Patriotic Keir Starmer has finally hit his stride
The PM is tapping into a strain of patriotism which has long run through the Labour party, from Ernest Bevin to Neil Kinnock and beyond.
One of the great truisms of politics, usually ascribed to Harold Macmillan, is that leaders are often defined by their response to events beyond their control. They may or not have come into power with ideological zeal and manifestos packed with plans; either way, these may be swept into irrelevance by truly major events.
Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee are secure in the pantheon of greatest prime ministers because of the way they led the nation during the Second World War and its aftermath. Margaret Thatcher was struggling and unpopular until the Falklands War and the Miners’ strike tested her iron lady qualities. For all his domestic successes, Tony Blair will forever be remembered for committing the UK to invade Iraq in response to the 9/11 attacks on the USA. Brexit happened on David Cameron’s watch.
In opposition, Starmer doggedly backed the last government’s support for Ukraine, earning scant thanks from the Conservatives or from voters. Now he is in Downing Street, the crisis has worsened thanks to the behaviour of the Trump administration. More importantly for the Prime Minister, international events are providing him with a sense of purpose which had seemed lacking in Labour’s first months in power.
Labour’s constant refrain about the dismal state of the country and the prudent warning that things could only get worse before they got better, at an unspecified time in the future, have worn thin. Worse, the chancellor’s enforced economic course corrections seemed calculated to make enemies of large sections of the public, including pensioners, farmers and businesses. In opinion polls, the popularity of the prime minister and his party has sunk.
But now, Starmer is garnering golden opinions in the media, including from the mass of right-leaning newspapers who had been targeting him relentlessly. Commenting on the week of diplomacy which took him from parliament to the Oval Office, a Lancaster House summit and back again, The Express declared: “Fair play to Sir Keir Starmer, he has acted with the calmness of an international statesman”. The Times praised his proposed “coalition of the willing”. Even The Mail accepted that his statesmanship faces “the ultimate test”.
Significantly, all the newspapers have turned against Trump, with The Mail on Sunday campaigning for the King to take back Trump’s invitation for a second state visit to the UK.
The wind is behind the prime minister if he can avoid pitfalls or humiliation. His deliberative, low key approach is paying off. In parliament, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and SNP are all supporting Starmer’s actions on Ukraine while the Trumpists and sometime Putin admirers in Reform UK are in a state of confusion.
It turns out Starmer has the right modest but firm temperament for challenges of the moment. The prime ministerial historian Sir Anthony Seldon noted that “he’s not a natural at domestic party politics but his lawyerly mindset is adept at large structural change”. Large structural change is an underestimate of the tectonic shifts now shaking the Western alliance.
The prime minister has the barrister’s skill of making his case without becoming emphatically partisan. In public, he automatically rejects the diagnosis from Sir Ed Davey and numerous former generals and intelligence chiefs that the US is now “an unreliable ally”. He has no alternative given his hopes of being an Atlantic bridge and remaining on friendly terms with the White House. At the same time, with his “coalition of the willing”, Starmer is moving closer to allies in the EU, as he always intended, to the point that Friedrich Merz, the next German chancellor, argues that Brexit is now an irrelevance to good relations with the UK.
Like many British Prime ministers before him, Sir Keir is discovering that he can have a direct personal impact on foreign relations. He represents the nation on the international stage, does the talking and takes the decisions. There is no such instant gratification from the heavy lifting necessary at home, to improve the NHS or boost growth for example, where advisors and political calculations hold sway and progress is glacially slow.
The “generational shift” in national priorities has the potential to help the government out on the domestic agenda. The demands of defence have given the government room to manoeuvre in the increasingly tight economic straitjacket it has imposed on itself. Ministers have already changed their approach to foreign aid and the National Wealth Fund. Starmer opened his statement to the Commons on Monday declaring that “economic security is national security”, together amounting to a chance to “rebuild British industry”.
European defence shares are up on the market. In his Commons statement, Starmer noticed how artillery shells sent to Ukraine have bolstered thousands of manufacturing jobs in Belfast. There may well be further opportunities for British manufacturers as other European nations dramatically increase their defence procurement.
In opinion polls, more than 70% of those questioned back continued support for Ukraine. Unlike Blair and Iraq, Starmer has a largely united Labour party behind him. There has been no widespread rebellion against the cut in aid. Anneliese Dodds, the sole ministerial resignee, actually raised the idea that the Chancellor may have to break her fiscal rules to spend more on defence. The best the Conservative opposition can do is to demand that the government does more, faster.
Starmer is tapping into a strain of patriotism which has long run through the Labour party, especially on the soft left of the party from Ernest Bevin to Neil Kinnock and beyond. This “needs must” approach was best summarised by David Low’s famous “Very well, Alone” cartoon in June 1940, depicting a squaddie defiantly brandishing his fist. Then, as now, the US was declining to come to Europe’s aid.
If Starmer can mobilize this mood and convince the public of the clear and present danger, he may even be able to shift the economy from welfare to warfare, from a drain to a stimulus of economic growth.
Sir Keir Starmer now has a purpose which can unite the nation – rather than his divisive effort to protect his chosen “working people” from doing their bit for economic recovery. He might look like a loser if Trump and Putin succeed in crushing Ukraine as a viable independent European state. But, by then, the UK will have to re-arm anyway.
'economic security is national security' is music to my ears because it is the course of action over which we have most control and which can both fund and manufacture the tools required for achieving effective defence. The UK is potentially very well positioned to achieve economic security because it is very good at developing step change innovation which can be deployed to significantly improve productivity both within the UK and globally. The Government now needs to foster the animal spirit required to unlock this potential rather than dampen it (as it has done thus far).
Although you are right that Keir's approach is currently popular, we are not actually at war with Russia, and they are not at all a military threat, this is mostly just WW2 cosplaying. I accept that the public wants to prolong the war in Ukraine, and that the Ukrainians seem to want this as well, personally I would like to see a ceasefire as soon as possible (which makes me pro Putin to the press).