Starmer, Starmer, Starmer Chameleon: Political hacks stare at Keir Starmer’s conference speech and discover it says what they already thought...
It was boring and empty of ideas but that's good, apparently.
It can be useful to write with the voice of an imagined critic in your ear as if a truculent Jiminy Cricket has taken out a lease on your left shoulder. It allows you to preempt the arguments which will be provoked by your own words. And today the little green git is screaming at me that I shouldn’t write about Keir Starmer’s speech and the failings of the media coverage of that event because it gives succour to the Tories.
“Wouldn’t a Labour government be better than more years of Boris Johnson?” the imaginary green bastard howls in my ear. It might be — marginally — but I don’t think that’s what Keir Starmer would deliver, given that his shadow cabinet spent this week gravedigging for slogans from the Blair years (“Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” murmurs Nick Thomas Symonds, smeared with dirt, a grimoire beneath his arm, preparing to perpetrate an act of political necromancy) and Peter Mandelson is standing in the corner stinking of sulphur.
To understand Starmer’s speech, you need to understand who wrote it: Former Times columnist and ex-Blair speechwriter, Philip Collins. It’s quite special that a speech that fetishised working with your hands and “the dignity of work” was penned by an investment banking equity analyst turned political advisor to Frank Field turned think-tanker1 turned speech writer for Tony Blair turned Labour-bashing Times columnist. Philip Collins has never done dignified work.
Knowing that Collins — who’d still be writing columns at The Times if he’d not had his contract ripped up as soon as Corbyn was gone2 — was the one who wrote the speech’s many lines about Keir Starmer doing things while Boris Johnson was writing columns is particularly choice.
Collins’ back catalogue of columns includes him calling for a new third party to fight Labour back in 2017 — he expanded that one into a book — and most egregiously a piece from November 2019 (Labour’s racism is worse than the Tory kind) where the headline accurately reflects the content. He wrote:
The racism that exists in the Tory ranks is, according to most witnesses, generational and casual. That does not mean it does not matter. Being on the receiving end of racism is never casual. It does, though, mean that the Muslim question will not greatly occupy the thoughts of the average Tory member. Very few of them will have a developed theory about how the madrassas are cultivating a religious cavalry to man the global caliphate. It’s just not a big deal to them. It is a small deal on which some of them hold stereotypically bigoted views.
That a man who dismissed Tory racism less than two years ago, and used the phrase “the Muslim question” with no thought to the historical resonance of that phrasing, shaped Keir Starmer’s speech yesterday speaks volumes. It may also go some way to explaining why sources close to Marsha de Cordova, who quit Starmer’s shadow cabinet earlier this month, told The Voice that she did so after months of frustration and because…
… efforts to set up a task force of experts to design progressive race equality policy were held back over concerns this might upset Red Wall voters, and that Starmer had resisted pleas to make a speech setting out his vision to black communities.
Collins’ hand in the speech was also obvious when Starmer used the line:
It’s easy to comfort yourself that your opponents are bad people. But I don’t think Boris Johnson is a bad man. I think he is a trivial man.
While clearly designed as a riposte to Angela Rayner after her ‘scum’ comment earlier in the week, it also echoes a column by Collins from July 2020 (Labour never understands how Tories think), in which — writing for a Tory paper — he salved Tory wounds and argued that Labour shouldn’t suggest that Conservative politicians were “bad”:
The usual Labour critique of the Tories is that the latter are committed ideologues who want to limit the scope of the state precisely because they think the poor are feckless, victims must be blamed and the devil take the hindmost. The standard line is not just that the Tories open up chasms of inequality between people but that they do it on purpose. Being a Conservative is not simply a crime of commission, it is a crime of motive: not just bad measures but bad men and women.
Ignoring the plentiful evidence that many Tories do think the poor are feckless, do blame victims, and do frequent the same private members clubs as Satan, Collins argued that Starmer’s strategy should be to…
…to criticise this government is not to disparage it but to take it seriously. Itemise all the promises in the Gove and Johnson speeches and count them as they fail. By all means point out that the government is intellectually confused but then go straight towards the consequences of that confusion, which is incompetence. The government cannot do what it says because it is not good enough.
