How will history remember Keir Starmer?

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0:30The New Statesman.

0:34Hello. We're doing something slightly different today. Keir Starmer is no longer the Prime Minister. Andy Burnham is. So, rather than an interview, we're doing a retrospective. What just happened? Why did it happen? And what now? I'm joined today by my editor, Tom McTague, for a conversation about Britain's latest former Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. I'm Olly Doug Moore. This is The Exchange for the New Statesman. Enjoy the conversation. Tom, if a student in 30 years was to ask you who Keir Starmer was, what do you say? It's a very good question. I mean, in the cover story for last week's magazine where I tried to get into this a bit, I was likening him to, you know, prime ministers who we've forgotten over the years, you know, that just kind of come and go.

1:24they're not giants like Margaret Thatcher or Clement Attlee or Winston Churchill. But, you know, there are lots of other prime ministers who we just don't think about very often at all. Alec Douglas Hume is the one that I mentioned, who served as prime minister for less than a year. And there are lots of jokes that Alec Douglas Hume would tell about his time as prime minister, you know, about how sort of, oh, was I prime minister? Oh, yes, I forgot, you know, that kind of thing. And I wondered aloud, you know, is that the kind of fate that we're going to, that's in store for Keir Starmer or even for Rishi Sunak and certainly for Liz Truss?

2:04You know, these prime ministers who just emerge and then go. And the fact that we've had so many of them, I think is the interesting thing. So what are we going to think about Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak? In my first magazine as editor, I profiled Keir Starmer, as we've talked about on this podcast before, and I did raise this sort of question, is he going to be the first normal prime minister, the first kind of prime minister of a country that doesn't care about its grandeur, the first prime minister of a kind of mid-European state that is just comfortable being a mid-European state? You know, do we know who the prime minister of the Netherlands is or Denmark or Sweden?

2:50Most people don't. Is that the kind of future? Is he the kind of first in that line? Or is he the last of the old kind of Blairite consensus? The last prime minister to try to keep it going, but who couldn't? And I think that is maybe still kind of where we're going to be thinking about Keir Starmer. Yeah, it's interesting. When you talk about Truss and Sunak and him, those are really relevant comparisons because I do think about Starmer as a prime minister kind of without his own constituency in the same way that with both of those, they obviously inherited majorities. But he won an election that, you know, I think it's hard to argue otherwise.

3:35He was a beneficiary of the Conservative Party's collapse, right? And he did a very good job of marshalling an image of competence. And, you know, we will be able to get this country out of the mess that it's in because we're serious. We think about things deeply. And we're also not sort of gallivanting around having parties in COVID, doing insane things with the economy, etc, etc, etc. They win the election. But as we have kind of come to realize, and I think some people did point out at the time, it was sort of a loveless landslide, right? He doesn't have, it's not a groundswell of positive support that's, yes, we want to put this man in Downing Street.

4:08It is, we're turning to the Labour Party now because the traditional party of government, the Conservative Party has made such a mess of this. And I wonder whether this is a sort of constant trend or if actually there's something kind of slightly unique about him in that sense that he doesn't really have – I think he didn't really have a core vote for sort of personal investment in himself. And maybe we'll talk about this more as the podcast goes on. I think he sort of was missing a kind of emotional constituency that it wasn't just – and this is where the contrast comes with Burnham – an idea of what he was governing for.

4:45and I don't know how tired this is maybe this is where there will be a sense of disagreement in the podcast but did he have a sort of a burning mission that he understood and knew this is why I'm in power this is why I want to wield power this is what I want to do and the extent to which he had that or perhaps the people around him had it and maybe we'll talk about Morgan McSweeney a little bit over the course of the pod as well in that sense I don't know what you make of that whether it's almost he's almost fated from the outset because he didn't have that sort of core vote yeah he never had a core vote other than i guess the labor party's core vote which was 33 yeah diminished yeah uh he he didn't have a burning sense of of what he was about other than a sense that the Labour Party represented quiet decency and its voters were the quiet, decent, patriotic bedrock of modern Britain and that essentially it was his job to stabilize things and to create the country in his image.

