Oliver Eagleton on the arc of Starmer’s career

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Oliver Eagleton (heir of the great Terry Eagleton) wrote an excellent book on Keir Starmer, reconstructing his rise from lawyer — writing of human rights — and bureaucratic servant of the state as a general prosecutor up to his current premiership. The book strips away cliches, fomented in the media and elsewhere, on Starmer’s apparent political qualunquismo (political cynicism). We talked about it in Soho, a stone's throw from the New Left Review headquarters of which Eagleton is assistant editor.

Your book tends to reject the “spin doctor take” on things. I've noticed that you deal with McSweeney [Starmer’s spin doctor] almost cursorily. Do we have to believe that it's always Campbell instead of Blair, or Cummings instead of Johnson, or now McSweeney instead of Starmer?

Well, part of what my book was trying to push back against was this “empty vessel” theory of Starmer, the very obvious observation that Starmer is not what you would call a slick politician. He doesn't perform very well in front of the news cameras, and he's a bit flat footed and uncharismatic, all of that is undeniable. But then people tend to extrapolate from that, he doesn't really have any firm convictions of his own and that he is just a cipher or a conduit for these other figures in the background, the Blairite old guard, or also that whatever he does must be a matter of just electoral opportunism, pitching himself to a right wing voter base and so on. So the received wisdom about Starmer is that he's just a weathervane, and he goes in whichever way the prevailing wind is blowing. 

That's not true. In fact, Starmer does have a quite coherent politics that you can trace biographically back to the start of his career as a lawyer and so on. And if Starmer himself is quite boring in many ways, one of the interesting things about him is why that politics fits with our political moment. There is a role that advisers play, obviously, in elevating particular political figures. There are apparatchiks and operators in the party who decide that this politician, as opposed to that one, is the man for the moment. And that did happen with Starmer. But the interesting question is why his politics made him the man for the moment? And that's what the book tries to explain.

As you clearly show in your research, in his early upbringing as a professional lawyer and so on, is that this is a figure who's got an ambiguous relationship with progressiveness. On the one side, you have the human rights lawyer, and on the other, you have the Punisher-in-chief, the Whitewasher-in-chief.

There's a historical explanation for that shift, which is that many people from Starmer's milieu did progressive things under Thatcher and Major at a time when the Tories were in power, were seen as a purely regressive, reactionary force, and there was a large cultural opposition to Thatcherism that suffused these various different spheres, like the legal profession, the media, the charity NGO world that Perry Anderson describes in that famous essay called “A Culture in Contra Flow”, where there's like a cultural efflorescence that Thatcherism produces, in opposition to the government. Starmer, as a young human rights lawyer, is part of that scene. 

And then what happens to that scene in 1997? It all gets subsumed into Blairism, because Blair manages to present the Labour Party as the liberal, modernising progressive force and to, then, try to impose that logic on the institutions of the state, as it were. And like Blair, coming to power is both in many ways a real hard line, authoritarian disciplinarian: he puts a new criminal offence on the statute book for every single day he's in power. But he also presents his project as a modernizing one. And many people like Starmer are swept up in that. And it's just around that time, the early 2000, when the new Labour government is fresh in power, that Starmer goes from doing his pro bono work for activists, environmentalists to then working for the Northern Irish Police Service. And that's the point at which you see him becoming increasingly close to the institutions of the state.

Corbyn's comeback in 2017 threw the centrist wing of the party into a frenzy. What made them converge on Starmer?

You had the unexpected success of the corbynite Left in the Labour Party, that meant that many of the crop of Blairite or Brownite politicians were just thoroughly discredited. They failed in all their leadership bids and their “Chicken coup” failed. They were drastically out of favour with the membership. So there was a recognition among people like Morgan McSweeney that someone who was openly associated with that wing of the party wasn't going to succeed in turning Labour back to the centre. After the collapse of Corbynism, and Starmer being from outside the world of parliamentary politics, there is a blank enough slate for the membership to project whatever their hopes for the post-Covid era. They can project that onto him. Starmer is able to step into that role as the new hope for the Labour Right, because he wasn't historically contaminated with it.

Isn’t there also a mean streak to his personality, in the way that he sometimes withdraws or delays information in communication with the rest of the caucus of the party in those highly critical moments?

