STARMER: GOOD RIDDANCE … BAD OMENS ??

There are moments in the long, grey afternoon of public life when the universe, usually so indifferent to human vanities, decides to offer a small, dry smile. Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement that he is quitting Parliament to pursue 'international affairs' is one such moment. After being gently but firmly shown the door of Downing Street by his own party, the former Prime Minister now prepares to take his leave of the green benches as well. One notes the timing with a certain aesthetic satisfaction. The man who once promised to stabilise the nation has succeeded mainly in stabilising the revolving door of British leadership.

It is difficult to survey Starmer’s career without a sense of mild astonishment that so much earnestness produced so little lasting architecture. Professionally, he specialised in the careful avoidance of definition. He arrived as the great resetter of Labour, the man who would make the party electable by the simple expedient of looking serious in spectacles. He left having demonstrated that seriousness, when unaccompanied by either vision or luck, can become a form of elaborate self-parody. His government managed the rare feat of making the previous chaotic decade look, in retrospect, almost purposeful. U-turns were executed with the solemnity of state funerals. Immigration numbers continued their determined upward trajectory while the language surrounding them grew ever more circular. The Southport aftermath revealed a government more fluent in the vocabulary of 'misinformation' than in the more awkward business of public order and public grief. Censorship, or its more fashionable cousin 'online safety,' advanced under the banner of protection, as if the British public were a collection of delicate children who might otherwise encounter an unauthorised opinion.

Personally, the portrait was hardly more flattering. Starmer projected the demeanour of a senior partner in a particularly humourless firm of solicitors who had somehow wandered into politics and decided to stay out of professional courtesy. There was the celebrated business of free spectacles and free suits, those small tokens of largesse that somehow managed to look both petty and revealing at once. Hypocrisy, when practised at this level, acquires a certain bureaucratic dignity. One did not so much dislike Starmer as find oneself increasingly unable to believe in the three-dimensionality of the figure before the cameras. He seemed less a man than a carefully briefed outline of a man, forever promising to 'deliver' while the contents of the package remained a closely guarded secret even from himself.

The satisfaction at his political demise is therefore not purely partisan. It is the quieter pleasure that accompanies the correction of a category error. Britain had, for a brief and expensive interval, mistaken managerial competence for leadership and lawyerly caution for statesmanship. The correction has now been applied, and the former Prime Minister finds himself with time on his hands and a résumé that still looks impressive on certain continents.

Here, however, the smile begins to freeze. Starmer has made it known that his future lies in 'international affairs,' a phrase that in modern political usage often translates as “somewhere with better catering and fewer voters.” The European institutions, the outer reaches of NATO’s civilian apparatus, or the more ethereal altitudes of the World Economic Forum all present themselves as natural destinations for a man of his particular gifts. One can already picture the carefully lit conference rooms, the soft-focus declarations about 'global challenges,' the quiet assumption that the British public, having proved itself insufficiently grateful, might benefit from a little external guidance.

The concern is not that Starmer will fail in such a role. On the contrary. The danger is that he may succeed in the limited, durable way that certain international functionaries do: by treating national electorates as temporary inconveniences rather than the ultimate source of legitimacy. Having been rejected by the country he once governed, he may discover a certain moral clarity in the higher atmosphere of transnational bodies, where the air is thinner and the accountability more diffuse. From those altitudes it becomes easier to regard the stubbornness of the British people as a problem to be managed rather than a verdict to be accepted. Revenge, in such circles, is rarely announced. It arrives instead as a series of well-intentioned frameworks, reporting obligations, and 'shared values' that somehow always seem to constrain the awkward island more than its more enlightened continental partners.

One hopes, of course, that this is mere pessimism. Starmer may simply settle into a comfortable sinecure, write the occasional thoughtful essay, and fade into the kind of well-remunerated obscurity that is the modern politician’s version of a country estate. Yet the pattern of the last few years suggests a residual grievance. The man who could not quite connect with the British public may find it easier to instruct it from abroad. The 'vile little man' of popular caricature may yet prove less little once equipped with the long levers of international bureaucracy.

In the end, the British have exercised their traditional right to grow tired of a leader. The question now is whether that leader, having been shown the door, will content himself with looking for another entrance or will begin designing a larger, more permanent set of keys. History is littered with rejected domestic politicians who discovered a second act in the global conversation. Few of them returned with undiluted affection for the electorates that first dismissed them. Starmer’s next chapter will tell us whether he belongs among their number, or whether, for once, the universe’s small dry smile will prove permanent.

THAT'S WHY MUMS SAY "NO" IN ICELAND

The Icelanders have spoken, and they have spoken with the blunt, brine-scented authority of a people who know the precise difference between a national identity and a regulatory annex. On a grey North Atlantic morning, while the rest of Europe was still debating the precise shade of grey required for the next Commission press release, the voters of Iceland delivered their verdict on the question of whether they should resume accession talks with the European Union. 

