Starmer has revealed his weakness over Israel His instincts are ill-suited to the new Great Game

I was recently told by someone close to the Prime Minister that he is hard to read, but at heart is just a simple social democrat. But something about this doesn’t ring quite true. Starmer is not driven by the kind of deep commitment to socialism that fueled the post-war Labour giants from Clement Attlee to Harold Wilson. That much is clear from his time as leader of the opposition. Rather, at the heart of Starmer’s deepest instincts and assumptions is something more banal: “Left-legal liberalism,” as another senior figure put it to me with obvious disappointment. “That’s the instinct — and I’m not sure he even knows it.”

In the absence of god and socialism, Left-legal liberalism is the Starmerite code. Faced with a choice to withdraw export licences to Israel at the risk of undermining Britain’s diplomatic standing or to maintain them but potentially be forced to revoke them later by the courts, Starmer chose to follow the legalistic process. He hoped it would signal a compromise, both maintaining Britain’s legal obligations and its diplomatic standing, by removing only a small percentage of the overall number of export licences already in place. This was not driven by morality or realpolitik, but legalism. The risk, though, is that it is a compromise which does the exact opposite of what it was intended, annoying everyone and assuaging no-one.

This is the danger Starmer faces on all fronts. If Left-legal liberalism is the Starmerite code, it is one that seems uniquely ill-suited to our world in which the mythical “rules-based order” of old has been replaced by the hard realities of power politics: a world in which Houthi rebels control the Red Sea, the United States has all but abandoned the pretence of global free trade, Vladimir Putin mockingly dismisses the international warrant that has been issued for his arrest, and China continues to do everything in its power to extend its global influence. Even the US’s prospective prosecutor-in-general Kamala Harris, who on the face of it shares many of Starmer’s Left-legal instincts, will be forced to act with far more hard-nosed realism if she wins the presidency.

A little over a year into Donald Trump’s first term, Kissinger speculated that “Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. Not that Trump was necessarily aware of this. But is Starmer?

In a post-Trump world buffeted by the power politics playing out between Russia, Iran, China and the US, where Europe is scrabbling around to defend itself and its energy needs, in what way can Left-legalism any longer be said to be suitable? Would such instincts have dared to negotiate with Australia and America, and bypass France, to produce the Aukus agreement now at the heart of British foreign policy?

The Starmerite instinct also has potentially troublesome domestic policy implications. At the heart of Morgan McSweeney’s project for government is a distinctly conservative vision of social democracy, whereby an active state meets the demands of Labour’s traditional voters by improving public services, defending the national interest, reducing immigration and generally, as Starmer once put it, “treading lighter on people’s lives”. In McSweeney’s words, the Labour Party must meet the voters where they are. And yet, in the early months of his premiership, all the notable announcements have been in the opposite direction: towards the kinds of paternalistic interventionism of the “preventative state” from banning smoking outdoors to imposing weight tests at work or mandatory tooth-brushing at school.

The instincts of other modern prime ministers were clear from their early decisions: Margaret Thatcher to remove capital controls in 1979; John Major to negotiate the opt out of the single currency in 1991; Tony Blair to accept Gordon Brown’s decision to not join the single currency; and Gordon Brown’s failure to call a snap election in 2007.

Only in hindsight can we appreciate the importance of such moments, but in each case these early decisions were among the most important of their entire time in office, binding them into political straitjackets they did not realise at the time. The same could be said of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, each of whom made early decisions which revealed the characters which would destroy their premierships: from breezy overconfidence to indecisiveness, unseriousness, arrogance and eventually political naivety.

Here lies the danger for Keir Starmer: the instincts nurtured over a lifetime of success which could suffocate his premiership before it has even began. The nature of power is to expose these instincts to the judgement of events and is why it is often described as “lonely” — it’s a game of chance that all eventually lose. Keir Starmer will be no different.

---

Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.

TomMcTague