Why Starmer must remain Prime Minister

The scene is set too well

As a reluctant student of History, whose formative years were spent reading fiction for pleasure, I can occasionally be frustrated by the lack of narrative payoff in world events as they occur. Look only to sickly old Mirabeau, the Aristocrat who nearly perverted the creation of the First Republic into a soggy Parliamentary democracy. Whose France would have been too tedious to give rise to Napoleon. The revolutionary who was in the pay of the King.

How tragic is it that he died of heart problems a year before his crimes were revealed? It would have been such a satisfying narrative end to the Ancien Regime to have had Mirabeau guillotined next to Louis XIV. The ‘Constitutional Reform’ that he advocated for would have been given a more cathartic destruction if the bumbling, obese eunuch who became it’s figurehead had been outed as a counter-revolutionary within his own lifetime. Instead we read Antoine Jay, writing some thirty years later:

‘Mirabeau comprit retendue de sa mis- sion, et y fut ndèle. La nature aussi l’avait moulé pour le tribunat l’audace de son front, le sombre éclair de’ses yeux, la nerté de ses attitudes, ses formes athlétiques, le retentis-sement quelquefois heurté d’une. voix impé- rieuse, tout annonçait en lui l’homme né pour les combats elt les victoires de l’éloquence.’

“Mirabeau understood the full scope of his mission and remained faithful to it. Nature had also shaped him for the tribune: the boldness of his brow, the dark flash of his eyes, the proud firmness of his posture, his athletic build, the sometimes rough resonance of an imperious voice — everything in him announced a man born for the battles and victories of eloquence.”

This loopy hagiography, worthy of Tom Baldwin himself, is what I suspect awaits many of our contemporary moderating politicians can expect to enjoy in about half a century, after there are inevitably some unpleasant excesses in the dismantling of our own ancien regime. The last fronde of pragmatists who wished to reconcile the establishment with populism, before the revolution became unstoppable. Robert Jenrick as a sort of Necker, maligned, perhaps unfairly, on all sides.

Keir Starmer, of course, is not made from this cast of historical actor. He is not a reformer looking to negotiate with the people’s concerns – despite the best efforts of the Paddy McPoll – he is a crude enforcer of the old regime. A human rights lawyer drafted in by the Deep State to turn the clock back to the 1990s. A former employee of refugee rights campaigning groups. He is Charles X. A foaming reactionary, a font of prejudice, with a macabre fascination for intolerant repression. Brought in after the revolution has begun (Brexit) to restore the old interests to their rightful place, only to be brought crashing down by the reason of the mob which he sought to crush.

Keir Starmer is so much the embodiment of everything that is wrong with ‘Modern Britain’ that I believe, from a narrative perspective, it must and should be him who is cast from power in 2029. ‘Modern Britain’ should die with this B.1962 Arsenal Fan and Top KC. I write this at a time when the usual suspects are reporting that his Cabinet are mutinous and that the polling suggests Shabana Mahmood/Wes Streeting/Andy Burnham would all do better with the electorate.

No. We do not need another narrative Arc. We do not need to know what it would have been like if Britain was governed by a bossy British-Pakistani woman, a paunchy millennial or a performative northerner. None of these people can ever capture the rottenness of the social-democratic consensus more perfectly than Sir Keir.

There will be nobody more satisfying for Nigel Farage to sweep aside with an extreme majority. Nothing will raise the indignation of David Aaronovitch, not even the fact that he can no longer afford a subscription to read his erstwhile employer’s newspaper, more than to see a man of his own generation be democratically slaughtered by an army of horrible, Daily Mail reading old bigots.

But this is true not only of Labour. If the Conservatives dies in the hands of Kemi Badenoch, it will be the best conclusion to the moderniser mythology, a skewering of hubris. For the world’s oldest political party to vanish twenty-three years after David Cameron first introduced the A-list because the powers that be overpromoted and overpraised a manifestly incapable first generation immigrant (‘for all intents and purposes’) is an act of historical justice.

The constellation of British politics has aligned itself perfectly for a great reckoning with the hypocrisy of past generations. So pray for the good electoral health of Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch. Let them lie in the graves that others have dug.