And that’s what we got from Labour Conference; a party leadership promising to do the same things but better: Immigration flights but more competent, cruelty in criminal justice but more competent, benefits cuts but more competent, rhetoric about “hard-working families” and “the people” but more competent, and all delivered not with a Johnsonian chuckle but the thin, apologetic smile of the rationally ruthless technocrat.
Just as many political hacks look sympathetically on Boris Johnson because he was a ‘journalist’ (and will be again after he returns to The Daily Telegraph once his ‘chickenfeed’ sabbatical as Prime Minister is over), Collins’ former position in the middle of the columnist’s clutch plays a role in some of the praise for the Starmer speech. Take, for example, Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff tweeting:
Starmer getting conference to clap the line ‘we are patriots’ by linking it to supporting England players taking the knee. Clever again. The Times’s loss of Phil Collins is speechwriting’s gain. (Now they’re clapping NATO)
Most British political journalists hear tone over the content and are intoxicated by a “clever line”, so it’s no surprise that they were taken in by the “patriots” angle and the clunking “tool” metaphor3 that ran through the speech. Of course, columnists who, week in, week out, try to find a ‘clever’ conclusion for their pieces will lap up lines like…
I think of these values as my heirloom. The word loom, from which that idea comes, is another word for tool.
… despite them being the sort of “the Oxford English Dictionary defines…” level writing that we’d disparage in a high school student’s essays.
What followed that “loom” line…
Work.
Care.
Equality,
Security.
These are the tools of my trade. And with them I will go to work.
… was not rousing but risible. As The Times’ Patrick Maguire tweeted about another section of the speech — which he described as a “paragraph of futurist technobabble” — had that conclusion been delivered by Jeremy Corbyn (or Ed Miliband for that matter) “[they] would have been roundly mocked”.
But while there are significant sections of the media who slated the Starmer speech this morning — we’ll come to The Sun shortly — those parts of it that are desperate to find him “credible” (for various) reasons are cutting him more slack than Fatty Arbuckle’s tailor4.
Writing for The Critic — the most cursed magazine in Britain — Rob Hutton purports to have the inside track on Collins’ advice to Starmer:
“Normally at this time on a Wednesday, it’s the Tories who are heckling me,” the leader replied, and the conference rose to its feet to applaud. It was a scripted reply, of course. His team had written half a dozen for him. What, Starmer had asked speechwriter Phil Collins, should he do after those ran out? “Tell them to fuck off.”
That’s the level of razor-sharp repartee you get if hire Collins.
Appropriately, given his appearance on the show during the last of his many relaunches to “introduce himself to the public”, Starmer’s address was a Piers Morgan’s Life Stories speech, leaning on emotional material from his life and others to paper over the vacuity of his blood, soil, family and work rhetoric.
His mother’s suffering and his pain as a result of it were used as shorthand to prove he’d protect the NHS, while his father’s job — as a toolmaker, did he mention that? — was a prop for his bland statement that “pride derives from work” (What about people who can’t work? The implication is that they don’t belong in Starmer’s beloved “hard-working families” whose desires must be paramount at all times).
Starmer spoke not one word about who people work for, how they work for them, and the exploitation that abounds in an economy where one of the biggest areas of the innovation he loves so much is how to squeeze more out of people while promising them less. Painting with primary colours using a Blairite, Starmer talks of work and family while ignoring or minimising the systematic failings that deny many people access to either.
The hecklers in the hall get more attention than gaps in Starmer’s statements, with many commentators kidding on that being heckled is good actually and the Leader of the Oppossition’s Office is actually delighted about it.
Following up on her gaff-laden reporting on the recent cabinet reshuffle, The Daily Mirror’s Rachel Wearmouth tweeted that a Labour source had said:
You can tell Seumas Milne and James Schneider were involved in this hard-left coup attempt this week because it has been a fucking shambles that has made its opponents stronger.