When you talk to people who have known him just when he was a lawyer before he became Director of Public prosecutions, they all say that he's always been intensely ambitious. And that's another part of the story of his political journey: personal ambition and the political conformity that tends to go with it. But there's no doubt that when from the moment he entered Parliament in 2015, he always saw himself as on a trajectory towards the leadership. He wasn't content with just being a backbench MP. And he already had allies inside and outside the party who were willing to assist him in rising to the top. And then, again, the superficial appearance that he's a very bad politician can be deceptive, because he played his time in Corbyn's shadow cabinet much more effectively than many other figures from the labour Right did. Rather than becoming an out and out factionalist, he sabotaged and undermined the project in various, much more subtle ways. Yes, and he made himself the standard bearer of Remain, which ingratiated him with the membership, which was very pro-Remain. So he broke with the leadership on a few different issues where it wasn't going to discredit him in the way that it had discredited other figures from the Labour Right. He really pulled the levers pretty well behind the scenes to position himself to then sweep to power after Corbyn, which is a remarkable feat given that the membership was so corbynite and was so still very Left wing after the after the 2019 defeat.

What were the tactical or strategic mistakes made by the Corbyn circle in the way that they tackled Brexit?

Brexit was always, potentially going to split Labour's voter base between constituencies, mostly in the north and the Midlands, who had voted for Brexit and urban power bases, which had voted against it. There was no way of managing that contradiction other than to hold the line and respect the referendum result on the basis that the constituencies that had supported Brexit were very wavering in their allegiances, were already trending towards the Tories and were likely to go in that direction if the Tories became the Brexit Party. That direction of travel needed to be stopped by a strong Left populist, respect-the-result position.

And then it's much less clear that the urban Remainer constituencies would have gone towards the Lib Dems or the Greens or whatever. These are people for whom the main appeal of Corbynism was its social, anti-racist and anti-imperialist programme and if the Brexit position had been articulated in those terms “we reject fortress Europe, we reject the EU as a racist and neoliberal institution, and we want to have a more active and interventionist state”, that wouldn't be possible within the ordoliberal strictures of the European Union. You would have won over those people, and then you would have retained a large enough amount of the red wall voters to at least reproduce the 2017 result, if not improve on it. Westminster politics can be such an echo chamber. And the pressure to capitulate on that question was coming so intensely from both the media and from within the parliamentary party, and the leadership needed to be unified to resist that pressure. And of course, it wasn't. It split the leadership itself, split down the middle, and the moment it split, it was going to ultimately succumb to that relentless pressure.

Then the centre-right of the Party were handed on a silver plate on the one side Brexit, on the other the pro-Palestine stance of Corbyn and, as a result, the antisemitism issue as phenomenal tools to abort the whole project by.

They could delegitimize it as a populist project through the Brexit position, which meant that Corbynism was on the side of Alastair Campbell and, the what, what was perceived as the elites, the establishment, all of whom wanted to overturn this popular result, they could use Brexit to put it on the wrong side of that division. And then they could also use the antisemitism smear campaign to remove its claim to have some moral legitimacy that the Right wing parties — whether it was the previous iteration of Labour or the Tories — lacked. So in that sense, the two popular selling points of corbynism were that it was a form of mass rather than elite politics. And also it was a form of moral politics rather than a  practical politics out of neoliberal necessity. What you needed really was a leadership that was going to do what you might say Mélenchon does now when he's attacked with completely fabricated charges, which is to double down on positions and to use the force of the attacker in a jujitsu maneuver against the attacker themselves. And to say: “The reason we're being attacked is because we're anti-establishment.” And the force of this onslaught proves that we are a genuinely popular movement and not a cartelised, Westminster party or whatever. You needed that  insurgent energy, which corbynism then failed to maintain.

So he wasn't true enough to the parochial, inward-looking tradition of Left of the Labour Party. Was his internationalism the problem as much as his anti-Atlanticism?

Yes, absolutely. It's still remarkable how true he stayed to it in the face of all these attempts to discredit him. Even in 2019 he was still extraordinarily internationalist by the standards of what's acceptable in British political culture. And it was that, much more than the elements of economic redistribution in the Corbyn programme, that really incited the hostility of the establishment. Corbynism was so loathed, mostly because of its internationalism and also because of the sense that it was going to reform the structures of the British state itself and make it more accountable and more democratic, in a country which still has an unelected head of state and a rigidly constrained two party system, still has an unelected second chamber and where these completely archaic, anachronistic elements of the state are really integral to how British elites see it functioning and how they see it as protected from real popular pressure. So it was being anti-Atlanticist and at odds with those parts of the undemocratic Westminster system that made Corbyn toxic. 

And then it's no surprise that Starmer is someone who can come in and be the perfect antidote to both. He's a lifelong servant of these state institutions, and also he, as director of Public Prosecutions, was very close to the Americans. When you work within the British state, you are necessarily working within the American state as well. So, those were the two points on which he could assure the establishment that he was the person to bring Labour back to the centre ground respectability.

How urgent is a reform of the electoral system in this country?

