The hollow men

You find me, dear reader, in something of a quandary. Over the weekend, I wrote about the absolute dearth of ideas in this Labour Government. Today, I need to respond to the Prime Minister’s big relaunch speech of yesterday. You can see where this is going.

The speech is the sort of item which, if missed by political editors, causes editors to wonder why they employ political editors. But it was a speech which exemplified the absolute dearth of ideas in this Labour Government. To all intents and purposes, I have already written about it, two days ago. You can just go and read it. I can’t simply write it again — editors frown upon recycled copy almost as much as no copy at all.

So, what shall we talk about? We could do the mutiny breaking out on the Labour benches, the first snowflakes coming loose from the avalanche that will likely end Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership. But there will be time for that, because there is actually a dimension of yesterday’s speech that I do want to write about: my absolute mystification as to who, or what, the Prime Minister is.

It isn’t merely that the speech had nothing in it; hollow speeches are hardly a novelty in politics. It’s that I simply don’t understand the mind that produced it. What does the Prime Minister think is going on in the world around him? Who looks back at him from the mirror? These aren’t sarcastic questions, nor are they meant to be cruel. I just don’t get it.

By way of contrast, I feel that I would have understood Boris Johnson had he been at the podium yesterday. A waffly speech full of empty platitudes was standard Johnson fare, after all. But as a phenomenon, it was explicable. First, because it had simply always worked for Boris right up until it hadn’t, so one can see why he learned the behaviour. But second, because there was never any doubt that Johnson knew what he was. High as his opinion of himself undoubtedly was and remains, he knew himself to be an illusionist (he even has a stage name, “Boris”). “Let me work magic”, that’s the spirit in which he would have delivered yesterday’s speech.

Starmer, though? He does not think of himself that way; indeed, he came very much to define himself against “Boris”. Whatever he actually is, the Prime Minister gives every impression of considering himself a sober, serious servant of the state. He seems unlikely to think of himself as a trickster, to commend himself for his ability to charm his way out of trouble. So how does a man like that explain, to himself, what happened yesterday? The big, make-or-break survival speech which contained, to quote Francis Urquhart again: “Nothing! Not a damned thing!”

The gulf between word and deed now all but defines British politics. If you need a one-stanza summation of our political culture, you can do no better than this, from Eliot’s aptly-titled The Hollow Men:

Between the idea 
And the reality 
Between the motion 
And the act 
Falls the Shadow.

That isn’t a specifically Starmer problem, or even a specifically Labour problem. If this Government pledged to go “hell for leather for growth” and then introduced a raft of growth-crushing taxes and employment and wage regulations, the Conservatives presided over the largest stealth-tax haul in living memory and sincerely, in their own minds, fought the last election as tax cutters. British politics is conducted more or less entirely in the Shadow now; we are umbranauts, you and I.

The critical question, then, is why our leaders contrive to keep falling into it. And that’s our problem. Well, my problem.

The Tories, as a whole, simply got lost in it; it isn’t obvious to me, as someone who was paid to scrutinise them full-time for many years, that by the end the Party had any collective understanding of Britain’s political economy in which the incoherence of its positions might be visible. Johnson simply yoked the Shadow and had it tow his chariot, and what a ride it was.

Starmer though… I simply don’t know. He’s an intelligent man. If he sincerely believes that economic integration with Europe is the magic key to unlocking a properly growing economy, then he should say so, and try it. I disagree with that analysis, but there are people who believe it, and if he believed it he should act on that belief. But to say that Britain’s future lies in the “heart of Europe” but then rule out joining either the Single Market or the Customs Union? Set aside all your own analysis, what does he think that would achieve? What did the advisors who helped draft that passage think it would do?

This is a prime minister, remember, who is fighting for his political life

Words do not simply cause things to happen by being spoken. That is, literally, magical thinking, the intellectual equivalent of those Pacific islanders who assemble wooden planes in hope of instantiating American bombers. We do not, typically, consider such cargo cults to be models of our own political thought. And yet.

This is a prime minister, remember, who is fighting for his political life. But even with nothing to lose, he had nothing to offer. There is some honour in the fact that Starmer in his imperial pomp and Starmer in his dying ditch are exactly the same man, we must concede. It is the calibre of man that is the pity. But it is also profoundly weird in a way which few things in British politics manage to be. He says he wants the job for ten years. Why? That he cannot effectively communicate an answer to that question is not in dispute; the mystery is whether one exists at all. It may simply be another thing that he knows prime ministers have.

Perhaps it is simply the opposite response to unpleasant circumstances to the one I diagnosed in Labour at the weekend. If other Labour figures are retreating behind the walls of the mind, Starmer is doing the opposite: abandoning it entirely, making instead a fortress of the rote, mechanical exercise of his role. He says the words, he gives the speeches, he has the car and the podium: he is the Prime Minister. If he just keeps being the prime minister, perhaps he won’t stop being the prime minister — a Count von Morzin for the lanyard age.

And the worst part is that we’ll probably miss him, our Hollow Man, just as Joseph Roth’s heroes missed the Habsburgs. The chilly sun of the Starmer Government is being extinguished, but compared to what may come after it we might well come to lament that it had, at least, been a sun.