Keir Starmer: Will new Labour leader abandon the f-word?

After four and a half years presiding over his divided party, having lost the confidence of his parliamentary colleagues and survived in post to lose two General Elections, Corbyn finally returns to the backbenches, promising that his voice will “still be heard’’.

To describe the Labour leadership election as interminable would be unfair. This would imply the battle between Sir Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey has impinged on public consciousness at all. But has it really?

As my colleague Nick would say, “it is about the movement, not personalities, comrade”. Even before the lockdown put two metres between us, when there was toilet roll on the shelves and the day’s headlines weren’t limited to TFV (“this f***ing virus”), with Jeremy Corbyn still droning on at Prime Minister’s Questions, the UK’s departure from the EU in January, and a cock-a-hoop Tory party settling in to a good long spell of majority government, public attention wasn’t exactly fixed on the question of who would be going toe to toe with Johnson in future, was it? What’s the rush to find out who’s going to lose the next General Election?

As I’m sure Corbyn would remind us in his Entish way, if something is worth saying, it is worth taking a long time to say. Democracy can’t be rushed, after all, and Labour now has an impressive 600,000 voters across the UK to canvass. Well and fine, I suppose.

Having lost office in Scotland 13 years ago, and last won a majority across the UK a decade ago, what are a few more months spent on the party’s favourite pastime of talking to itself about itself?

Well, they’ve well and truly chosen now. Keir Starmer is, by any fair reckoning, a substantial figure who comes to the Labour leadership with a professional hinterland most of our leading politicians lack.

It is a familiar complaint: British politics is now dominated by career politicians. Look at parliament. Just look at Boris Johnson’s cabinet. The story, too often, goes like this. Our journey begins with a short hop from private school to plooky Oxbridge undergrad. You are almost certainly studying PPE, ensuring you have superficial knowledge of politics, philosophy and economics, but no real understanding of any of them.

From there, your ambitious young thing probably nets a job as a party researcher. The cookie cutter would-be politician is then expected to fail gallantly contesting a hopeless seat, before being selected for a safe constituency, either in the north beyond the red wall, or in the deepest south of England. And from thence? Anything is possible.

Minister of state, cabinet secretary, a seat in the House of Lords – just occasionally graduating by the end of your career to “disgraced former’’. Vile ambition being what it is, can you blame them? If someone with the callous stupidity of Priti Patel can hold a great office of state, if a dangerous fool like Chris Grayling can be made responsible for whole government departments, why shouldn’t every ambitious young partisan think “Why couldn’t I become foreign secretary or chancellor of the exchequer”? And so I hire people like me. Replicants beget replicants. And politics becomes a clone factory.

To his credit, Starmer doesn’t seem to fit into this mould. Southwark born and Leeds educated, he comes to the Labour leadership with an impressive legal career behind him. Barrister, Queen’s Counsel, Knight of the Realm, quiff-sharpener and Brylcreem enthusiast, the Holborn and St Pancras MP spent most of his working life as a defence lawyer doing human rights work.

The right-wing press will, presumably, do their best to hold this against him. Expect to see such rational headlines as “Starmer got me off, admits crazed sex killer”, “Starmer’s Euro human rights law killed my granny” – and so on. The Sun has already taken to dubbing him “millionaire barrister”, reflecting the paper’s well-known antipathy towards millionaires, including its “millionaire owner” Rupert Murdoch, “millionaire columnist” Boris Johnson and his cabinet of what you might charitably describe as – “millionaire idiots”.

But in 2008, poacher turned gamekeeper. Starmer abandoned his defence lawyer’s wig for a five-year stint as Director of Public Prosecutions.

The DPP is England’s third most senior prosecutor, but the one chiefly responsible for the work of the nation’s 7000 crown prosecutors. By any reckoning, this is not a job for the faint hearted.

So we know Starmer brings a good brain and substantial executive experience to the job – but legal smarts don’t always translate into political gumption and the common touch.

GIVEN his political record, there are already good reasons to wonder about his judegment. Corbyn is often accused of mangling Labour’s messaging on Brexit, alienating the party’s pro-European die-hards while simultaneously alienating Eurosceptic punters who might once have been inclined to vote for the party. Corbyn, doubtless, deserves his share of blame for Labour’s mixed messages. But Starmer – as the party’s shadow Brexit spokesman throughout this burach – isn’t exactly free of blame either. Labour has Starmer to thank for the doomed people’s vote strategy which helped it lose the last election.

In 2017 it was Starmer who set out Labour’s “six tests for Brexit”, which essentially amounted to a refusal to engage seriously with the government on how the UK left the EU. It was pettifogging. Each of these missteps contributed to the present predicament, where Brexit and Britain are wholly owned subsidiaries of a Tory party which veers between bungling and psychosis.

A creature of Labour’s “soft left”, Labour’s new leader has no strong Scottish connections that I can find – but then, neither does his party in Westminster these days. From amongst his Scottish MPs, Starmer has the unenviable choice of Edinburgh South MP Ian Murray or South Edinburgh MP Ian Murray to be his Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland.

I don’t want to alarm you, but he’s also a fan of the “f” word. Was that groaning I heard at the back? Yes, Starmer is yet another Labour politician with a taste for “federalism”. In his efforts to woo Scottish Labour voters in January, the former DPP suggested “we need a new constitutional settlement” and “a large-scale devolution of power and resources”.

From whom, and to whom, he didn’t say. But what he did say was we need “a new long-term political and constitutional consensus” to be “built on the principle of federalism”.

Starmer helpfully forgot to specify what he understands federalism to mean, or how you can make it work when 85% of the UK’s whole population lives in England, and England continues to show no political enthusiasm for the project. On the prospect of Holyrood holding a second independence referendum, Sir Keir described it both as an SNP “trap” and “an interesting question.” His main message? It wasn’t for the party’s UK leadership to force Scottish Labour to accept the principle that the Scottish people have the democratic right to self-determination through their institutions. So that’s encouraging. “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” Well, we’ll see.

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