Very. There should be a proportional representation system, first of all. And the abolition of the House of Lords, it goes without saying. And also, I would join the movements who are working for a breakup of the British state itself, like Scottish independence and Northern Irish reunification as the two most imminent prospects also essential to create an actually democratized system. Otherwise, you're always going to have effectively, like an overcentralised superstate in Westminster that's ruling over peoples and places that have little to do with it. And in the absence now of a of national Left wing political force and of any prospects of the Left taking control of the Labour Party again, I do think it's probably those movements that have the most chance of succeeding in actually changing the political topography. So maybe rather than just trying to win power in Westminster again, we should be thinking about the ways in which the Westminster system could itself be undermined, reformed.

Corbyn and his and his ilk should have split, against the opinion of so many leftist commentators?

I was advocating that back when the book came out in 2022. And now of course, they effectively have split, just not on their own terms, not out of their own choice and not therefore as an act of bravery that could then galvanize people to come with them and join some new thing, but rather just as yet another factional assault led by the Right on the Right's terms. It's a great tragedy. 

Jeremy, John McDonnell, Zarah Sultana and Apsana Begum, who are sitting now as independent MPs, missed the great opportunity to  make a unified split at a moment that would have been propitious for the Left. Nonetheless, you now have many more MPs who are to the Left of Labour than MPs on the far Right. The independent MPs who were elected at the last election, plus those who have lost the Labour whip, plus I suppose the Greens, form a significantly larger force than Farage's. And yet who's dominating the national discourse now? It's Farage and not them. So couldn't there be some coalition or some alliance of Left of labour forces that would allow them to push back against this outsized influence that the far Right has at this political moment? That’s clearly the way that you would move forward.

Foreign politics always provide a lifeboat for struggling leaders. Macron and Starmer themselves, they are clinging to that. But the Churchill syndrome of the British political class at this stage it's not proving very effective, is it?

It's early to predict where it goes. But I do think that there's an opportunity for Starmer to, on the one hand, assert the sovereignty of Europe in some way and have Britain play a leading role within that by taking a very hard and hawkish line against Russia and calling for more military aid to Ukraine, calling for boots on the ground in the event of a peace deal. So to continue the tough talking that he's done throughout the war and to make that look rhetorically as if he is standing firm on the side of Ukraine while Washington is abandoning it. That's a position that plays quite well with the media here and with certain sections of the population, who are in a  new Cold War mood. But of course, that's also exactly what Washington wants: Europe to start pulling its weight and to boost its defence budgets and manage whatever the fallout of the Ukraine situation is so that Washington can pull out and then focus on larger strategic imperatives. So, in a way, by seeming to affect some rhetorical break with the Trump administration Starmer is also, at the same time, able to really delight the Trump administration and reaffirm Britain's role as its lieutenant in Europe. So he's potentially in a good position there. I suppose it might depend on how the negotiations go where he's in a less good position. In massively inflating the arms budget while cutting social spending and also in continuing to support the genocide in Gaza, which now has accelerated once again with the backing of the Americans — those two things threaten to lose him a huge amount of support domestically and further delegitimize a government that got into power with fewer votes than Corbyn got in 2019. So, it's that aspect of his ultra pro-American foreign policy that threatens to have implications at home.

Won't replacing welfare with the warfare state distance the extreme centre from Labour? Why buy a product where the Tory brand is clearly counterfeit?

There's a high likelihood of that. If you look at Starmer's electoral strategy for the last election, it was all based on this idea that you could not just get the Tory vote to collapse, but you could actually win over Tory voters with promises of security, both military and I guess in some vague way, like “we will cut NHS waiting times” and so on. The promise of security was supposed to be the one that recomposed a viable electoral majority for the Labour Party, based both on its  historic  constituencies, and also on this wavering  red wall, one that could go either way. That strategy has already failed spectacularly, because even in those red wall seats — and it's an extraordinary statistic, Labour in 2019 lost 31 seats in the red wall; it regained all of them in this election, but its vote share in those seats actually decreased — it fell by about 800 votes per seat. So, the very fragile victory that they secured in July was based not on winning voters over, but on voters staying at home, not voting for the Tories, and or splitting and voting for reform and then Labour  winning by getting through the breach. Now with this program that doesn't offer any security — in fact, diminishes Britain's security in terms of foreign policy by courting disaster like potential nuclear war in Europe, while also privatizing even more state services and starving them of funding — that's not going to win over those wavering voters, and it's only going to alienate the voters they have left. 

I suppose they, as ever, have this complacent assumption that, well “those voters have nowhere else to go, they're inveterate Labour voters. They're not going to shift to the Tories.” Maybe they won't. But if they fail to turn out — which is a much more likely scenario — then the energy and the enthusiasm and the re-enchantment of politics is all going to be channelled through Reform Uk, which will be the beneficiary of that disaffection. So you could easily foresee the Tories failing to recover, Labour sabotaging its own electoral prospects and then Reform Uk being the only insurgent force that's able to benefit.

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Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/la-parabola-di-starmer on 2025-04-10