The unsettling psychology of Sir Keir Starmer

Labour's self-righteous leader is addicted to the idea of his own virtue but nothing he says can be trusted.

Photo by Natalia Trofimova on Unsplash

KEIR Starmer has accused Rishi Sunak of not believing that child molesters should be sent to prison.

After today’s article by Starmer in the Daily Mail, the claim that the already-notorious attack ad on the Prime Minister was launched without Starmer’s knowledge or involvement has been exposed as the shameless lie that it always was.

“I make absolutely zero apologies for being blunt about this. I stand by every word Labour has said on the subject, no matter how squeamish it might make some feel. When 4,500 child abusers avoid prison, people don’t want more excuses from politicians – they want answers,” writes Starmer.

Yet Sunak had no involvement in drawing up the sentencing guidelines which advised judges that sex offending against children should not automatically attract a prison term. And here’s the rub: Starmer himself was intimately involved in compiling them.

While Director of Public Prosecutions he sat on the Sentencing Council that came up with the sentencing framework for sex offenders in 2012 that persists to this day.

So he is condemning Sunak for not yet having overturned the very policy that he co-authored alongside other legal big-wigs. All of which raises a fascinating question: How the hell did he think he was going to get away with that?

The normally loquacious shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry was unsurprisingly stumped by the point when it was put to her by Justin Webb on Radio 4 this morning, eventually resorting to the improbable claim that she had known nothing about Starmer’s role.

Could Starmer simply have forgotten his participation in this soft-on-nonces sentencing framework? That seems highly unlikely. Though he has an uninspiring mind, it is certainly a methodical one and nobody has detected previous signs of early onset Alzheimer’s in him.

Far more likely is that Starmer has wilfully dissociated from the episode, simply refusing to follow a logical thought trail that would paint him in a bad light. After all, he also writes in the Mail that: “As a former director of public prosecutions, my life’s work has been about making our country safer and more secure.”

This is the kernel of the Labour leader’s self-image: an addiction to the idea that he is a virtuous and principled individual, pursuing justice at every turn. Once that belief was cemented in place in his psyche, all manner of inconsistencies could be overlooked.

Not just on jail terms for paedos, but for any number of other important stances and pledges: whether to honour the result of the Brexit referendum, whether Jeremy Corbyn was fit to be prime minister, whether Shamima Begum deserved to get her British citizenship back, whether private sector involvement in the NHS should be banned, whether the utilities should be nationalised, whether free movement should be defended, whether student fees should be scrapped: the list of opportunistic U-turns goes on and on. And on.

Looking at the first of those items, on his Brexit manoeuvrings, illustrates the point well. As shadow secretary of state for Brexit on the eve of the 2017 general election, Starmer pledged in a piece to camera that Labour would uphold exiting from the EU as “a matter of principle”. But by autumn 2018 there he was earning himself an instant standing ovation from Labour activists when he committed to campaigning for a second referendum at the party’s conference and declared: “Nobody is ruling out Remain.”

This was the most important political issue for many years. Starmer must have known he was abandoning a solemn pledge on it. Yet still he considered himself to be that courageous and principled campaigner for justice.

This doesn’t quite count as cognitive dissonance because that involves holding two contradictory thoughts in one’s head at the same time and suffering an unpleasant and disorientating feeling as a result. Neither of those conditions applied to Starmer either over Brexit or the sentencing of child molesters: there had been an elapse of time between the contradictory stances and there was no trace of discomfort detectable in his demeanour. The addiction to the idea of his own nobility had proved too strong. In Starmer’s mind, the Prince Andrew defence prevailed: “The trouble with me is that I am too honourable.”

Keir Starmer is the method actor of British politics. He does not speak from the heart because, like the Tin Man, he has no heart. So expecting consistency from him would be akin to expecting Robert De Niro to exude the same beliefs as the overbearing dad Jack Byrnes in Meet The Fockers or spin doctor Conrad Brean in Wag The Dog as he does when playing a murderous gangster.

Perhaps that is according him too much glamour and the relevant comparison should be with the suburban shape-shifter Mr Benn – the stupendously dull children’s TV character who dons a different outfit each time he goes into the local fancy dress shop and imagines himself at the centre of an heroic scene: an animated Billy Liar or a reincarnation of Charles Pooter, the supremely self-important North Londoner in the comic novel The Diary of a Nobody.

Can such a fantasist – even one who camouflages himself with conventionality – really become prime minister? Many critics of Boris Johnson would say that already happened, though distracting outlandishness was the core of that premier’s ability to mislead.

Who knows what future scenes a prime minister Starmer would appear in or what stances he would take? All we can be certain of is that in his own mind they would be honourable and principled, even if diametrically opposed to everything he had ever said before or would come to say again.

As with the famous Magritte portraits of partially obscured and bowler-hatted men, one is left with the unsettling feeling that there is nothing really there. Perhaps that is how you like your prime ministers. But it isn’t how I like mine.