Those of us who read too many detective stories probably have an unrealistically exalted view of barristers. With their razor-sharp minds, rapier wit, and quick thinking, the brilliant silks of fiction are rarely at a loss for words. It has, therefore, been a curious experience to observe Starmer KC over the last few weeks. The Prime Minister has been at the Bar since before I started school, and yet in interviews he appears flustered, ill-tempered, inarticulate, and bizarrely oblivious to how the public might view the Labour leadership’s apparent reliance on the beneficence of a single millionaire. 

I might have more sympathy with Sir Keir, in his battle with political journalists focused on “sleaze” and procedural rigmarole rather than policy and outcomes, were it not for Labour’s relentless sanctimony about Tory misbehaviour, both perceived and actual. As it is, they have fed the beast of public censoriousness, cheering while it devoured their opponents, and so cannot expect much sympathy now it has turned to devour them too. Proverbs about living and dying by the sword come to mind, and even an old story about motes and beams.

Can the beast be slain? It would take a politician of unusual charisma, eloquence and courage to address the nation with the message that the general public are getting fixated on the wrong things, and allowing themselves to be whipped up into pointless huffing and puffing about relatively minor “scandals”, while huge structural problems go unsolved. In the era of universal suffrage democracy, the voter is always right, at least as a matter of political logic. Equally, however, there is a very strong case that a politician who did make such a speech would be on to something. 

Consider something like Partygate. The crux of the matter was that some colleagues who were spending all day together, in a very intense and high-stress environment — the office of the head of government, during a disease pandemic — spent some additional time together, in the evening after work, to unwind and relax. There was no meaningful raised threat to public health from any of it. That’s not to say that it was all fine and dandy, or that the way the Johnson government handled the revelations was especially edifying. But fundamentally, it was not the sort of lapse that ought to have derailed an entire government. In my view, the enormous public anger that followed the revelations was really about something else; the cruelly pedantic enforcement of excessive lockdown regulations to which the rest of us were subjected.

… none of the recent revelations about the Labour Cabinet suggest any deep corruption or wickedness

Similarly, none of the recent revelations about the Labour Cabinet suggest any deep corruption or wickedness. Naiveté, certainly, and perhaps a desire to experience the frisson of proximity to power and glamour, but not serious moral torpor. We are talking, when all is said and done, about invitations to swanky parties, a few new outfits, a free holiday in New York, and Taylor Swift tickets so that an overworked MP can make up to his daughter for all those family dinners missed while he discussed interminable points of order in draughty community centres. As with Partygate, I wouldn’t want to claim there is no moral issue at all with these freebies — only that by comparison with some of the huge challenges facing Britain today it is pretty small fry.

The journalist Aris Roussinos put it this way on Twitter recently: “Britain is a country mercilessly unforgiving of petty corruption among its rulers, but endlessly tolerant of dangerous incompetence”. For example, it is now three decades since England has built a new reservoir, even though the population has grown by about nine million in that time. We have not opened a single mile of high-speed rail since 2007. We are not building enough power station or roads or homes. Our domestic steel industry is collapsing because of energy costs, and the government seem content to let Harland & Woolf, an important shipbuilder, go into administration. The British Army would struggle to field a single full-strength division, despite all our hawkishness towards Russia, while in the last year almost all of the Royal Navy’s attack submarines have been confined to port for various technical reasons. The Channel migrant crisis continues.

It is in this context that we should ask some very searching questions about the amount of media and public attention being paid to Angela Rayner’s new year in the Big Apple or Lady Starmer’s gladrags. The Prime Minister’s evident embarrassment at his use of Lord Alli’s swanky flat is an irresistible opportunity for right-wing schadenfreude, but at a time when real average pay has barely risen in two decades and there is a severe housing shortage, it feels decadent and frivolous for it to be leading the domestic news agenda.

One possible partial solution to the problem is that the main parties implement a kind of implicit non-aggression pact

It’s difficult to be sure whether this is largely the fault of political journalists, or whether they are simply responding to popular demand for relentless focus on the moral shortcomings and stupidities of individual politicians. Most likely, the public’s puritanical attitude to their leaders, and the journalistic preference for custard pie throwing over serious analysis and principled argument, form a mutually reinforcing spiral of trivialisation. 

One possible partial solution to the problem is that the main parties implement a kind of implicit non-aggression pact, whereby they all quietly agree to not exploit so-called “sleaze” allegations, unless there is genuinely disgraceful behaviour. This is wildly improbable, of course, not least because it is a prisoner’s dilemma-type situation where the first to defect from a mutually beneficial agreement gets an immediate selfish advantage. But it’s hard to see how else we might move towards a more constructive form of politics, laser-focused on national prosperity and revival rather than purse-lipped tutting about the excesses of The Other Lot. After all, I suspect that popular concern about “snouts in the trough” would abate considerably if everyone’s trough was getting much fuller.