mid-80s; all episodes thought deleted until a cache of VHS tapes turned up in some guy’s shed.
But it doesn’t matter if Starmer’s Labour™️ is a smash-up of 90s nostalgia, copy from Capita powerpoints, and the focused group opinions of that bloke from down your street who is obsessed with the bins, because the press — even the hardcore headbangers at the Telegraph — has concluded that it’s going to win. Political hacks are rushing to bolster their sources “close to Starmer” and columnists insufficiently well-positioned to write about the new regime are being defenestrated.
Starmer’s conference speech — made accidentally interesting by a protestor with a glitter bomb but cursed with an inability to shout an easily discernible slogan — was guaranteed good reviews regardless of what he actually said. A political commentariat that privileges tone over content at the best of times is desperate for a refresh and if the man to deliver it is a charisma vacuum with the authoritarian streak of a traffic warden elevated to dictator of a small island nation so be it.
The Guardian’s sketchwriter, John Crace — a man whose byline picture marks him out as one of those people who laugh long and hard at their own jokes — described “the vibe” as “almost rock’n’roll”. I’m concerned about the state of his record collection, let alone his critical faculties. He continues:
Where Sunak’s speech in Manchester had never been more than an increasingly desperate plea to be given another chance. He knew he had done nothing to deserve it, but he just wanted it anyway. He couldn’t stand the personal failure. Starmer offered so much more. Not just intellectual depth but emotional intelligence…
… Not all politicians were liars, he said. Some, like Rishi, were just hopelessly out of touch. Their lived experience was not ours. But Starmer’s was. He knew what it was like to go without. To struggle. His was an authentic voice. If you hadn’t already got it, this was the real him. “I will fight for you,” he promised. Unlike the Tories, whose only commitment is to fight each other.
This stuff is setting up the credulous for a fall; a tip onto the concrete face first when Starmer’s government isn’t the morally pure, upstanding, selfless superheroes that we’re being sold. In 1997, in that weird voice that has only got weirder as the years have gone by, Tony Blair croaked: “A new dawn has broken, has it not?”
I was 13 when Blair made that speech and watched him say the line on TV. My childhood had been spent entirely under the twin suns of Thatcher and Major — the latter more of a dim bulb — and now my teenage years through to my mid-twenties would be dominated by the Blair and Brown administrations; optimism curdling to managerialism at home and malignant militarism abroad.
Dig back into the press from the months before Blair walked into Downing Street and you’ll see the same process we’re witnessing now: Questions being stuffed back in mouths in favour of giddiness, praise, and a focus on access. The difference this time is that Starmer — when not drenched in glitter — doesn’t have the sparkle of Blair before power started to rub away the gloss. Those pundits who pretend that Starmer isn’t boring are just embarrassing themselves.
In the Mirror, Jason Beattie swoons that Starmer “has rarely looked more like a Prime Minister in waiting,” while George Eaton in the New Statesman senses — like someone kicking the table leg to move a Ouija board — “a quiet radicalism” at work. The latter’s conclusion rests on Starmer’s promises in his speech to end ‘fire and rehire’, expand collective bargaining, and grant basic rights — such as sick pay, parental leave and protection against unfair dismissal — to workers from day one. The problem is that Starmer has shitcanned plenty of promises and policies already and, as Eaton himself notes, Jeffrey Epstein’s belt shopping buddy Peter Mandelson is lurking in the background, hissing that the party “[has] to be careful about labour market reform”. The most ‘careful‘ approach? Say all the right things and do none of them.
For The Telegraph, Gordon Rayner ignores the rabbit-in-headlights photos of Starmer after the glitter stunt and says the incident “gave him a chance to show he is calm in a crisis. Just the sort of thing voters want from a prime minister, in fact.” But, as the i paper’s Paul Waugh pointed out, it was Carol Linforth, Labour’s long-serving Director of Events (“She’s been with the party for an incredible 43 years…”) who calmed things down and got Starmer to ditch the glittery jacket and opt for shirtsleeves.
What’s interesting is the neutral tone of The Sun’s coverage, which suggests that the paper — where Starmer has gladly contributed articles as leader — is starting to tack towards Labour. It won’t be The Sun wot won it, but the paper will want to be able to say it backed a winner.
In today’s Politico London Playbook, a subhead asks, “Not made up your mind, Lachlan?”, nodding to the recent management manoeuvrings at News Corp, but that’s mistaken. Lachlan hasn’t been to the UK in years and doesn’t care much for the British tabloid even if ageing hacks there swap stories about him learning subbing there. If anyone is being appealed to by Sun deputy political editor, Ryan Sabey’s write-up of the speech, it’s still old Rupert:
SIR Keir Starmer made a direct appeal to Tory voters yesterday — calling on them to switch sides at the election.
The Labour leader said the past 13 years had been an era of “chaos and crisis” and many Conservative voters despaired as the party descended “into the murky waters of populism and conspiracy”.
If Starmer trips, The Sun will jump on him from a great height, but if the polls stay on his side, News Corp will want to be able to claim some role in his win.
Over at The Times — The Sun with access to a thesaurus and marginally fewer public school boys cosplaying as pub bruisers (Hi, Harry Cole!) — a panel of columnists is convened to give their verdicts. Juliet Samuel, the big money Telegraph transfer that Times editor Tony Gallagher signed to replace the out-of-favour David Aaronovitch, begins with a lumpen and appropriately boring assessment:
Optimism, one sensed, does not come naturally to him, but he did his best. He sounded like a man who, if he didn’t quite yet have a fully developed plan to vanquish them, has at least understood the country’s problems.
