Transcription
I think he arrived in office without a plan, actually. Um, I think, I think he sort of, I remember I was looking back at what he said at the time. His plan was to make good decisions. That's not a plan.
Um, particularly if you're not good at decision-making, which turns out he also wasn't very good at. So, he, he, he had this huge victory, probably bigger than he was expecting. Showed up in office and everyone went like, "Okay, where's the plan?" And from there, it kind of very quickly started to unravel because it turned out, I mean, you know, the one thing you need when you arrive in power is a plan to execute. And I think the, the thing that runs throughout this for me is, it's a failure of, it's not just a salesman thing. It's a failure to have a vision, to know what you believe, um, and then to sell it to both your party and the public. But I, I, I think he is a man who doesn't know what he thinks.
Don, about his judgment of people. Has he, is he good with people?
Uh, no. Which again, is another flaw in how he portrayed himself. He played, portrayed himself as a technocrat, as a bureaucrat, as a manager. But you do hear horror stories from coming out, coming out of Downing Street. He has a reputation for throwing advisers completely under, under the bus. And that's just not a, a happy workplace. And that, that's the same whether it's, it's here or in Downing Street. It's the same for any office.
Does he work well with cabinet ministers?
They regard him with near open contempt. So, Starmer is a strange politician in that he's a very sort of normal guy. He came to politics very late. Uh, and his rise to prime minister was sort of almost coincidental. And he's in cabinet with people who had dreamed of doing this job since they were 10. And then this guy sort of lucks into the role. Uh, and, and then they see him screw up, you know, the best opportunity Labour have had in decades. And so, there is outright fury.
You've often said to me, Sasha, that that one of the problems is that when he does something, it, it's a sort of an enormous political cost. So, or pain.
No gain.
No gain. Yes.
Tell us a little bit about that. Well, again, it's sort of the sort of he hasn't ultimately done any of the big things we hoped, um, he would do, but then he has done things like cut winter fuel allowances and done things that have sort of, um, agitated a lot of voters without having like a huge sort of fiscal, uh, benefit. Um, and he's kind of had a, he's done lots of things like the workers' rights bill, which sounded really dramatic, freaked out loads of employers, um, and then started row, rowing, rowing back from it and continues to, but the damage has been done. Like employers are going, "Oh, wait, hang on, I'm not sure about hiring people because I heard that from day one, they'll have have all these rights." Never mind that he's been rowing back from it. So, he's had this peculiar tendency to not do the really big things that hurt but will have rewards, but instead do the smaller things that will still hurt but have no rewards, which is like a really peculiar, you know, form of self-harm, I guess.
There's something really interesting about this to me, which is that that, you know, he, he got to power because people wanted an anti-politician. There was a feeling that politicians weren't trustworthy after Brexit. They were incapable of sorting things out. Someone get on with the job. They get Starmer and they don't like him. What does that tell you, Duncan, about the kind of politics as something that's despised by voters but needed by countries?
Correct. It, it people who say they don't want want sort of career politicians, but people who aren't career politicians really struggle with politics. I, I think that's the biggest lesson we, we, we, we can take from Keir Starmer's sorry reign. It is a skill. You do need this, this, this, this vocation, this calling. You need a sort of madness or almost fueling you. And again, Starmer is almost just too normal to be prime minister.
Archie, you're back from from the US temporarily. And we have a, um, a subscriber who's who's got an observation I want you to comment on. Um, Ivana Bulkin says, "Britain's political and media environment seems almost structurally incapable of registering incremental competence. Everything gets swallowed by the populist outrage cycle where only spectacle counts as politics. Watching from the US right now, the slow procedural nature of British government increasingly looks less like a flaw and more like a safeguard." Well, nothing very slow at the moment, but has she got a point?
You know, there's something about the outrage cycle that makes it very hard to do the slow, incremental work of building policies to, to a degree. So, we, we, we had the election July of 2024. We're coming on two years. And so even if, um, maybe the past few months have been quite ropey, he had, I would say, a pretty clear 18 months, certainly a clear year when even as his polling ratings were dipping, he had some sense of momentum with the party. There was some sense among the electorate that he was worthy of the benefit of the doubt. And I don't see much incremental competence in that period. I think it's one thing, and you could be totally right, that he could have come along, done exactly what the Economist leader line told him to do for the first 18 months, and the public would have still hated him, and that's possible. But that's sort of unknowable because he hasn't tried it. And so, I, I, I struggle slightly to say that this is an issue of politics and media environment and so on in a situation where we don't even really have the competence to to point to. This would look different, I think, if he could point to achievements that were real and concrete. And the fact that he can't, and he reverts to things like breakfast clubs, which are perfectly laudable, but just a tiny social intervention, I think speaks that gap.