Neither good nor serious

The last eighteen months must have been hard on Polly Toynbee. The spiritual grandmother of the modern Labour Party had to spend fourteen years lamenting Conservative rule. The election of Keir Starmer was, for her, a chance to “[clean] up our fetid politics”. Now, the government is teetering over the appointment, to a top job, of a bosom buddy of the world’s most famous sex criminal. Fetid enough for you?

“Fetid” would be a good word for describing an argumentative maneuver that Mrs Toynbee deploys in her latest piece. Discussing the Epstein Files, she writes:

Somehow, the grooming gangs of Rotherham cause more visceral disgust and outcry than exploitation of these equally vulnerable victims procured for the lusts of the wealthy.

It is perhaps worth noting that dozens of people have been convicted for their part in the grooming gang horrors — not just in Rotherham, but in Rochdale, Telford and elsewhere — while none of Epstein’s friends and acquaintances, except Ghislaine Maxwell, have actually been proved to have committed crimes. But it is also the case that there is no contradiction here. The class of globe-trotting political actors who enabled Jeffrey Epstein are the same people who ignored the grooming gangs. Does Mrs Toynbee think it is the likes of Peter Mandelson who have been beating the drum for justice for the victims of Rotherham? Who does she think has been expressing disproportionate “disgust” here? 

I’m not sure that Mrs Toynbee is thinking of anyone in particular. It seems like a desperate attempt to claw back some of the moral authority that the centre left lost when the self-proclaimed guardians of the underdog overlooked the rape and torture of vulnerable schoolgirls. The opportunism is repulsive.

Such indecent and unserious rhetorical behaviour is ironic coming from someone who is saluting Starmer as a “good and serious man”. “I still don’t understand the reason for this level of public dislike for [him],” Toynbee sighs.

Well, I’m not going to claim that Keir Starmer is an exceptionally bad man. Nor am I going to claim that my own goodness is such that I can spend a lot of time finger-wagging. But this premature creation of a kind of Starmerite Lost Cause Myth needs challenging. Toynbee’s portrayal of a decent and earnest prime minister overwhelmed by the cynicism around him is preposterous. Are we talking about the same man who called Jeremy Corbyn his friend before saying that he wouldn’t even wave to him across the road?

Belief in Starmer’s goodness and seriousness, at least as they relate to public life, seems impossible to sustain in the face of his endless series of U-turns. He thought that women could have penises until he didn’t. He claimed that Britain was at risk of becoming an “island of strangers” before deciding that it wasn’t. Perhaps the only thing that the Prime Minister has been consistent about is expensively abandoning British Overseas Territories. 

This is devastating for a prime minister whose lack of vision and charisma makes competence his only selling point

This sort of inconsistency is liable to be justified as the mark of pragmatism. Of course, there can be value in changing one’s mind in the face of facts. But this all seems far more like changing one’s mind in the face of unfortunate PR. The idea that Starmer and his government have been marked by seriousness should have been destroyed by the Mandelson affair. If an idiot like me, living on the other side of Europe, knew that Mandelson’s links to Epstein would be a massive problem, the government has no excuse. The idea that someone could claim to be shocked by the dubious connections of Peter Mandelson, of all people, is absurd. It is like a magazine hiring Hunter S. Thompson and then being surprised to discover that he does drugs. As well as the moral implications, this is devastating for a prime minister whose lack of vision and charisma makes competence his only selling point.

Again, I am not suggesting that the prime minister stands out among world leaders for his badness or unseriousness. Actually, I suspect that whoever replaces him will be worse. Polly Toynbee writes today that Labour should “go left” to “fetch back Green and Liberal Democrat supporters”. Starmer’s strained attempts to be somewhat realistic about migration and welfare have been too much for the Guardianista set. The future of the left, it seems, is Zack Polanski — all sentimental delusions, all the time.

But all political disagreements aside, I can’t blame people for heeding Polanski’s call. There is no injustice in the Starmerites being abandoned. Their dishonourable supplanting of Corbyn and his comrades ended up being followed by chronic indecision and outrageous incompetence — all wrapped up in bizarre self-satisfaction. I’m not rooting for Starmer to go (inasmuch as the alternatives seem worse, as well as because I’m an expat) but if he does then he will have himself to blame. Self-proclaimed moderate leftists seem to have a problem of believing themselves to be good and serious by their very nature. Our record, not our pose, should be the proof of that.