Frailties and Flaws

Aditya Chakrabortty writes:

Say this for Keir Starmer: he’s lucky in his enemies. From Rebecca Long-Bailey to Liz Truss to Humza Yousaf, they flop as heavily as solo projects from lesser members of Take That. And then we come to Rishi Sunak.

It shouldn’t be said of a man wealthier than the king, but: poor Rishi. The defining images of this first week of the election campaign will be of a downpour and D:Ream, and the ostensible leader of the country standing drenched on his doorstep as if, Withnail-style, he’d called an election by mistake. For his launch, Starmer kept in the warm and looked prime ministerial. What a contrast.

Or is it? Elections bring out such binaries: incumbent v insurgent, chump v champ. But these two rivals are more alike, personally and politically, than is in either’s interest to let on.

Both non-London southerners, they come from well-paid jobs outside Westminster, Sunak in finance and Starmer in law. SW1 is stuffed with lifers, yet these two only became MPs in 2015, gifted ultra-safe seats and swift promotion to the frontbench.

For the most part, their press hasn’t been merely supportive, but positively slobbering. In 2020, the Times’s Saturday magazine put dishy Rishi on its cover with a gold halo; the next year, the Sunday Times magazine presented Keir’s dad-level skills at football with chuckling indulgence.

You’ve eaten eggs that were harder than this pair’s careers. Rather than wear out their Italian shoe leather trudging between doorsteps, they have been primped and counselled and focus-grouped into place. And, as every bad-tempered interview suggests, it has left them without killer political instincts.

One proof of that lies in the fact that you are reading about an election over this bank holiday weekend. Had Sunak held on a while longer, not only would the economic news have got a little better for him but Starmer would inevitably have come under more scrutiny. Why does his party have a place for the poison politics of Natalie Elphicke but not the socialism of Diane Abbott? What happened to all the promises he made for greater fairness?

I make this point with zero sympathy for the Goldman Sachs appointee currently occupying No 10. The Tory party is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, and the polls suggest it will finally be over in six weeks. But within a couple of years of a Starmer government, he will hit the same rapids as Sunak. And the same personal and political forces that are about to do for his enemy could then quite conceivably do for him.

Consider the economy, supposedly the number one issue in this election. The big picture is that the UK has been through a shockingly bad five years, in which people are on average worse off than they were at the start of this parliament, even while taxes are reaching a record high – and still rising. In those two facts alone, you have enough explanation for why any government would get kicked out.

“Two different countries, two different futures,” said Starmer this week. Not according to his own economics. He and Rachel Reeves have sworn themselves to budgetary rules that are practically identical to those currently enforced by Sunak and Jeremy Hunt – which leaves both sides on the hook for huge spending cuts.

Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that, whichever of the two parties comes to power in July, day-to-day spending on everything outside health, defence and education is promised to fall by around £20bn. That is roughly equal to shutting the entire Home Office, or closing the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The next time a journalist interviews a Labour frontbencher they should ask which of those options they would prefer.

Reeves or Wes Streeting will probably reply that these headaches will be solved by economic growth, an explanation more readily accepted in Westminster than anywhere else. From the IMF to the Bank of England, most institutions expect the British economy to remain very tepid over the next few years. Think Starmer can change that? Analysts in the City don’t. Take this from the consultancy Capital Economics: “We are not convinced that either party will be responsible for a big increase in the economy’s potential growth rate”. Rather more blunt is Sharon Graham, boss of Unite: “Ripping up building regulations and tinkering in the public sector are not going to deliver serious growth – that’s for the birds.” The trade unionist’s voice is especially vital here, since Labour is chasing the same “hero voter” as the Tories were in 2019: older Brexiters who tuned out of the reds when they got too “woke”. This is why Starmer’s “six pledges” last week didn’t contain a single direct promise to younger voters or working people: they just aren’t that central to his electoral coalition.

Cast your imagination forward to 2026, with an economy still dragging along and more big spending cuts being made to your public services. The result is that the politics will look and feel as sullen and fractious as today. Just look at the “shit list” drawn up by Starmer’s lieutenant Sue Gray of issues likely to smack her boss in the face once in No 10. They range from more bankrupt councils to collapsing universities, to teaching and medical trade unions in open mutiny over low pay.

How would the new prime minister respond to all this? The most likely answer is: as badly as our current one. The Labour leader is, if anything, even more technocratic than Sunak and has surrounded himself with others of like mind. Gray is an ex-civil servant; Ravinder Athwal, writing the party’s manifesto, is an ex-civil servant; and, as director of public prosecutions, Starmer was himself a civil servant. He comes to politics without a clear idea of what he wants to do or how to do it. As Karl Pike at Queen Mary University of London writes in his new book, Getting Over New Labour: The Party After Blair and Brown: “If Starmerism is associated with anything … it is with a leader still making up his own mind.” Except in power you no longer get to do that; the Treasury and the Bank of England make up your mind for you.

This summer marks the 17th since the collapse of Northern Rock, the start of the banking crisis and what should have been the beginning of the end of Britain’s ruined economic and political model. Yet we enter our fifth general election since then with the same old conjuring tricks and half-hearted flourishes that have dominated politics my entire adult life. A pledge card from a Labour leader. An assurance of greater austerity. The old mix of free markets and strong state, giveaways for financiers and crackdowns on dissenters that has been the hallmark of British government since Thatcher. The one great novelty this time is the sight of a prime minister whose weakness is being mercilessly exposed by a rival who himself has many of the same frailties and flaws.