Schneider, the Momentum co-founder and former advisor to Jeremy Corbyn, quote tweeted Wearmouth’s message with a screenshot of a WhatsApp conversation between them…
Wearmouth: Labour source has claimed to me that you and Seumas were involved in creating disruption to conference this week. Do you want to respond?
Schneider: What sort of disruption? What does that mean? And what does a Labour source mean in this context? LOTO? Because many people can be a “Labour source”. Obviously, I’ve not been involved in disruption but would appreciate you putting what I’m actually meant to have done to me so I can respond if necessary.
It’s not surprising that The Daily Mirror, which has gone all-in on Starmer, carries a laudatory leader about the speech. It argues that he…
… took Labour a step closer to power with a confident and authoritative speech.
He offered a vision for the country based on strong values, and proved he is a credible Prime Minister in waiting. It was a serious speech for serious times.
Stretching to make a boring performance and vague slogans into an advantage, it continues:
He does not pretend to be a glamorous politician who plays to the crowd. But he is a principled man who is genuine in his desire to create a fairer and more prosperous Britain.
If Keir Starmer did attempt to pretend that he’s a glamorous politician, it would be like supergluing a Cornetto to a Shetland pony’s head and claiming it was a unicorn. The Daily Mirror likes Keir Starmer because he looks and sounds like a character actor cast as the Prime Minister in a mid-week ITV drama. There’s no need to dig deeper than that or point out contradictions such as his support for a £15-an-hour minimum wage last year and his dismissal of it now.
The Guardian’s leader plays it both ways, (unconvincingly) arguing that…
Starmerism offers Britain a fresh approach to leadership and political culture.
… while saying he is still “in search of a vision” and hasn’t managed to “seize the agenda”. You would assume someone who had stood for and won the leadership of a major political party might have arrived with some vision to start with.
The Times, throwing its former columnist a bone, calls the speech “well-crafted” but notes “his most serious opponents were not the ones heckling but those clapping along, waiting for him to fail.”
In the paper’s opinion section, James Kirkup — director of the Social Market Foundation (them again), former Daily Telegraph political editor and current Spectator writer — rakes over Rayner’s scum comments again, reaching the conclusion you would expect a creature of the right-wing press to reach:
Believing that Tories are axiomatically wicked is an abiding Labour mistake. It makes it harder to win over Tory voters, because why would you support a party that thinks you’re a bad person?
… The real centre ground is far away from stark binary political fights, in a place where most people don’t take sides, don’t pay too much attention to politics and can happily disagree with someone about one thing while agreeing with them on another.
It’s not impossible to escape the purity spiral. All it takes is acknowledging complexity, in good faith. So Rayner is wrong about some things and right about others; the same is true of Johnson. And neither one of them is good or bad, because just like the rest of us, they’re both just stumbling around somewhere in the middle.
Right-wingers who dress themselves up as centrists — a tactic to ensure they keep the ‘centre’ ground shifted far to the right — often push this stuff as if no one “normal” is passionate enough about their principles to not simply put them aside to get along. It’s the same idea that The Guardian is selling with its new Dining Across The Divide feature (all political rows can be solved by sufficiently delicious small plates, you see).
None of the papers whose front pages understandably focus on the guilty pleas from the serving police officer who murdered Sarah Everard note connect that event to the moment in Starmer’s speech when he spoke of:
… the young women I met recently in Stoke who told me they dare not go to their high street alone. They see more violence and fewer police. It’s just common sense to put the two together.
On the Today programme this morning, Starmer could not answer the simple question of whether the murder of Sarah Everard (and the response following it) has damaged women’s trust in the police with a simple “yes”. The Labour Party conference saw the launch of Labour Friends of the Police.
For some observers, the real ‘shock’ of this morning’s coverage is that The Daily Mail writes with relative warmth about Starmer’s performance. Starmer supporters will argue that this means he’s succeeded — “Look! Even slowly decaying zombie creature Stephen Glover was impressed” — but that's crushingly naive. The Daily Mail is happy to see Starmer remain where he is — 8 points behind the Tories even in the midst of a fuel crisis, benefits cuts, and talk of another ruined Christmas — because he poses no threat.
