If we were to assign a Homeric epithet to Sir Keir Starmer, to accompany every account of his words and deeds, it would unquestionably be “boring”:
“To this boring Sir Keir replied with leaden words …”
There are perhaps still some loyalists who can convince themselves that Starmer is not boring, but rather sensible and statesmanlike, and some opponents who can hear evil dripping from his pronouncements. But such reactions require building elaborate narratives around the man. Absent these, direct exposure to Starmer can provoke only about as much passion as staring at a concrete wall.
It is therefore fitting that Starmer is now embroiled in a crushingly boring scandal, one that cannot be fully understood without knowledge of such arcana as the role of civil servants in vetting ambassadors, and the rules on disclosure of government policy to third parties. Behind this lies Peter Mandelson involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, but so great is the potency of Starmer’s force-field of boring that he can drain the life out of even such lurid material.
It is fitting that Starmer is now embroiled in a crushingly boring scandal.
Now, it is not intrinsically bad that a political leader be boring. The alternative currently available is that of the politician as trash TV entertainer, a personage both alarming and exhausting. Indeed Starmer’s rise to power was due in part to an implicit promise of relief from the dog and pony show of Anglo-American politics in the Trump-Brexit-Covid-More Trump sequence. Starmer was supposed to be a Gordon Brown figure, his dullness flowing from competency, commitment to results, and the eschewal of demagoguery.
Starmer’s rise to power was due in part to an implicit promise of relief from the dog and pony show of Anglo-American politics.
The politician as professional administrator is a model natural to our bureaucratic democracies: that is why our leaders wear business suits. It is always something of a myth, but in Starmer’s case it is simply a fraud. His dull competence is every bit as much kayfabe as was Boris Johnson’s Churchill impersonation. Beneath Starmer’s performance lies—as far as one can tell—an almost total void. He clearly wants very much to be Prime Minister, but appears to have sacrificed all other desires and thoughts to gaining and retaining the post. Starmer’s performative dullness is built on a far deeper dullness, that of an empty man.
Starmer may well survive the Mandelson scandal, if only because it lacks any of the enticements of a true scandal. He may even limp through the full five years of a prime ministerial term. If so, his survival will be the mirror image of Donald Trump’s. Where Trump has turned the type of the politician as popular tribune into a coarse stand-up routine, Starmer transforms that of the politician as public servant into a manifestation of the man without qualities. In the absence of true leadership, the only choice left to us is between such sickening tribute acts.
