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Keir Starmer has assured MPs that he takes responsibility for the Peter Mandelson scandal: that, whatever failures of vetting there may have been, the decision to appoint as Britain’s ambassador to the US a man who was twice dismissed from Tony Blair’s government, and was known to have continued his association with Jeffrey Epstein after the child sex offender’s conviction, was his alone.
But it is a funny sort of responsibility because it seems to come free of consequences. The inevitable repercussions always appear to fall on someone else: on yet another communications director, on his former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, and now on the Foreign Office’s former top civil servant, Olly Robbins.
Starmer might reflect on what happened before Robbins reportedly decided not to inform Downing Street that Mandelson had failed his “developed” national security vetting. Not only had the government already publicly announced they were sending Mandelson to Washington, but the prime minister had, for good measure, delivered a speech in which he accused too many in the British civil service of being comfortable with “the tepid bath of managed decline”. He seems to have wanted a civil service capable of swift delivery that responded to clear signals about what the government wanted — just not these clear signals.
The man who is still, at the time of writing, Britain’s prime minister and Labour leader, once said that there was “no such thing” as Starmerism, and added that there never would be. He was half-right: he does not have an overarching ideology and he never will. But there is a Starmerite governing style, and that helps to explain why this government spent its first year driving itself into the mire and its second failing to get out of it.
Starmer is a man with little interest in much of politics. He has never particularly enjoyed the company of his fellow MPs, and is a rare presence in the Palace of Westminster’s bars or MPs’ tea rooms.
He is that rare politician who enjoys discussing neither the internal machinations of Labour nor the cut and thrust of combat between the parties. He doesn’t particularly enjoy long debates over policy either. And he dislikes it when departments bring their disputes to him rather than settling them on their own and then presenting him with the results.
Instead Starmer believes that the combination of the right process and hard work is enough to solve more or less any problem, and that mobilising the right amount of institutional memory will result in a better standard of government. This, then, is Starmerism: the belief that process can, in and of itself, lead to better outcomes.
The trouble is that this approach is wrong, and not just because it leads so often to his appointing people whom he then rapidly has to sack. The job of prime minister isn’t to follow process: it is to navigate and advocate for trade-offs. In this case, the trade-off was between the real or perceived abilities of Mandelson as a diplomat and the real or perceived political risk to the government of appointing him.
That Starmer did not understand this is part of his broader inability to get to grips with the job of running the government. If you want to reform welfare, you do actually need to make an argument for why what you are doing will improve outcomes. It’s not enough to just hope that if your aides threaten enough MPs they will vote for a plan that has no underlying logic, beyond making the Office for Budget Responsibility’s projections look good.
If you want to deepen and repair the UK’s relationship with the EU, you have to be willing to make an argument for the free movement of people and the pooling of British sovereignty, not just talk about the failures of Brexit while proposing nothing of note to change those failures. And if you want to equip the UK to defend itself and its allies from military threats, you do need to be able to make a prolonged and serious argument about how you are going to pay for it.
Starmer’s unwillingness to do these things reflects the same attitude — that following process, rather than providing leadership, makes you an effective prime minister. But it doesn’t: a prime minister has to make it their business to be on top of how the government runs, to be its master not its servant.
The result is a premiership on its last legs and a government lacking the leadership and direction that only a prime minister can provide. The failure to navigate trade-offs has derailed its entire agenda, not just when picking diplomats.
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