5:58And I still think listening to him, we're recording on Monday afternoon, having listened to him give his resignation speech, again, he is parroting these lines that he really does believe in about England or Britain. And they're the kind of things that you could hear in John Major's speeches about England. Or they kind of do have this long tail back into Orwell and all of this, you know, what is England? It's this sense of a gentle, nice patriotic but gently patriotic decent place where you know we clean up after ourselves and we we sweep the streets after the bad people have gone rioting and that's the kind of country that that he uh that he really does fundamentally believe it and so often when you listen to you actually are hearing his life story and the family story so you're hearing uh a sort of elevation of his mother, who was this quietly dignified woman who had health problems, who battled through them, who was supported by his father.

7:09They didn't have much money, but they were good people and they did good things. And you can sort of sense that in the way he talks about the country. It's a kind of idealized vision of the country. It's not really political it's not fundamentally a political vision it's a you know in a sense it's a small c conservative vision of of what he believes in and what he wants to protect uh in the country and and you also get that sense when um when he speaks about the things he's most proud of so the people that he's met who have suffered uh some kind of injustice that he will then go and help quietly, almost like off camera, these individual moments, individual instances of injustice that he will have work to correct.

7:59Now, again, it's not a sense that there is some structural reason why all of these injustices are happening that he is going to fix, you know, on a macro level. It's like, I will fix this problem and this problem and this problem and problem. And so I think you get this, almost like this listicle of his achievements as Prime Minister, you know, I did this, it got better, the statistics got better here and here and here and here. And therefore, I'm a very good, you know, manager and Prime Minister, without any overarching sense of, okay, you know, what was the idea that connected all this? Yeah, I think it also misses, I mean, politics has always been about narrative power, emotional storytelling and i think to an even greater extent now in this new age of short form vertical video of a million podcasts media saturation increasingly atomized society i think those things that i would have always said were a part of politics are of increasing importance now particularly if you want to communicate authentically and put forward a vision of yourself and actually that sort of technocratic managerial tendency i don't think it cut it then it and it certainly doesn't cut it now i was struck there's a couple of times this speech previous one you know typically these politicians they they reel off their achievements right it's like here we go i'll take i'll take the flowers now do the lap of honor and i was struck that on both instances i've heard him in fact more than that i've talked a lot whenever he's usually asked to talk about his achievements he will very often mention the transformation of the Labour Party under his leadership and then its resulting election and securing that largest majority since Blair in 1997.

9:45And I've been trying to sort of make sense and think about that because I don't think I've really heard many prime ministers when asked for their achievements in office reference their election as being one of those achievements. Now, I don't know whether that's because actually the scale of the transformation he had to take in order to get the party into office is so significant that he wants to to reference it but i do also wonder if it's kind of if it is perhaps telling in a way that he the machinery around him i know we know sue gray who was responsible for the planning of you know the labor administration very quickly left once labor won office and whether and that gives you an indication of how starmer felt about the quality of the work that was being done there but whether or not his leadership of the party was that perhaps too focused on winning an election and not on the actual business of government of course i mean i i think that's absolutely right but if you you know speak to people like morgan mcsweeney and they'll they'll put their hands up and acknowledge that that they didn't do enough work into the purpose but the you know that an election um campaign should be about the purpose of what you're trying to achieve you know that should that is the point of of politics There is a kind of conservative philosophy out there, a kind of deeply cynical, arch-conservative philosophy, which says that visions and plans and ideas are all for naive lefties.

11:14And that the purpose of government is to just manage the ship of state and just to keep it floating. you know don't you all of this other stuff is just for you know for people who haven't grown up yet you know and and you really it's just about protect what's good stop what's bad as much as you can and you know don't screw up what's the thing it's like don't don't take the gate down ask why the gate is there yeah yeah it's it's it's a sort of image that i've always been fascinated by it's this sort of you know the uh the story of the liberal and the conservative who are walking through the desert and they come across a gate and the liberal sort of says, what is this there for?

