AS SOME of us, well me, have been saying for months, there was no way the local election results were going to shame the Prime Algorithm into resignation, because neither androids nor zombies are capable of embarrassment.
That said, even I didn’t think he’d react with such glorious, and very funny, tone deafness. A normal political operator, a human one for example, would have looked at Thursday’s electoral devastation – which included the loss of some 1,500 council seats – and concluded that the game was up.
Instead Starmer put on a theatre of the absurd, a carnival of misjudgements which perhaps should be entered for the Turner Prize.
In fact, the antics of Saturday reminded me of something one of Hegel’s contemporaries said about his work: is it possible that the whole thing, the complete system, is literally just a joke?
Could it be that we are seeing a slow-motion reveal? That far from being the robot we’ve come to loathe, Starmer is a Jack Dee wannabe, and the weekend’s comedy was always going to be the punchline?
Of course not. But we can’t be blamed for wondering.
This was Starmer’s post on X from Friday: ‘These are tough results for Labour. There’s no sugarcoating it. We’ve lost brilliant Labour representatives who’ve stood up for their communities. People are still frustrated. Their lives aren’t changing fast enough. We haven’t offered enough hope or optimism for the future. I was elected to change this country – tough days like this don’t weaken my determination to do that. They strengthen it.’
To bring some energy into government, to quicken the pace of change for the rest of us, to give things some Presbyterian fizz, Starmer has brought Gordon Brown back into government as his ‘special envoy on global finance’. Which sounds exciting, I know, but might be no more than a ceremonial role, given that the government has no finances to get global with.
As one wag put it on X: the man who brought back Mandelson for the third time has brought back the man who brought back Mandelson for the second time.
I suppose this could be some genius ‘retro’ strategy – that there could be some previously undetected yearning for what nobody fondly refers to as the ‘Golden Brown Years’.
After all, people’s first reaction was to laugh when somebody thought it was sensible, in the 1990s, to bring back the kipper tie. They were right to, now I think of it. As retro moves go, I think we can agree that the re-emergence of Brown does not count as a ‘return to vinyl’ moment.
I guess also that the loss of so many Red Wall seats could be interpreted as a call for the return to public life of the contentedly mummified Harriet Harman, but this seems a counter-intuitive reading of the public mood.
It’s as if Starmer has given up on politics in favour of archaeology.
None of this is to say that Starmer can survive, just that, like those admirable Japanese soldiers we often hear about, he’ll be the last one to come to be told that all this mess has been resolved, albeit not the way he hoped.
A couple of things are still working in his favour. Firstly, the ‘Burnham strategy’ is an exercise in wishful thinking, for reasons I have given here. Thursday’s vote was the public saying that they are sick of a political class which acts as rent seekers and treats those of us who are outside it – voters and taxpayers – with contempt. The response to that can hardly be to game the constituency map in a way which would consolidate that anxiety.
Second, the ‘successor candidates’ within Westminster are in danger of missing their moment. Collectively they are like nervous learner drivers meeting up at a mini roundabout on the day of the test. And individually, to adapt Jane Austen, they are, each in their own way, completely useless. In the case of Miliband, certifiable.
All that said, the situation as I write is not sustainable, as a matter of logic, as much as personalities. If Hegel wasn’t joking, and if his view of the historical process has merit, then he might identify this as a moment of unsustainable tension, which must resolve itself somehow.
Because, joking aside, there could be something deeper and more sinister going on, something which goes beyond the malevolence of Keir Starmer and his Malvolian inability to see himself as others do.
It is unbelievable that Starmer could just carry on now. Absurd. But it is a strategy of postmodern global Leftism to force us to believe in absurd things. It is no more ridiculous to believe that Starmer’s position is tenable than it is to believe that a man can become a woman by choice or that Gordon Brown is a political asset.
There’s a (very small) part of me that has begun to admire Starmer for this intransigence. He’s like the guy who gets fired from his job then turns up the next day as if nothing’s happened. His indifference to the public mood is almost Nietzschean in its expression, an exercise in will to power.
Then I remember that you can admire people, but not algorithms. And that the Nietzschean model is not the best one for a vibrant modern democracy.
