Keir Starmer’s hidden promise

I didn’t watch Keir Starmer’s New Year speech but I did glance at Twitter afterwards, and annoyingly found something that caught my eye. I sighed, waited for a few hours, then went to read the whole transcript on Labour’s website.

There were a few semi-decent gags in there, and though critics were right to point out that a few more policies would have been welcome, I found something else to be quite striking.

“With respect and service I also promise this: a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives,” Starmer said. “Because that’s the thing about populism, or nationalism, any politics fuelled by division. It needs your full attention. It needs you constantly focusing on this week’s common enemy. And that’s exhausting, isn’t it?”

Later on, he added: “It will feel different, frankly. The character of politics will change, and with it the national mood. A collective breathing out.”

This, to me, felt like the most important part of the speech. Of course we know that the Tories are bad and Labour is good, Keir Starmer used to be director of public prosecutions, yadda yadda. None of that was new. 

What felt (perhaps counter-intuitively) exciting was the idea that Labour will Make Politics Boring Again. There is a great irony in the opposition’s new unofficial slogan, as they are setting out to do what Boris Johnson promised voters in 2019.

Back then, we were told, the country had a choice between Jeremy Corbyn’s grand radical plans to dramatically change Britain, and the Conservatives’ promise to “get Brexit done”. The subtitle could have easily been “so you won’t have to hear from us ever again”. That’s what Johnson offered at the time, and that is one of the reasons why he won so comprehensively.

People were knackered, back in 2019, and they didn’t want to hear from their politicians anymore. Isn’t that funny to think about now, knowing everything we do today? Well, bleakly funny at least.

Boris Johnson made a promise and, like a Chelsea blonde watching her front door hurriedly being shut at 3am, the electorate eventually realised it’d been swindled. Keir Starmer is making a similar promise this year, and his assurances feel altogether more believable. 

Johnson had always been many things but he was never dull; the Labour leader has repeatedly been criticised for being too bland. If he promises us a way of politics that will be tough to turn into screeching headlines, we can probably take him at his word.

It will be an odd thing, to find Westminster dull again. The SW1 bubble will return to being just that; a bubble, hidden away from the rest of the country, of no interest to most people. There will be debates but they will be about policy, or about the vague bouts of infighting the Labour party cannot help but have every few months.

Newspapers which once had to take on extra staff to follow every twist and turn of the Brexit wars may find themselves having to reassign some reporters to other beats. Social media, for so long a place of constant battle over the news of the day, will have to find other things to scream about.

Many people, myself included, have never known calm like that. I started writing about politics in 2015, and am yet to catch my breath. What will happen to us all when, as Starmer said, politics starts treading lighter on our lives? It is a tantalising prospect, as it feels so different from the world we have lived in for so long. I don’t know about you but personally, I can’t wait.