11:58You know, what is it? What the hell is this? We've got to knock it down. It doesn't make any sense. And the conservator goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, you don't know. You don't know. Leave it until you've figured it out. And that's a kind of old traditional divide. But I think in many ways that's disappeared in that, you know, probably at least since Thatcher, You've had a real ideological conservatism, which is very much animated by a sense of purpose and ideas and mission and all of those things. and I'd say that in some sense this is this gets to the heart of of the debate about you know the modern left uh Keir Starmer the Labour Party you know the the critics of the Labour Party and Keir Starmer and all the rest from the left would very much I think subscribe to the notion that this isn't a party fundamentally of ideas and moral mission anymore it's a party uh based on effectively conservatism, small c conservatism, it's protecting the status quo, the sort of the Blairite status quo, or the, you know, some on the left would say the Thatcherite status quo, you know, effectively protecting the system that exists today.

13:13Equally, many on the right would say that that is the argument today, that while they would say, no, Keir Starmer is about protecting the Blairite status quo, not the Thatcherite one, you know, Blair destroyed that status quo. There is that sense that on both sides of the political spectrum, the more kind of either whether you describe that as populist or radical or whatever, that they are looking in and they see, you know, effectively a uniparty conservatism. and I think it is a challenge that the center left and the center right are increasingly struggling to deal with right that sense that you know okay what is the you know what is the moral mission here where is the radicalism you know where is the constitutional radicalism or the you know economic radicalism it doesn't appear to be there it's just about protecting the status quote, in all of its forms, right?

14:10So it's like the, whether it's the Blairite constitutional order, the Thatcherite economic consensus, the foreign policy consensus that we've had, you know, for beyond both of those, you know, where is the fundamental challenge to any of this? I guess Andy Burnham in a way is making that critique as well, right? When he says that he wants to end 40 years of neoliberalism. Implicit in that is that the last two years are part of those 40 years, right? He doesn't view Starmer as much of a departure from that consensus. I've always struggled with this because I would probably categorize myself as one of those people on the left that would level those criticisms at Starmer.

14:52But if you ignore the rhetoric and this was one of the things I've always found fascinating about him and particularly Reeves is they would very often employ the rhetoric and vocabulary of fiscal conservatives. They would talk about the difficult choices that had to be made invoke the household budget metaphor and i always found it quite strange because rachel reese was a chancellor who in consecutive budgets raised more than 25 billion pounds in taxes and changed the fiscal rules in order to increase capital spending on infrastructure projects which is not a world apart from the world that andy burnham is talking about right he's talking about house building and yes the labor government has fallen really quite far short in terms of their own targets which i would have viewed as not significant enough maybe he's going to place more of a focus on um regional transport links he he also obviously wants to do a massive house building program but they're not worlds apart you know we're talking about a tax-raising chancellor who taxed to spend and yet it came with this rhetorical tendency to i think talk more right as in right wing than they were actually governing.

15:56Yeah, I think part of that is the ability to obviously communicate the purpose of your government, to communicate the story, as a lot of people will say, or the narrative, all of that. That is clearly a part of what a politician has to do. He or she has to be able to say, here's what I stand for, here's what I'm trying to achieve. If you don't like it, at least you you you're judging it based on my you know my definition and there'll be supporters and there'll be opponents are based on that and he he clearly um he he clearly struggled to do that you know it and that is probably comes back to the opening question about why it's forgettable you know why are we um why are we likely to sort of memory hole this period and i think there's sort of two things going on in a sense one is that inability to define it outside of technical or technocratic uh you know metrics to measure against and so both kia starma and rishi sunak deployed the same strategy right they both said right here are the targets you know and i'm going to pursue them and you measure you know my success based on these targets rishi sunak i think had five kia starmer had five kia starmer changed them once he got into into government he changed his missions to milestones nobody knows what those milestones are other than this sort of the the the super geeks of westminster politics you know but i'd challenge almost anyone to to remember the five missions and the six milestones and so some of the people that were involved in the missions you know said to me uh you know privately this is like the sort of the original sin of the of the Stama government to give up on the, on the missions, because the idea of them was that they weren't so technocratic.

