Starmer, sleaze and Labour’s uphill struggle

Martin Shipton

We’re three months into a UK Labour government, and it’s not going well.

I had no expectation that the party would depart massively from the Tories’ austerity policies. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves had made it abundantly clear during the general election campaign that, in effect, there would be more of the same.

But what is enormously disappointing, as well as quite unexpected, is the way Labour has so quickly become mired in sleaze.

When Starmer was elected as Labour’s leader, it was assumed he would make the party electable in the way it hadn’t been under Jeremy Corbyn.

In a counterintuitive kind of way, his lack of charisma and indeed quite boring personality was seen as a positive virtue in comparison with the egocentric flamboyance of Boris Johnson during the Covid crisis.

Enigma

As a relatively recent arrival in Parliament – he was first elected in 2015 – he remained something of an enigma, but didn’t initially seem to be saddled with much in the way of negative baggage. When tabloid newspapers and their digital offshoots attempted to smear him for providing legal representation to foreign murderers trying to avoid the death penalty, the attacks seemed pretty desperate and were easily brushed off.

After an unspectacular start to his leadership in 2020, it became apparent that Starmer – or more likely the team of advisers he had surrounded himself with – had embarked on a ruthless campaign to purge or alternatively neutralise the party’s left wing.

Parallel tactics were deployed to achieve this end. Contrary to promises made during his leadership campaign, Starmer announced a series of policy U-turns which antagonised the left to the point that many grassroots members quit the party, making it easier for Starmer loyalists to seize and maintain control of its decision-making units.

Another part of the strategy involved blocking left wingers from becoming party candidates and, if possible, deselecting MPs from the left and replacing them with Starmer acolytes. As the general election neared, some MPs announced late that they were standing down, opening up the possibility for compliant candidates to be parachuted on to local parties, most of whose members had no democratic say in the selection.

Predictable

Most of this was highly predictable and aimed at presenting a united “moderate” party to the electorate that was untainted by – yes – anything that could be construed as socialism.

Labour’s election manifesto promised “stability” and “growth”, but there was no credible plan about how to deliver prosperity to an electorate sick of the cost of living crisis.

The best prospect of achieving economic growth – rejoining the European single market and customs union – was blocked off by Starmer, who had once been a passionate advocate of another referendum on EU membership. The rapidity with which he changed his tune after the 2019 general election should have provided ample warning of his lack of principle and inability to be honest with voters.

Labour may have won the July election with ease, but there was a low turnout and the party got fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, an election which itself had been characterised as Labour’s worst general election performance since 1935.

Once he was in office, it didn’t take long for Starmer to demonstrate that he was incapable of providing a narrative that would gain his government respect, let alone deliver tangible improvements.

Inept

The decision to deprive most pensioners of the Winter Fuel Allowance was politically inept as well as heartless, and the spectacle of Starmer loyalists queuing up to defend a policy that will undoubtedly lead to deaths in the coming winter was nauseating.

What hadn’t been bargained for, however, was the element of sleaze that dragged the new government’s reputation down to a point where it was regarded as contemptible.

While one can disagree profoundly with Starmer and Reeves over their approach to economics and their belief that continuing austerity cuts is the right course of action – even while denying that’s what they’re doing – it’s the perception of sleazy conduct that is causing the greatest damage.

This is not the first time this has happened. Not long after John Major’s unexpected victory in the 1992 general election over a Labour Party led by Neil Kinnock, the UK experienced an economic crisis when it was forced to leave the European Exchange Rate Mechanism because of the weakness of the pound. But humiliating as this was, it was something else that robbed the Major government of its credibility and paved the way for Labour’s landslide under Tony Blair in 1997.

A succession of Tory ministers were exposed for their involvement in personal scandals of a financial or sexual nature. One of the ministers, Jonathan Aitken, actually ended up in prison after committing perjury in a libel case he brought against The Guardian. It was the drip-drip of salacious revelations that fatally undermined the Major government, turning it into a laughing stock.

Incompetent

In the same way, Boris Johnson’s premiership was destroyed not by the incompetent handling of the Covid crisis that resulted in avoidable deaths by the thousand, but by revelations about his personal defiance of lockdown rules that became known as Partygate.

Starmer’s credibility has been lost far more quickly. Whatever one thinks of Johnson, he had a degree of undeserved popularity stemming from many people’s sense that he had charisma. Starmer’s dearth of charisma has meant that he lacks a defensive shield that could have acted as a counterpoint to the negative factors that are currently destroying his reputation.

Earlier this year it was difficult to understand why Starmer stood by Vaughan Gething for so long as revelations emerged about the now former First Minister’s relationship with a convicted criminal who donated £200,000 to his Welsh Labour leadership campaign.

The majority of party members, as well as the Welsh population as a whole, were rightly shocked by Gething’s behaviour. But for Starmer and other senior figures, he had done nothing wrong because he hadn’t “broken the rules” – a mantra that Gething himself, with the breathtaking lack of self-awareness for which he is now infamous, continues to trot out to this day.

Given what we now know about Starmer’s propensity to accept gifts from sometimes questionable sources, his nonchalance about Gething’s actions is unsurprising.

Wealthy

By any standards, Starmer is a wealthy man. But he is also a stupid man who could not understand why people would be shocked and angered by the acceptance of clothes worth many thousands of pounds by himself, his wife and Rachel Reeves. His vanity in even accepting a donation of free spectacles seems limitless. It has certainly lowered the opinion most people have of him.

By handing back a relatively small portion of the money he received, and by prevaricating over what gifts are acceptable for him and other ministers and what are not, he has made the situation even worse. None of the highly paid special advisers who work for him and the rest of his government seem to have been able to offer him common sense advice about how the acceptance of these and other gifts would be perceived.

There’s another matter too which is now swirling around thanks to right wing political commentators who will seize on anything that might discredit a Labour Prime Minister. In the run-up to the general election I was told that the reason why UK Labour wasn’t taking as much critical interest in the Gething scandals as they might was because – as it was put to me – they had “bigger fish to fry”. My well-placed source went on to tell me that the Telegraph was working on a story relating to Starmer’s private life.

But no more details were forthcoming and it seemed likely that, even if true, the Telegraph had been advised by its lawyers not to publish the story because it would fall foul of privacy legislation.

Public interest 

These days, to publish stories relating to a public figure’s private life, it’s necessary to have a public interest justification. Eight years ago, a tabloid newspaper was able to publish details of a sexual encounter involving then Labour MP Keith Vaz and some male sex workers not because of the encounter itself, but because he had given the sex workers money to buy an illegal drug. That was the public interest justification.

Right wing commentators like Guido Fawkes, Isabel Oakeshott – the partner of Reform UK MP Richard Tice – and Dan Wootton have already dropped strong hints about “Starmer’s secret”, and will doubtless continue to do so.

In the grand scheme of things, most people in Britain do not judge politicians on their private lives, unless there has been abusive behaviour. But when a politician has already lost respect for other reasons, personal revelations they would prefer not to be aired in public can add to the negativity.

No politician wants to be regarded as a figure of ridicule. On Friday the Labour junior minister Rushanara Ali said on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions that Keir Starmer was committed to restoring trust and integrity in politics. The audience responded with laughter.

As a friend pointed out to me: “This is a real danger for Labour. Starmer has lost the room.”

Unlike Ireland, Rachel Reeves will not be delivering a giveaway “feelgood” Budget at the end of this month.

Labour faces an uphill struggle to redeem itself.