Everyone is Keir Starmer

The animal wants to survive

I love Keir Starmer. I know I shouldn’t; I know it’s shameful; I can’t help it. I love all our Prime Ministers. Only once they’ve quit: as long as they’re in office I hate them with a slightly scary intensity. I see a face on TV and it makes me want to crack their skull open with my bare hands, peel the skin like a lychee, suck out the brains, paint my chest in whorls of biological slime, that’ll teach you to not let the income tax band thresholds rise in line with inflation, fucker, that’ll teach you… All I want is this person gone. Sick of that smarmy face and that stupid strangled voice. And then they drag a plywood lectern outside Number 10 for one last series of mostly meaningless honks and suddenly there’s a lump in my throat. Suddenly I’m saying that in a way, poor old Boris Johnson was actually the most left-wing Prime Minister of my lifetime. The power’s gone; all that remains is a human creature, pink and defenceless like a baby bird. It’s hard to watch a person being so utterly humiliated and not feel sorry for them, and the British political system runs on public humiliations. In other countries their leaders get to serve out their terms and leave with dignity, to write their memoirs and name buildings after themselves. Not here. Here, we practice boarding-school sadism as a system of government.

You get into the job by scheming, working various highly baroque party bureaucracies to bludgeon your enemies and fuck over your friends until the power is yours and you’ve won, but the game doesn’t end there. The instant you have it, your grip slackens. Everyone around you is already trying to pry your fingers open, your cabinet keeps briefing against you, you get weaker and weaker until within a startlingly short time the whole country despises you, you’re a joke, hopeless, but still you can’t let go. Not until all your strength is gone and all your dignity is sapped, until the newspapers have published pictures of your genitals, until children are taunting you in the streets: only once everything that made you a human being has been totally destroyed do you get to stand behind that lectern, fat and exhausted, to resign. It’s all court politics, scheming; the British public are barely involved. Do you know who was the last Prime Minister to have taken office in a general election, and then left office in another general election? Edward Heath. He was voted out in 1974. Since then, every single premier in this country has either arrived or departed through some kind of undemocratic skulduggery. You wonder why there’s anyone who still wants the job. Would you take a gig that pays less than a long-haul trucker or elevator mechanic makes in the US, with no long-term security, and which is guaranteed to turn you into an utterly ruined shadow of yourself, despised by millions of people you’ve never even met? But people keep trying. In Aztec human sacrifice, the captives willingly climbed the pyramids. You could have tried to rescue one, but he’d just shake you off and keep trudging up the bloodstained stairs, as one corpse after another came tumbling down.

But the reason I love Keir Starmer in particular is that all of this seems to have happened to him before he even got the job. He wasn’t always like this. Back in the 90s, Keir Starmer was a radical, impassioned human rights lawyer, which was for a certain kind of person in the 90s the coolest thing you could possibly be. He defended the miners. He defended the McLibel activists against the bright plasticky forces of American corporate domination. He defended people who broke into nuclear bases to vandalise the instruments of death. He’s widely suspected to have inspired the Mark Darcy character in Bridget Jones. All meticulous precision in the courtroom, but in private he had an intense, dangerous charisma. According to rumour, which you can choose not to believe if it helps, he was also a champion shagger, finest cocksman in Doughty Street Chambers. He had the run of them, he had them lining up outside his door. But then, in 2024, the man who was about to take over the country couldn’t tell a Guardian interviewer what his favourite book was. He didn’t have one. He didn’t have a favourite poem either. He couldn’t say, when asked, whether he was an optimist or a pessimist, or an introvert or an extrovert. Or what he’d dreamed about the previous night. ‘I don’t dream,’ he said. He lies down at night, and the nothingness inside his head becomes, somehow, something less.

How do you know you’re not Keir Starmer? You’re all grown up and you think you know who you are; you’ve built yourself a whole narrative about it. This is the music you like and these are your opinions. You are a tragically waifish political dissident. You’re the kind of sensitive modern bloke who likes both football and trying different types of hand cream. O you who turn the wheel and look to windward! You’re not finished yet. You haven’t found your true and final form, which will be, if you’re lucky, that of a withered shell, gasping in a hospital bed. Until then, anything might happen. The person you are now might be the prologue to someone entirely different and dramatically worse. You might lose all of your interests and personality and end up going into politics. The whole thing is terrifyingly out of your hands. (For Keir too; he’s not finished either. What is he supposed to do with the rest of his life? Standard practice for ex-PMs is to linger like a ghost on the edges of political life, leaving an ectoplasmic trail of Observer columns in which they gently advise their successor on how to avoid repeating their mistakes. But even that might be too much for him. Who’d listen? The whole country’s seen his bum. He’ll need to do something else; the world might still birth strange and terrible Keirs in the years to come.) The best thing you can do, here in the present, is pointlessly avenge yourself on the person you’ll become. That’s what I did. When I was nineteen I got three words from the Futurist Manifesto tattooed on my body. The line goes ‘We are not old, our hearts are not tired, for they are nourished by fire, hatred, and speed.’ There are still three blobs resembling the words fuoco, odio, and velocità on my ribs. I got them because I wanted to punish my future self for having been stupid enough to get old, and it worked. Look at me now. I’ve slowed down, my fire’s dimming, and instead of the hatred that should be fizzing through my veins I’m full of dumb sympathetic love for Keir Starmer, of all people. The gormless image of our helplessness in time.