17:45They were sort of, you know, they, they suggested something beyond that, something more, uh, something more strategic or ideological or, you know, or moral even. So anyway, but you get the same sense with the, with the two of them, that they were sort of, they were setting these, you know, these targets and measure me against those. And that's how their administrations would be remembered. But that's not how, you know, that's not how people think and behave. You kind of understand somehow that you're on their side or you're not on their side, you know, that you stand for a certain thing or you stand for something else.

18:22And so it's hard to sort of, to think about Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak in those ways. And then I think when you cast back, and this is what I was trying to think about in my piece last week, was, you know, we have had a period now going back to say david cameron uh in uh say that from 20 uh 2015 at least we've had this kind of period of of chaos where we've had all of these different types of government and it's very hard to cohere them into anything approaching a um a kind of understandable coherent story so you know we have the coalition years which you know how do we think about that now basically one of austerity and social liberalism i guess in what in one way then that merges into the one year of conservative majority rule under david cameron which turned out to be, you know, a total failure on its own terms.

19:27It collapses in and on itself. So we don't really know how to judge that other than essentially his fundamental misjudgment about the referendum. And then we have this 10-year period after the referendum where we have Theresa May for three years. How do we understand her? Well, in many ways, she was defining herself against David Cameron From the moment that she delivered her speech outside number 10, she used that pulpit to say, you know, I am going to change Britain so that it works for everybody. Implicit criticism that the last lot were only in it for the privileged few. She fails within a year because she loses her majority.

20:08And then we enter into chaos. Boris Johnson takes over and again is defined in one way you just talked about him being this government uh sort of almost governing more left-wing than they actually uh actually their sort of public perception this the almost the inverse was true of Boris Johnson but we don't again what how do we think of Boris Johnson now we think of him as party gate and sort of just inadequacy. Then we have the chaos of this trust, which is defined against other things. Is it a continuation of Boris? What is it? Fiscal incontinence. Then we have Sunak. So it's almost like it's impossible to think for any of us about this period of time in any coherent way, in the way that you would about Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher or Clement Attlee.

20:58Okay, we're going to take a short break now. We will be back after this.

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22:09This might be a bit of a tangent, but I'd venture that I think COVID has a really significant role to play here. In that, I think, you know, for large numbers of us, this extraordinary global event takes place in ways that really materially changes your life. And, you know, that's not to say that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz doesn't have a material impact on your life. It clearly does. But when you're literally confined to your own four walls, like, do I have a garden? Can I go outside? Oh, I live in a flat on the fifth floor of a townhouse. I can only go outside for one hour a day for my state mandated walk.

22:45You know, people's lives really changed and very often not for the better. and then all of a sudden we kind of we come out the other side of it takes a while vaccines um something that we're talking about boris johnson i mean should should really really be applauded in the way that we drove that that vaccination through and i feel like that inculcated a kind of sense of a willingness to use the phrase memory hole which i think is a really appropriate one to just kind of compartmentalize and go right that's over now and as much as we could and there's these bizarre kind of we have these like little relics you know sometimes you go into a pub or a restaurant they've still got the sticker you know and and you sort and you it hasn't been taken down and i sort of think why is it still there and in a way it's kind of like a it's like a memento it's like a remember this this extraordinary event that happened to all of us and we just we just have little sort of to me to keep your distance stickers in places they're like the little artifacts i'm reading um i'm reading m john Harrison's The End of Everything and it's a really good sort of part sci-fi supernatural satirical there's some sort of crisis has happened that no one quite understands why it's happened and the phrase that comes up is Europe has been mislaid like no one remembers where Europe is or what's going on and it reminds me of what you're talking about here and you know the literary references in your piece but also I actually think that as a sort of body politic as a society we've rather than we now have this tendency rather than to go well why did that happen what does it mean what it like what is happening to us we prefer to just sort of go oh well it's over you know on to the next one i'm sure trump's going to bomb somewhere else next week i'm sure we'll have another prime minister in two years time what is the point of caring about any and all of this because it is all so transient it is all so passing does it mean anything to me and i this doesn't end in the question tom so you're gonna have to help me out here but that's kind of the way i that's the way i think about it feel about it yeah that that um that transient chaos as you as you describe it is i think part of the of the issue here and it's part of why when undie burnham got into the uh you know the steps of number 10 today there are no steps but you know the uh when he got to downing street and he delivers his speech he is saying he's trying to address this but you're left with the same formula then that in a sense that kia starmer had which is stability will be change you know yes and that is and for andy burnham he's trying to get a he doesn't want that to be the message because it has to be beyond that has to be about this sort of 40 years uh 40 years of uh neoliberalism or 40 years of where we took a wrong turn 40 years ago and there's a there is a coherent story there i mean 40 years is an interesting one that's 1986 86 is you know seven years into thatcher's uh time in office you know we can give him leeway he means the 1980s right like that's that's his that's his reference point that's where he says things went wrong that the the country was de-industrialized and life's essentials were privatized.

