What was once said of children might now be applied to one of the few grown-ups in a new Global Disorder that desperately needs some adult influence: sometimes it is better to be “seen but not heard”.
Keir Starmer knows there really isn’t much point in loudly proclaiming Britain’s outrage at the mayhem being unleashed by Donald Trump from Gaza to Greenland. More than enough noise is already coming from the social media playgrounds that are largely controlled – and trolled – by MAGA’s fanboys.
Adding to that cacophony has never been this prime minister’s style, even if that has not always impressed.
Over the past few years, the notion that Starmer is a poor communicator has become one of those truths universally acknowledged and endlessly repeated by political journalists. A contrast is sometimes made with how, for instance, Wes Streeting or Angela Rayner are better at amusing the media and connecting with voters. But I doubt that even the biggest admirers of these talented politicians would really have felt more comfortable with either of them – let alone those “great communicators” Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage – representing Britain on the world stage in Starmer’s place over the past couple of weeks.
The reassuring sense of stolidity provided by the prime minister has helped drain at least some of the drama out of the current crisis. It goes a long way to prove all those theories about “non-verbal communication” being more important than the biggest speech or the most grandiloquent statement.
Indeed, there was a vivid example of actions speaking louder than words after Volodymyr Zelensky was chucked out of the White House like some humiliated contestant on The Apprentice. Starmer declined to join the stampede among European leaders tweeting their condemnation of America’s president, but pictures of him locked in a warm embrace the next day with the Ukrainian president outside Downing Street were seen around the world.
The PM has been rewarded by approval ratings that for the first time since the summer are showing signs of a pulse, as well as some rare praise from even the most right wing newspapers. But there are still plenty of critics, not least from a liberal left that once regarded him as one of their own. They despair of what they see as the short-sighted and vicious cut in Britain’s international aid budget to pay for increased military spending. After the government took money from the world’s poor, it seems welfare budgets for Britain’s poor will be next on the chopping block.
Some of Starmer’s old colleagues from his time as one of those “lefty human rights lawyers” ask why it’s their sacred principles that are always sacrificed or, indeed, what’s the point of having a grown-up in charge of the first Labour government for 14 years if he never stands up for what the party – and, they thought, he – had always believed in.
This goes beyond the familiar cries of betrayal. There’s now a welter of evidence to show that Labour is haemorrhaging support to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens faster than it’s losing votes to Reform. According to a polling analysis published last week by UCL’s Policy Lab and More in Common, a swing of just 1.5% from Labour to the Lib Dems would enable the Tories to take back 80 seats even without gaining a single extra vote.
Two in five Labour supporters say backtracking on climate commitments, preventing safe routes for legal migration or scrapping all diversity programmes “would be a deal breaker” at the next election. The warning seems clear: if the party focuses solely on stopping Reform in working class Brexit-backing areas, it risks taking for granted all those middle class Remainer types.
For what it’s worth, Starmer will probably neither worry about such polls right now nor bask in any faint flickers of popularity. This is a self-consciously serious man at the most serious of times being, well, very serious. As one adviser put it to me the other day: “Keir did not become prime minister just so that he could keep his friends happy.”
Rather than merely talk about the need to increase military spending, Starmer took a decision – one that was certainly personally painful for him – to turn metaphorical ploughshares into swords so that he could do so. Instead of lamenting the collapse of an 80-year-old western alliance, he has done his best to hold it together even as he patches a new one to defend Ukraine and Europe from a “coalition of the willing”.
Most readers of this newspaper are probably sensible enough to understand why Starmer didn’t do that “Love Actually thing”, when a fictional British PM played by Hugh Grant turned on a bullying and predatory US president. But there will be some who nonetheless wonder why he had to oil Trump with so much flattery about how he was helping create the conditions for peace? Was it really necessary to point out how “special” and “unprecedented” the US president’s second state visit to the UK would be? Couldn’t he have said a bit more in defence of Canada other than to mumble that he hadn’t discussed Trump’s expressed desire to turn this part of the Commonwealth into America’s 51st state?
Eighteen months ago, many were similarly angry at how Starmer had tripped over his words on the legality of the Israeli government’s brutal war in Gaza. Some would perhaps have been among the hundreds of thousands demanding an immediate ceasefire that for too long the Labour leader pointedly refused to back.
When I interviewed him about this for my biography of the PM, Starmer repeatedly emphasised that he was “driven by what is actually going to make a difference on the ground” and how, in opposition, there was nothing he could say that would “save a single life in Gaza”. He was worried that speaking out ahead of the then-US president Joe Biden might have reduced an incoming Labour government’s capacity to exert real influence later.
Since the election, Britain has dropped the last government’s opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu being tried at the international court for war crimes, halted some (yes, I know, not all) arms sales to Israel, and been among a quartet of European governments helping Arab nations put together a plan for the reconstruction of Gaza which, unlike Trump’s proposal, allows Palestinians their most basic right to carry on living there. Although it may not be enough for a lot of people, these are all actions the Conservatives probably wouldn’t have taken – and they are not merely words.
But the past couple of weeks have, I hope, also changed something in Starmer because gears that have been grinding for months now seem to be clicking again.
Efforts to portray him as a little bit Trumpian himself – one day railing against civil servants for managing national decline and then complaining that “complacent liberals” had allowed immigration to get too high – have never felt close to being authentic. It’s all been part of a disconnection between Westminster’s obsessions and the potentially existential threat to western liberal democracy looming ever closer.
Well, now it is upon us. And the prime minister no longer has to talk about who paid for some suit, the haywire office politics within Downing Street or, most ludicrously of all, whether he is spending too much time travelling abroad as if the limits of the world ended at a focus group in Wallsend.
As he enters this global storm, Starmer is showing the same relentlessness, as well as his capacity for reason and a flair for detailed nuance, that have usually served him well before. It is expressing, not betraying, democratic values to search for any hint of ambiguity and uncertainty in America’s position. Such an approach doesn’t suit those who like their politics to flow in straight lines, but it’s exactly where desperately needed compromise might be found.
That UCL/More in Common polling showed that Britain’s public are impatient for change but, aside from Reform voters, do not want to smash everything up. They want the government to make speed not haste or, their report concluded, “radicalism not recklessness”.
These are Starmer’s strengths and he should build on them. There is no reason to lack confidence in progressive values because they still point to the best – or least worst – route for Britain in this terrifying new era. For all our frustrations with a rules-based democracy, it remains the best way in the vicious blood-stained history of our species we have found to organise a cohesive society. At a time when we’re now having once more to contemplate an escalating war in Europe, these tried and trusted mechanisms for balancing competing interests and conflicting rights will be more important than ever if Britain is to get through this together.
Those same values have generally underpinned the west’s economic prosperity before and will do so again. Trump’s White House has begun an assault on the independence of financial regulators, scrapped anti-corruption laws, threatened federal judges who get in the way, and slapped arbitrary tariffs on America’s closest trading partners.
What has already been styled as a “mafia state” might help him and his friends get even richer, but it won’t make ordinary people better off any more than it has in Putin’s Russia. A Britain aligned with Europe in having strong independent institutions backed by the rule of law and an old-fashioned liberal belief in the virtues of free trade can attract investment, foster innovation and encourage competition as America did over most of the past century.
And staying true to the still beating heart of the human rights lawyer within him amid all that hard-headed pragmatism, is surely the best way to win other hearts and heads in this fight to protect what we used to call the free world against authoritarians from Moscow to Washington.
Starmer doesn’t need to shout about his values. But he can show them.
Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin is published by William Collins