Of course, Samuel’s take also includes a sprinkling of transphobia (“… it is a little hard to believe that a man who can’t define the word “woman” is going to cut through the knot of nimbyism, bureaucratic inertia and vested interests.”) and Corbyn derangement syndrome (“[This] was a direct challenge to the Corbynista rump.”); this is The Times after all. But this fence-sitting is clearly tilting to the side where the grass looks greener — Starmer’s beloved five-a-side pitch.
Phillip Collins, whose role in writing Starmer’s 2021 Labour Party Conference speech is not mentioned, contributes a rather more pissy take. It’s almost as though a man who was binned from The Times during the Boris Johnson era and has been dragged back in to provide Labour insight is still annoyed about that and the fact that his services as speechwriter are no longer required:
It was, however, a speech that stuttered just as it started. Grand arguments were flirted with but left undeveloped. There was a recurring, gently populist, theme of the people v the government. Politics must be long-term (a theme Rishi Sunak has stolen from Starmer). We heard it is an era of unprecedented volatility. It is a new age of insecurity. This was a speech in which new ages lasted no more than a paragraph.
If you need a reminder of Collins’ phrase coining, here’s an extract from that 2021 speech with its endless moist-eyed evocations of Starmer’s childhood:
Work, care, equality, security. I think of these as British values. I think of them as the values that take you right to the heart of the British public, and that is where this party must always be. I think of these values as my heirloom. The word loom from which the idea comes is another word for tool. Work, care, equality, security, these are the tools of my trade and with them, I will go to work.
That’s the kind of laboured rhetorical work that someone who thinks of themselves as a “wordsmith” comes up with.
The final member of The Times panel was Iain Martin — the Scottish reactionary who, appropriately, runs the right-wing opinion site Reaction, rather than The Thick of It writer and swearing consultant — who is most likely to reflect the editor’s politics:
The idiot protester who somehow breached security at the start of Sir Keir Starmer’s speech did the Labour leader a favour, unintentionally. Covering him in glitter, which stuck to his hair and clothes, ensured that the leader of the opposition twinkled throughout. It means headline writers can say Starmer finally found his sparkle in this speech. And it’s true, he did.
… There was the customary round of “Our NHS” bingo, in which a Labour leader uses the sanctimonious term to describe a health care system so superior that no country on earth has succeeded in replicating it, or indeed tried to.
But even here it was a canny device designed to win a hearing for a tougher section on the need to use technology such as AI to improve healthcare outcomes. If Labour gets in, it will have to reform the NHS to make it more productive and effective. All this in the face of trade union intransigence and voter sentimentality that is stoked by politicians telling voters what they want to hear about “our NHS”.
Now they’re fairly certain Starmer is set for Downing Street, the right-wing papers will work hard to ensure that he does what they so crave: NHS privatisation at first as a glacial creep, then a fast melt.
Over at The Guardian, another panel of columnists (and academics) gave their verdicts:
Frances Ryan said “Starmer’s language created some much-needed optimism”; Zoe Williams went with, “… it’s been so long, so very long, since we heard anyone plausibly say that things don’t have to be this bad.”; Sahil Dutta broke ranks saying, “Starmer struck the right emotional notes about the future of the UK economy… [but] avoided saying anything about the choices needed to get there.”; “Cometh the moment, cometh the decline-dodging manager?” asked Nels Abbey; Fatima Ibrahim concluded that Labour is not remotely bold enough… but might be by the General Election; and Tom Belger, editor of LabourList, argued the speech means “many members have enough of a spring in their step and fire in their belly to put their doubts on ice”.
As notable as The Sun’s near neutrality, it’s worth pointing out that The Times and Telegraph seem less open to criticising Starmer’s rise than the wet lib — like Wet Leg but worse — lot at The Guardian. Taken in the round, the British press’ response to Starmer’s speech is desperate to argue that there is excitement under the glitter.
A word cloud released by the pollsters Savanta after asking 2000 people for their opinions of Starmer suggests the public still thinks differently. Yes, “Honest” and “Good” loom large but BORING dominates the frame and “Bland”, “Liar”, “Dull” and, arguably the most crushing one, “Okay” take up significant space.
Many Starmer supporters — and plenty of neutrals — will argue that Britain needs some ‘boring’ government after the upheaval of the past 13 years, but I don’t think the Labour leader is actually boring; I think he’s dishonest. He won the leadership election by promising to be one thing — to capture Left votes — and pivoted immediately to another — to appease the right of his party and the press — and he’ll shift again if power looks in doubt.
“All that glisters is not gold,” was Shakespeare’s formulation in The Merchant of Venice but he was far from the first. Alain de Lille, the poet and theologian, warned in 1175:
Do not consider gold everything that shines like gold
nor think that each and every lovely fruit is good.
Virtue is not in many things in which it seems to be.
Our eyes deceive us with their actions.
Some have more of aloe than of honey in their heart
whom you think to be like saints in their simplicity.
He’d never have made it as a Times columnist.
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For balance, the Tories’ “Long-term decisions for a brighter future” sounded like the tag from an aggressively upbeat life insurance ad.
It's said that "you can't polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter". Uncanny.
Good piece, Mic; I think you’re right.