26:03The sense of decline. Right to buy. Right to buy. Now, that is a coherent story here. Now, it's an interesting one. And this is why I think he provoked quite a bit of reaction from Tony Blair, you know, on that very question, because Tony Blair is saying kind of incredulously, hang on. So you're saying 40 years of neoliberalism, You're just lumping me in with this. And so, you know, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair and everything that came after is just all of a one piece, including Andy Burnham's time in government, you know, in the Blair governments and the Brown governments. so he's reacting to that that that telling of a story um but it's a there is a there is something there that is a um a coherent argument whether it's right or wrong there is a an argument there that you can make and you can sort of um and certainly from the perspective of those largely outside of the southeast of england there'll be a lot of people who effectively agree with that you know and just say yeah most of this country has been in decline since then the story that you tend to hear in the uh in the southeast at least uh and among the kind of tory press is that there is a the story of britain and this is what i try and get into in the piece as well is from 1945 to 79 is a decline.

27:35And then from 79 onwards is a kind of resurrection through Thatcher's grit and determination to reimpose the power of the state over all of these people challenging the sovereignty of parliament and the democratic will. That's the kind of the story. um and that is being challenged now more and more actually so not just by andy burnham i think andy burnham in a sense is the inheritor of a retelling of this story you can see it in say david edgerton's book um on uh on the post-war on post-war britain which which is a sense it makes this argument very explicitly he's saying no no if you look at most metrics of post-war britain there is no major uptick in the 1980s or in the thatcher period the living standards were improving at a greater uh speed before then than they did after then uh duncan weldon's book modeling through on on post-war uh but you know it's i think it's beyond post-war uh economics actually makes a very similar point that if you actually take the in the round 1979 to 1990 or if you take particularly if you take in the big recession that happens just after Thatcher leaves.

29:01So if you take the recession at the beginning, the recession at the end of that period, and you average it out and say, is this a great period of national renewal? You know, effectively, they question that, right? And so I think this relitigating the history is quite an important moment here, in that if this is going to be the heart of Burnham's premiership, if he is going to make it the central part of it as he told me in when i profiled him in september he said you know part of it is about unwinding the 1980s so it's a kind of you know it is an explicit attack on that settlement now that is something significant if it's actually true and how it's defined it doesn't necessarily mean trying to recreate the 1970s i think that's where people are kind of being willfully sort of simplistic if you just say oh that means he wants to bring back everything that's in the 1970s.

29:57No, just as Margaret Thatcher was sort of illuminated by the Grantham of her childhood in the 1930s doesn't mean that she was actively seeking to reimpose 1930s Britain. But in that process of trying to unwind something that you disagree with, or you think went wrong, you're going to create something new. Well, yeah, I think that there's been a lot of sort of naivety, willful ignorance, misinterpretation about his remark particularly in that interview the one you i still reading the weekend's papers you still see the in hoc to the bond markets quote yeah like repeatedly referenced and we've spoken about it before i've spoken about with other people on the pod about it was probably slightly misinterpreted but we don't need to relitigate that now i do on this point about memory and what he will be remembered for i think we should certainly at at least give a bit of time for us to talk about Gaza, moral leadership, moral authority.

