Starmer, man of sleaze

The rot starts at the top. We have a prime minister whose name is synonymous with sleaze, dodgy deals and hypocrisy. This is the man who allows his ministers to breach with impunity the codes that govern public life; who thinks it should be one rule for him and his chums, another for everyone else. With his every action he signals to his MPs: do what you like. There are no consequences.

Those words are not mine. They are the words of our Prime Minister, writing in The Guardian in 2021.

The same year he wrote that, he told the BBC the government was “trashing” the UK’s reputation for upholding democratic standards. 

A year after, he tweeted that Boris Johnson was a “national distraction” — millions of people are struggling to pay the bills, but Boris Johnson and his government are spending the whole time mopping up their own rule-breaking, sleaze and deceit. He’s got to go”, he concluded. 

These are just three examples of countless Starmer soundbites along these lines, as he made the most of the Tory sleaze that beset the Boris Johnson government. Every scandal — Pincher, Patterson, Hancock, Barnard Castle, Partygate, PPE procurement, the Downing Street flat — was met with such Gladstonian moral rectitude, such Biblical piousness, it could only have been performative. When people are truly outraged, their anger is instinctive, barely controllable. Instead, Starmer had the rehearsed indignation of a barrister addressing the gallery. It was a sermonising, and you always felt as if he believed the cadence of his condemnation mattered more than content.

In office, he has turned out to be less a pillar of society and more of a lean-to

We have had the row over Lord Alli, over Starmer’s gifts, over other MPs accepting tickets, Rayner’s tax affairs, the Digital Services Tax U-turn, Peter Mandelson. The government’s former anti-corruption Minister Tulip Siddiq has just been sentenced to four years in jail in Bangladesh on corruption charges. Good Lord, how the insufferable have fallen.

We hear constant warnings about the threats of demagogues to democracy. The precise definition — much like fascism, given both are used as political pejoratives, — is strikingly imprecise, but it can generally be boiled down to Merriam-Webster’s: “a political leader who appeals to popular prejudices and who makes false claims and promises in order to gain power.”

Given this definition, I ask you; what is Starmer if not a demagogue of the establishment? A man who appealed to the popular prejudices of the washed masses, who made false promises about his own party’s probity. 

Starmer sold himself on far more than competence. He sold his Labour government as a purification ritual and himself as a Hercules, sent to cleanse the Augean stables of British politics. “Drain the swamp” was the populist slogan of a demagogue, we were told at the time; is it meaningfully different to Starmer’s statement that; “Every day there’s more sleaze, it stinks”. The messenger might be different, but the message is the same.

The problem is that unless you are actually Hercules, the shit piles up faster than you can shovel it out

The problem is that unless you are actually Hercules, the shit piles up faster than you can shovel it out and so Starmer, like all demagogues, has fallen short of the standards he himself has set. Like many demagogues before him, the path of least resistance is the familiar slide toward despotism: cancelled elections, the neutralisation of political rivals, a clamp down on social media dissent.

Were it not for the wilful ignorance of Mandelson’s links to the international pedophile Epstein, this sleaze would be most remarkable for its tawdriness, its cheapness, its almost contemptible smallness. We have MPs who are willing to trade their honour for tickets to Taylor Swift. We have a warrant out for the arrest of a former Cabinet Minister in a third world country. We have a Prime Minister who allows another man to buy clothes for his wife. Their modesty is not so much indecent as pitiful.

Luckily for Starmer, in Morgan McSweeney he has a convenient fall guy. But sleaze is like the clap; once it’s with you, it never really leaves. Even if McSweeney goes, the rancid symptoms will remain. The rash is not going away — as the Prime Minister well knows. I close with another Starmer quote from his Guardian article:

What we need now is to restore public faith in our democracy, not cynically exploit it. Because long after this government has gone, we will still be living with the consequences of its flagrant disregard for honesty and accountability in high office. The sooner we get on with cleaning up our politics, the better.