The sad ubiquity of political dishonesty

“I leave with good grace; I leave with a smile.”

I don’t know what planet Sir Keir Starmer’s speechwriter was trained on, so I don’t want to be accused of cultural insensitivity. But here on Earth, those are what we call “non-verbal cues”. Good grace and a smiling countenance are things you demonstrate, rather than things you say. It all felt a bit “strong message here”. 

The past few days have felt slightly ridiculous

Starmer’s final days have got me thinking about honesty. Political honesty is, in general, one of those things which we journalists tend to demand much more than we reward. Humans are also social creatures; we are none of us perfectly honest in our day-to-day lives, and politics as a human business is as subject to conventions and courtesies as anything else.

Even so, the past few days have felt slightly ridiculous.

We can forgive, I think, the massed ranks of Labour MPs applauding Starmer’s final PMQs. Not forgive them the clapping, which should not be done in the Chamber, but the hypocrisy. The eulogy is the central part of any funeral, and it is one of our happier customs not to speak ill of the dead.

But in politics, where death is usually metaphorical, has developed a much weirder convention whereby the dead do not speak ill of the living. 

Whatever his shortcomings as a politician, Starmer has been treated extremely shabbily by the Parliamentary Labour Party. He delivered his party one of the biggest majorities in the long history of the House of Commons, only to see his authority broken in a series of petulant mutinies over trivial and urgently needed spending cuts and then get ditched in favour of a man whose pitch possesses all the depth and sophistication of a Coca-Cola commercial.

And so we were yesterday presented with that surreal speech wherein a prime minister who has been forced out by his party after a far shorter reign than he can possibly have expected pretended not only to be content with the situation, but also that his premiership has been a success. Nobody, but nobody, could believe a word of it. 

What if he’d done something else? Not simply snarl about his colleagues, of course, a poor loser is universally considered bad form and rightly so. But what if he had stepped up to that podium and acknowledged that he had failed? What if he’d used his final speech to look the nation in the eye and deliver some hard truths that nobody worried about re-election dares to mention? (Allow for the purposes of the thought experiment that Starmer possesses that sort of analysis, which I concede isn’t obvious from his conduct in office.)

How would we — both media and nation — react if he’d done something like that? 

Well, on the press side we’d probably create a short clip of him saying “I failed” and turn that into the audiovisual shorthand for his place in history, which is one reason nobody does such things. But, and perhaps I’m being optimistic, I think he might have emerged with a lot of credit. Not only would it deserve respect, but it might have got it; it isn’t uncommon for the public to warm to politicians once they’re ex-politicians and speaking more freely. 

People also like dignity in defeat, and at the risk of slandering again the extraterrestrial who prepared that speech this is not dignity.

And yet, he didn’t do it. Hardly anybody does it. And winners lie as often as losers. Consider this clip of Andy Burnham insisting that he had no role whatsoever in Starmer’s defenestration. 

Such protestations are an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has been paying the least attention. Burnham can’t even pull off the usual tissue-thin pretence of being Cincinnatus called from the plough; he and his team had to plot for months to secure a seat in the Commons, and they did that with the explicit intention of challenging Starmer. 

They presumably believe their motivations to be defensible: that the Government was going in the wrong direction and Burnham was the man to save it and the nation. So why not say so?

As mentioned above, the most common reason that people lie in front of cameras is terror of the clip. A politician will insult the intelligence of their interviewer and anybody who happens to watch a full interview because they know that the full interview is not the real product and neither of those audiences the real audience. When I was at ConservativeHome, I had to watch Rishi Sunak pretend three times that his fundamental political motivations that drove him to seek a parliamentary career were those five trivial objectives of his. No matter how we cut the video, he would always be entirely on-message.

Presumably Burnham is concerned that admitting he did something so nefarious as plot would undermine his image as Mr Nice Guy with so-called “low-information voters” who haven’t been paying attention. But this isn’t an attempted “gotcha” on some obscure area of policy. His campaign to oust Starmer is universally known amongst journalists and thus shapes all the coverage. It is the informational equivalent of background radiation. To think that there exist out there a lot of voters who have no idea suggests, if nothing else, a really bleak assessment of the electorate. 

Yet again, perhaps he has a point. There is a difference, after all, between merely being able to write about Burnham’s plotting and the headline “BURNHAM: I DID IT”. A confession would be news, it would get lots of coverage, and perhaps one man’s bracing honesty would read to another as an unbecoming lack of shame.

And perhaps I’m simply setting the bar too high. British politics has reached the point where the numbers in the budgets are barely real. Why should the sentiment be more solid than the accounting?