30:54But I do just want to take a step back because I'm conscious, rightly, we've been very critical of his time as prime minister. And I think you'd have to describe his time as prime minister as a failure. He's not even made it halfway through his parliamentary term. But we should consider some of the really significant achievements and positives that they've reached. in in leadership not least you know we've had we've had this idea bouncing around in our editorial meetings about sort of um new parents and the policy measures that the government's adopted that the the reduced cost in child care policy that this the government's rolled out is genuinely transformative you know as as um a new dad speaks yeah thank you kia no um you know i I know people who make a lot of money and do not have the support.

31:54And when they tell me about their nursery bills, they are eye-wateringly expensive, right? I benefit from it. Other people have a young family. This genuinely transformational bit of policy. We were talking about that idea, right? Because if you sit the social media ban in that context as well, you can start to put a constituency together. oh maybe okay this is the government for sort of you know the msn generation of parents who are trying to raise this generation in a whole new world i thought it's worth i think that social media ban and a few other things illustrative of a slightly authoritarian tendency in starmer that i think will will color the imagination a little bit about him and gaza will too and we'll talk about that next but just a pause tom and for you to reflect on what what did he what did he achieve that was a success what did this government do that you come away thinking yeah do you know actually there has been some good as well as the bad um so it's a fair challenge um i would probably struggle more even more than you and you're you're you're you're a more outspoken critic um of starmer himself or this government um than than me but i i would say even on the child care thing in fact it began under the previous government i think uh some of the things that he talks about in his speech immigration uh reductions they are um again the largely the product of the previous government's uh decisions uh many of which were taken entirely chaotically and are not necessarily uh to be cheered you know i i think there's every possibility that we we come to consider the immigration restrictions as uh keeping out lots of people that we would quite like to come to this country uh you know i was speaking to the chancellor of a of a um of a university who was saying it's a total nightmare to try and just get people not you know because of the salary cap that was introduced trying to get you know people in who would be a massive benefit to this country and can't come in um while actually achieving you know not very much on on other parts of uh the migration uh issue of small boats and other things um so i i'm not sure there are these major wins to be honest i think if you were to go back to it and you would try to think structurally you'd probably come back to the point that you were making at the beginning which is what they really did was come in and raise taxes on businesses more than people but also on people they came in and raised taxes and loosened the fiscal rules to uh to try and uh change the way um the economy functions so it it encouraged more investment and uh that i think capital investment and other types of investment.

34:55You hear that privately when you speak to some of the strategic thinkers in this government, saying that's at the core of what they're trying to do, that you have to raise taxes because of the burdens on the state that are structural, fundamental, not going away. They're about aging society. They're about costs of elderly care, costs of healthcare, all these things that are going to continue and continue on, the war in Ukraine, you know, all these fundamentals mean that taxes have to go up, taxes have gone up as a result, and the economy has started to recover. And so maybe that is the something where you could say, you know, that although it was shrouded in a kind of dishonesty about you, you know, you box yourself in far too much you've tried to pretend that you haven't raised taxes uh because that's what you promised at the last election but fundamentally you did so you know so mild credit for that very generous um okay let's let's talk about gaza and i do just want to want to caveat this for listeners as well in that you know i'm this is an opportunity we're not going to discuss at length the ins and outs of the war there are other podcasts where we've done that there are very very strong covers of this magazine i think back tom to the the jonathan sumption essay that you published very early on in your time as editor where the bigger issues have been discussed and i say that because i just want to talk about this in the context of keir starmer i don't get people to get the impression that i think that's the only reason why it's relevant yeah um but for me i think his moral authority was really diminished by the conflict um not least because he had made such a significant part of his pitch to the electorate to be that we are we are a party of moral upstanding we are good people we will make sensitive decisions and we will be guided by a sort of a sense of justice and injustice and everything that we do.

37:00And there is that moment very shortly, he's still the leader of the opposition, shortly after October 7th, where he gives an interview on LBC to Nick Ferrari. And Nick Ferrari is asking him about the collective punishment of Gaza. And he says, do the Israelis have the right to cut off water and power from Gaza? Starmer replies, and he says, I think Israel does have that right. Obviously, everything should be done within international law but i do think israel has that right now people just listening to that broadcast will think oh my goodness is the has the leader of the labor party just and a former humanitarian lawyer just endorsed possibly the committing of war crimes starmer very quickly pushes back gives another interview shortly after says he misspoke said that um he was not saying he was saying that israel a right to defend itself not to do those things why am i talking about this i think it's a really revealing moment not least because what if a prime minister would sooner misspeak in that like we accept his explanation if he would sooner misspeak in that way man with understands with deep sensitivity international law, humanitarian law, would say that.

