Keir Starmer has always seen his pragmatism as a strength. Where other political leaders get stuck in dogma, or feel obliged to please their particular wing of the party, he actively eschews any attempt at defining “Starmerism”, boasting that there will never be such a thing.
He has seen how his ability to promise one thing to one crowd before taking a contradictory stance on the same matter has allowed him first to take back the Labour Party from the Corbynites and secondly to win the 2024 general election. What he had perhaps not anticipated – until recently at least – was that his strength could also be a weakness once in power.
This week’s U-turn on the winter fuel payment is an example of how Starmer’s pragmatism does him no favours. He held one position on the necessity of limiting this benefit for months, before moving to another, with the clear motivation being that Labour was taking a hammering in the polls, rather than because Starmer believed this was the right thing to do.
Similarly, his tough immigration speech earlier this month seemed to be driven not by conviction but by public opinion. Of course, voters want politicians who listen to them. But they only believe that the politician is going to do what they say if they’re making the announcements for a better reason than political expediency.
It’s not just voters who do not appreciate Starmer’s pragmatism as much as he does. The recent slew of letters from Labour MPs about welfare and immigration policies should not come as a surprise at all.
Firstly, most Labourites do have quite a strong ideological underpinning (even Blairites, who have as their mantra “what matter is what works”, subscribe to a set of beliefs about the value of the private sector and importance of law and order). So they do not fully understand Starmer. For the average Labour MP, their motivation will boil down to wanting to do the “right thing” – even if they see that in a slightly naive, West Wing-influenced sense of there always being one obviously right way and lots of other clearly wrong ways, as opposed to a series of equally unpleasant choices.
A minister once told me that the only time they really felt their leader was fully human, even in private, was when he was talking about the importance of family, something that seems to make Starmer slightly shiny-eyed with emotion in a way that few other topics do. Once again, this is really not how most Labour MPs function. Politics itself is an emotional thing for them.
Secondly, what Labour MPs do understand about the Prime Minister is that he can change tack if he thinks it is advantageous to do so. If they keep on at him about the policies they don’t like, he will U-turn eventually because he doesn’t really know what he thinks, other than that he wants to keep winning.
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This explains the level of brazenness among Labour MPs now. Far from being robotically loyal “Starmtroopers”, they are increasingly vocal in their critique of the direction of the Government. They have probably also been more influenced than they realise by the years of mayhem that preceded their party entering government.
The open dissent in the Tory party over a long period normalised criticism and rebellion in politics. It changed the baseline of what it means to be loyal: many of these Labour backbenchers signing letters and taking to the airwaves probably still think they are behaving quite reasonably in comparison to the weird bloodlust that Tory MPs displayed in their regular anonymous quotes to journalists about what they wanted to do to whichever leader was nominally in charge at the time. But we are still under a year into this new government and this level of complaining is not normal.
Recent attempts to crack down on WhatsApp dissent haven’t worked very well either: though people in WhatsApp groups do undoubtedly stir one another up, they don’t stop being unhappy at the moment a group is turned into a broadcast-only channel for official messages from the whips.
The next obvious U-turn for Starmer is on something Labour MPs have been unhappy about for months: the two-child benefit cap. It should come as no surprise that the Prime Minister reportedly wants to drop it, using the same argument about an improving economy making that possible. But it should equally come as little surprise if Starmer gets no credit for doing it, either from his party or the public.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of ‘The Spectator’ magazine
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