If Starmer starts to gain traction in the polls, The Daily Mail’s brief face turn in his favour will evaporate and it will return to choke-slamming him and the Labour Party on a daily basis. The Mail knows that it’s in its interests — and by that I mean the interests of Lord Rothermere — to keep Boris Johnson slightly worried and ever-ready to give it a quote about how wonderful its many campaigns are.
Starmer is chucked a few little treats by Glover because he deems him “serious about standing up to the Left”. But the real aim of his column is made crystal clear by the conclusion:
Sir Keir may be worthy and dullish. But he also seems reliable and organised. There may come a time when the British public yearns for such a leader, if he really has disposed of the Left. Somehow Boris needs to get a grip.
Starmer exists as a stick to beat Boris Johnson with, a threat from The Daily Mail to the Prime Minister that it considers the “worthy and dullish” Labour leader to have potential. It’s an idle threat really. The Daily Mail will turn its malevolent machinery against Labour as soon as the next general election is called.
The Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson’s once and future home, can’t play the same kind of games. While it kicks petulantly at his shins — particularly via the increasingly unhinged columns of Allison Pearson — it could not bear to the columnist prime minister beaten by Starmer (“a leftie lawyer!”).
So its columnist Michael Deacon offers up the “plague on both their houses” option (The real lesson of this week’s chaos? There’s no one left to vote for), its women section turns its Sauron-with-eye-shadow gaze onto Starmer’s wife, and the knife is wielded by Sherelle Jacobs who argues that “modern politics has left Starmer behind” and that “the Labour leader’s Tony Blair tribute act cannot mask his inadequacy on Brexit or the pandemic.”
The Spectator, another bullet point on Boris Johnson’s CV, argues itself to a draw as Lloyd Evans howled Labour’s bid to lose the next election has begun…
Sir Keir stamped the Labour conference with his personality today. And the mark he left was very bland, vague and colourless – but hard to dislike.
… while Isabel Hardman — partner of former Labour MP turned Boris Johnson ennobled government advisor Lord Walney — says Starmer’s speech will go down as a success:
It has been a rough conference for [Starmer], but with this speech he has shown that much of the roughness was necessary to get back into the place where a Labour leader can proudly talk about the party’s past and future.
Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch is not remotely sold on Keir Starmer yet so neither is The Sun. Its leader column is blunt (Keir Starmer’s dull speech leaves him a very long way from looking like a PM in waiting) while that titan of moral judgement Rod Liddle contributes a column headlined Labour is nothing more than a party of two halves… and both of ’em are wrong and the relentlessly awful Trevor Kavanagh opts for Anti-Brexit pro-immigration Keir Starmer will never lead Labour back into power.
A more realistic response to the 90-minute speech than anything published in the British media today would be typing out the “I ain’t reading all that I’m happy for you though or sorry that happened” meme. The Westminster press pack had decamped to Brighton for a week so Starmer’s speech had to mean something to justify their expenses and it serves the purpose — with the aid of a handful of hecklers — of further shoving the Left out of Labour.
Whether it’s The Mirror desperate to turn Starmer into a giant or The Mail making kind noises to spook the Prime Minister, most of the analysis was settled before Starmer made a single sound. His purpose is fixed now and so is his destiny: To lose the next election to Boris Johnson before the right-wing press gets the next Tory Prime Minister that it’s already eager to see.
He worked at The Social Market Foundation no less, founded by fellow Times columnist Lord Finkelstein and often described as “John Major’s favourite think-tank”.
At the time of his defenestration, a Times source told various tame right-wing sources, including Guido Fawkes, that the “reality [was] with Corbyn gone and majority Conservative government in power for four more years, [Collins’] Blairite insights, however elegantly expressed, are surplus to requirements.”
The "My dad was a toolmaker in a factory. In a sense so was Boris Johnson’s dad." joke was a decent one but as with all the jokes and zingers in Starmer’s speech, it was delivered with the confused air of a dog trying to demonstrate a card trick.
A contemporary reference for ver kids there.