38:18What does it say? And I think he was acutely aware of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. He was acutely aware of the way that he wanted to change the party. And I think he was worried about that criticism being leveled at him. And I think that's what led to that instance of him misspeaking. And if we are to pass the two years that happened since, you know, the horror of that conflict, the tens of thousands of people killed and again they will respond and say recognize the palestinian state limited arms shipments um to israel as well i think that with hindsight and particularly people on the left i think that is probably the most significant thing that people will remember keir starmer for and they will also say it diminished his moral and political authority yeah i think a lot of people will will say that i mean and i think it's something that the labor party is obviously trying to deal with now right so they are they are trying to repair that damage i think it is a it's a question that we all have to grapple with is is this conflict becoming or has it already become long ago uh the defining conflict of our of our time the defining moral question of our age.

39:39And I think clearly for a lot of British Muslims, a lot of British people in general on the left, who just are horrified by what they're watching, that is the reality. That's how it has become. And they understandably then just make a decision. Well, if you do think a genocide has been committed or war crimes, then from that point, a lot flows, a lot flows naturally. And it's therefore unlike other conflicts in the Middle East or other wars involving Israel and either Lebanon or the Palestinians or other things, even unlike the Iraq war or the war in Afghanistan. It's something beyond that because of the nature of what is being discussed.

40:37uh and so that is you're right to say that that potentially is going to be um something that defines him um in a way actually that is is the case with with tony blair in iraq it's not something that he can sort of get beyond it's just it is there and in the same way that for for a lot of people it was it was a kind of line in the sand and it changed politics as a result And I think that does have the power. This war continues to have that power over British politics. And I guess it's a lesson in moral leadership, and also just in history, that it's not possible in a way, to go back to what we were talking about with Keir Starmer, that he's trying to protect what he sees as a kind of reasonable centre.

41:33as he sees it. So he is trying to protect the relationship with the United States and Europe and Britain's allies and international law all at the same time while trying to protect Britain's economic position in the world, its public services, blah, blah, blah, everything all at once. But the world is shifting all the time, and politics is shifting all the time. And sometimes it's not possible just to maintain things in this way that if you're on the kind of defensive just trying to maintain the the position that you have uh that you end up losing as a result you know i saw some some message the other day about about the football and it says if you're if your game plan is just to defend what you have you'll usually lose it's the same in tennis the same football and and and tony blair actually himself used to say this about politics in that if you are if you start to go on the defensive to protect what you've got so you don't try to misspeak you don't try and do this you don't you don't do that you often find that you're you're losing and so i in a sense i do wonder if it all comes back to the central point here which is if you if your starting position is not one of like this is what i believe this is my moral mission these are my lines and this is what i believe in if that's not your guiding principle and everything falls in behind that if your position actually is to defend something that a status quo a kind of uh as as many interests as possible um then you're you're you're fundamentally on the back foot to begin with and so that the the failure in gaza is then almost like illustrative of the wider point it doesn't seem to be based in a you know a moral purpose of british foreign policy yeah i I would just add as an addendum and we'll be out of time, but I just, I think that authenticity counts for so much in the modern world, not just in politics, you know, anyone interested in, you know, leading a large organization or being a decent person in their day-to-day life or trying to communicate ideas, being authentic is a shortcut to people trusting you, people listening to you and people engaging with you it was like a central truth of of human nature and to me it's no wonder that as political communication is professionalized and um the nature of standing up pre-writing something giving a speech giving an interview and it being so clear to everyone listening that you haven't listened to what you're being asked about you've gone this applies to preset response b so that's the one i'll deliver people can smell it a mile away and it does connect to social media but when you spend so much of your life um watching other people talk listening to other people talk reading the words other people have written it's a central fact of modern life now people are really good at detecting the register in which people communicate and is this person communicating authentically with me is this person real um and if you can't do that you are in really really big trouble and it's one of the central things when i talk about the sort of the old politics versus the new politics i think it's it's so so so central i think i may i may have said this to you when we were um doing our 10 10 years of brexit talking about mandani talking about Trump, talking about Farage, that these political communicators who really understand that fact.

