Labour’s anti-intellectual moment

The past three decades have seen the Everymanification of British politics.

Photo by Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images

Keir Starmer had been leader of the Labour Party for seven months when he appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Among the musical picks (“Three Lions” to indicate he likes football, some Northern soul to hint at his working-class origins) was one revealing answer. Along with the show’s obligatory gifts of a Bible and the collected works of Shakespeare, Starmer was asked to bring one book of his choosing to his proverbial desert island. “I’m going to take a detailed atlas, hopefully with shipping lanes in it, so I can get myself off the island,” he said. “A big atlas, with real details.”

This is the Labour leader as he wanted to be seen in 2020: a managerial captain ready to steer the course out of the electoral backwater of four consecutive Labour defeats and into the mainstream. What need is there for personality to emerge through a literary sensibility when there is serious political work to be done? No, the abstract and intellectual are no use to us now. Instead, Starmer opts for an atlas and a heavy-handed metaphor.

Starmer’s experience in Northern Ireland, as an adviser to the police service in the years following the Good Friday Agreement, forged these cautious instincts. In a febrile region – with a peace that was hard won but by no means fully secured – the task of officials was to take the hot emotion out of debate and operate with a cool-headed pragmatism. It is not that Starmer cannot handle the abstract – he wrote a 938-page book about human rights – but rather, I suspect, that as a lawyer he prefers the material, the orderly and the self-contained; a real-world atlas over sprawling magical realism.

By the time of the 2024 election campaign, Starmer took this self-styling a step further, telling the Guardian he had neither a favourite novel nor a favourite poem. This did not chime with the Starmer of only five years prior. In 2019, he claimed at a party fundraising event that among his favourite books was Glaswegian author James Kelman’s 1989 novel A Disaffection. A colleague of his, meanwhile, according to a 2008 Guardian profile, said Starmer knows The Trial by Franz Kafka “backwards” (perhaps more evidence of the former director of public prosecution’s literal mind and legal tastes).

So why is Keir Starmer reluctant to reveal his intellectual hinterland? His biographer, Tom Baldwin, pointed out that in the three decades he spent as a human rights barrister there were few reminders that he grew up in a pebbledash semi – although now we know all about it. Starmer’s oft-repeated phrase “My dad was a toolmaker and my mum was a nurse” did not cross his lips, Baldwin notes, until he was in his late fifties. Starmer’s pivot from Kafka fan to atlas enthusiast might be part of this overture: as he moved closer to power, it was time to abandon the literary. With No 10 in view, and an uneasy coalition of voters to maintain, Starmer the Everyman came to the fore.

His atlas gambit is not the first instance of a politician grasping for the apparent electoral panacea of being a normal bloke. Take Gordon Brown’s alleged affection for the Arctic Monkeys (“They are very loud”). Or David Cameron’s professed love of the Killers’ song “All These Things That I’ve Done” (“I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier” remains among the least cool lyrics in the Western canon). Then came Rishi Sunak’s recent admission that his favourite food is “sandwiches”. Perhaps the greatest display of intellectual authenticity from a leading British politician was when Theresa May logged a Gregorian chant among her Desert Island picks in 2014; it was, at least, believable.

The median British voter’s presumed hostility to intellectuals might be overstated. But Starmer’s people would hardly be the first to leverage it. This is the “Everymanification” of British politics. Tony Blair – who attended the Brit Awards in 1994 months before taking over the Labour Party, met Blur’s Damon Albarn for drinks in 1995, and greeted Oasis’s Noel Gallagher at a gathering at No 10 – bargained that ballot-box popularity depended on sharing cultural touchstones with the voter. John Major might have preached about Britain becoming a classless society, but Blair, in spite of his public-schoolboy persona, tried to personify it.

Boris Johnson once again manages to be an exception to prove the rule. On the campaign trail in 2019, the Sun asked him what he does at the end of the day: “A bit of Greek lyric poetry, nothing complicated,” he quipped.

These overtures may well have been performative, but Johnson knew that boasting of an intellectual hinterland was not disruptive to his mass appeal;it may even have been the source of it. And it was certainly no obstacle to winning an electoral landslide in 2019.

Could it be that abstract ideas have been focus-grouped out of the public realm? In Tony Blair’s wake, the field of vision has contracted, leaving politicians to declare their interest in cartography while eschewing their passion for subversive Scottish literature (a later Kelman novel, How Late It Was, How Late, won the Booker Prize in 1994). Perhaps it is electorally expedient (though I suspect the old line of attack about Britain’s national philistinism has been exaggerated). But politics needs complex ideas and ambition to work beyond the short term; without it, we risk managing our own decline through the fear of intellectual imagination.

[See also: The scourge of bad Tube poetry]