As a young man, I used to enjoy playing a series of video games called Tropico, a city builder with vaguely political themes where you played as a dictator. In the Tropico games, you could order your avatar to mount the balcony of the Presidential palace and deliver stirring speeches, which would raise your popularity for a brief period. The “address to the nation” is a practice, generally, foreign to democracies outside of a crisis. When our glorious leaders speak to us, we expect them to do so from the dispatch box of Parliament, or at set occasions like the King’s Christmas address. It is true, the weekly COVID-briefings from Number 10 created a precedent, and the twilight days of Sunakism saw an oddly unspecified address from Number 10 about “British values”. Nonetheless, for a sitting Prime Minister to lay out policy in this manner in an attempt to silence criticism of things he is yet to do, is not normal politics. 

The content of Keir Starmer’s recent speech was similarly Generalissimo-flavoured. Sir Keir painted an apocalyptic vision of Britain as having been left in “rubble and ruin” by the Conservatives whom he called a “rot”. Sir Keir spoke about “reclaiming Downing Street… for the people.” This is very different from the joshing, “sorry, there’s no money left!” norm for British Democracy. Starmer is not saying that he disagrees with the Conservative government, he is not trying something so simple as blaming them for his own inaction. David Cameron was not talking about the “rot” of Blairism within 2 months of government. What Sir Keir is trying to say is that the past 14 years of British government are illegitimate; and that any failure of the Starmer project is the consequence of wreckers and saboteurs. 

This is the language of authoritarianism, in which political opponents are “othered” into something alien from the rest of the nation; similar tactics have been studied in Francoist Spain. Perhaps, many readers will feel that the Conservative Party ought to be treated in this way; and it was hard to feel too intimidated by the thundering Knight, Sir Keir was constantly interjecting how decisions he had made “went against every grain of his being”, begging the question of why he allowed himself to be persuaded into doing them; the unfortunate habit of the Prime Minister to sound like he’s just polished off a 6-pack of Holstein pils is yet unmitigated by Labour comms. Our country is the first to have strongman politics without a strongman. 

What is the cause of this aberration? A dark wind is blowing through the capitals of the sensible centre. In France, the new coalition government between Emmanuel Macron and the New Popular Front is promising a 90 per cent tax on the rich. The — increasingly speculative — candidacy of Kamala Harris and a P.E Teacher from Nebraska for the American Presidency wants to tax unrealised capital gains. Starmerism is part of a global trend with underreported significance; liberal elites are no longer content to present themselves as technocrats and apolitical managers of the economy. What we’re seeing is not “politics as usual” but a deeply ideological, although by no means radical or transformative, project which shows naked contempt for both expertise and dissent. We have a word for such politics, and that word is Populism.

… the Starmer cabinet is one of the least qualified in history

If you find yourself struggling to believe how some of the decisions made over the past summer ever happened, you must turn to the fact that the Starmer cabinet is one of the least qualified in history. For example, one of the earliest Starmer appointments was that of Lord Timpson as Minister of State for prisons. There is nothing to suggest that Lord Timpson actually knows anything about his brief. He is a man with a private, moral interest in prisoner’s welfare, much like how other very wealthy people develop philanthropic interests in Spectacled Bears and Global Warming. He has not academically studied the causes of crime, worked in a prison, or, one hopes, been a prisoner himself. His views on the topic directly contradict everything written about reoffending for several decades. It is like appointing a creationist to be Minister of Education. 

Starmer himself is among the least educated PMs in modern History. It is easy to imagine him being pleasantly surprised to discover Germany “used to be lots of little countries” alarmingly late in life. Sue Gray, widely identified as the driving force in Starmerism, is surely accomplished in her role as ethics advisor. Whether her experience running a job centre in Cricklewood properly qualifies to read sensitive briefings on whatever the Chinese are getting up to is a different matter. Of course, one can already predict the responses given to anyone who dares mention the competence crisis at the top of Number 10; you will, inevitably, be called a snob for an attitude less than supinely deferential to our rulers. These are the tactics all anti-intellectual, populist and authoritarian governments have used to attack critics of their incompetence; the powerful become the victims, and the critics become rootless “elites”. 

The times when the Establishment at least pretended to be the party of expertise are long behind us

Across the civil service, professional officials have been quietly replaced by a cast of Labour donors from the world of business and apparatchiks. The latest for the Whitehall chopping block is Gwyn Jenkins, decorated Royal Marine, who shall no doubt be replaced as National Security advisor by “that bloke off comic relief”. It is worth noting how the one party Starmer’s Labour seems to be mirroring in government is Reform. It was a major part of the populist party’s manifesto that “business people” should be brought into government and the professional civil service replaced by political appointees. Those who have seen Starmer’s assault on civil service independence, with its appointment of party hacks and assorted small-time rich men to offices which ought to be appointed on merit, will wonder whether “Vote Labour, Get Farage” might have some truth to it. 

The times when the Establishment at least pretended to be the party of expertise are long behind us. This is the age of the populist centre; and the critics of nascent Starmerism should reflect that in their rhetoric.