45:17And I think Burnham has to understand it, because for me, it's one of the key places. I'm not just saying it's the comms, it's the comms, it's the comms. Clearly, listen to the podcast. We've talked about it in far deeper terms than that. But I think authenticity, if I go back to the question we started this with, when people like someone in 30 years, what was Keir Starmer? The reason I pose that question is because I think it's really hard to answer what and who the authentic Keir Starmer is. And that's where we are. Well, I think it may come back to this. He was one of the final attempts to keep alive the status quo that we'd been trying to keep alive probably since 2008.

46:05And despite the various crises that happen afterwards, I think you could take this story back even further, you know, in a way that we've been living through a almost rolling period of major crises and foreign policy failures and domestic failures that have not really led to significant changes in our, you know, in our central understanding or our central kind of. constitutional settlement constitutional settlement or settlement for you know the the the political asset trying to pursue okay so you know let's say 2003 iraq war we've also got you know libya and syria we've got the implosion of our um our economy in 2007-8 we have the uh the rise of China happening at the same time.

47:11We have, what do we have from that point? We have the implosion of the Eurozone. We have Brexit. We have all of these things and then COVID. We have all of these things, some of them crises that kind of blow in from outside, which then show Britain is more vulnerable than almost any other comparable country. I know that the COVID response is, you know, that is being still litigated, you know, were we hit harder than other countries or not? You know, it looks to me like we've somehow ended up roughly in the middle of that. But, you know, I think all of these things, there's incredibly significant moments which reveal a kind of more fundamental problem with the state.

47:59And I think this is where probably, I think Andy Burnham's story is, is at its most significant, the argument that he's trying to make that these failures are the, are the defined so much of, of Britain outside of the areas that are doing well, you know, outside of the, of the Southeast, um, and pockets of success outside of that, you know, bits of Manchester now. But you know, the Cambridge, Edinburgh say, you know, these parts of the country that are doing well. Large swathes of this country is doing badly, just on bog standard average European terms. Just it's performing badly. And he's tracing that back to the 1980s.

48:46An interesting counter argument is being made by the right, which is tracing the story back to 1997. and everything is Tony Blair's fault, essentially, that, you know, everything was going fine. He comes in and he screws the country over with these constitutional reforms, which kind of stopped the state from being able to do anything. That is their foundational, you know, story of what went, what has gone wrong. But you've now got two rival arguments starting to develop. One of kind of de-industrialized economic failure traced back to the 1980s, and the other, a story of constitutional, you know, liberal progressivism traced back to 1997.

49:31Both sides are basically saying that this is bad. You know, the rot is real. The decline is real. You haven't really got a booster-ish account on either side saying, yeah, come on, Britain's fundamentally great. You know, all these people who are talking it down are, you know, are wrong. We just need a bit of, you know, release the animal spirits of, of, of, of the British and we'll, you know, we'll be back on track. They're both talking in really quite fundamental terms. And so I do wonder whether it comes to it that we'll be seeing, you know, Rishi Sunak, Kiyos Dama as the, as the final prime ministers trying to protect the old way before something new comes along but even that i should probably add just as a you know an addendum on this is maybe that is an ahistorical way of thinking and maybe the you know people like you and you and i are too locked in to uh easy narratives you know you have the thatcherite narrative the blairite narrative the uh you know the edgerton analysis or whatever and then actually most of history is just one of total chaos in which you can't define.

50:48It's just a big bumpy road of madness. And maybe that's where we are. Maybe that is where we are. It's certainly a good time to be in the business of printing political magazines, Mr. McTague. Indeed. Tom, thank you as always for taking the time to join us on the podcast. I really enjoy our conversations. You've been listening to The Exchange with me, Olly Dougmore. That was Tom McTague. We'll see you next week.

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