They said no. Not with the hysterical flourish of a continental protest march, but with the quiet finality of a fisherman hauling in a net that contains exactly what he expected and nothing he did not. The government’s clever notion of advancing the vote by more than a year, in the apparent belief that a spot of geopolitical weather might panic the island into the waiting arms of Brussels, was met with what can only be described as a giant North Atlantic cod applied vigorously to the collective official face.

One must pause to admire the economy of the gesture. Iceland, that improbable outcrop of lava, saga and stubbornness, has never been particularly interested in being told that its destiny lies in a PowerPoint presentation drafted in a glass building several time zones away. Its culture is not a regional variant of something larger; it is a deliberate, centuries-long experiment in remaining itself. The sagas were not written by committee. The language, that austere and beautiful survival of Old Norse, did not evolve in order to accommodate twenty-seven official translations of a directive on the curvature of bananas. The people who live there have spent a millennium learning how to extract a living from a landscape that regards human ambition with glacial indifference. The idea that this hard-won particularity should now be dissolved into the great bureaucratic consommé of the European project was always going to strike them as a peculiar form of self-harm.

And so they rejected it. They rejected the soft coercion of globalisation dressed up as historical inevitability. They rejected the assumption that national sovereignty is a picturesque anachronism to be retained only in folk museums and tourism brochures. In doing so they performed a small, bracing act of cultural self-respect that ought to make more fashionable capitals shift uncomfortably in their seats. Icelandic culture is not a lifestyle accessory. It is the accumulated result of isolation, literacy, volcanic interruption and an almost unnatural attachment to the idea that a free people ought to decide their own fishing quotas. The cod, in this context, is not merely a fish. It is a symbol of the proposition that some things are not for sale, and that the sea does not recognise the Common Fisheries Policy.

The European Union, of course, took a different view. For years it has regarded the remaining non-members of the north-western fringe with the proprietary interest of a landlord eyeing an empty flat. The pitch is always the same: come inside where it is warm, where the rules are harmonised, where the currency is shared and the destiny is collective. What is left unsaid is that the warmth is institutional, the rules are written by people who will never have to live under the consequences in a small open economy, and the collective destiny has a curious habit of looking remarkably like the destiny preferred by the larger members. The attempt to draw Iceland into the process was less an invitation than an exercise in administrative gravity. Assimilation was the unspoken destination; the referendum was merely the procedural obstacle.

At the centre of this project stands Ursula von der Leyen, a figure who has perfected the art of looking simultaneously earnest and slightly surprised that anyone might disagree with her. One imagines her receiving the news from Reykjavík with the expression of a headmistress who has just been informed that the prefects have voted against the new school uniform. There is something almost poignant in the spectacle: the President of the Commission, that tireless evangelist for ever-closer union, confronted by an island that has looked at the prospectus and decided the boarding fees are too high and the house rules intolerable. The embarrassment is not merely political; it is aesthetic. To be rebuffed by a nation whose entire population could fit inside a medium-sized European city, and whose principal export has historically been fish and literature, is to be reminded that scale is not the same thing as authority, and that moral seriousness does not automatically confer the right to absorb one’s neighbours.

Von der Leyen’s difficulty is structural. She embodies an institution that has come to regard national difference as a transitional inconvenience rather than a permanent feature of the human landscape. The Icelanders, by contrast, appear to regard it as the entire point. Their rejection was not a fit of xenophobia or a romantic attachment to autarky. It was a cold-eyed calculation that the unique character of their society – the language that still reads like the Middle Ages, the democratic habits forged in isolation, the economic dependence on resources that Brussels would prefer to manage from a distance – was worth more than the dubious consolations of membership. In an age when globalisation is sold as both inevitable and benign, they have insisted on the right to remain particular.

The rest of us are left with the mildly unedifying spectacle of a superstate that cannot quite believe it has been declined by a country whose most famous literary achievement involves blood feuds and poetic justice. The cod has been delivered. The face of official Europe, and in particular the carefully composed features of Ursula von der Leyen, bears the imprint. One suspects the bruise will fade. The principle, rather less so. Iceland has simply declined to be improved. In the current climate, that counts as a minor miracle of good taste.

BURNHAM'S PRIMARK SOCIALISM

There are moments in the life of a nation when the cut of a man’s cloth tells you more than any speech he might deliver from a lectern. Andy Burnham, newly elevated to the office of Prime Minister and freshly arrived in Kyiv on Ukraine’s Independence Day, has provided us with one such moment. He stepped off the train in what can only be described as the full kit of the modern British progressive: a short-sleeved polo of indeterminate navy, dark chinos that had clearly seen better afternoons, and an air of studied informality that suggested he had just popped out for a packet of crisps and somehow found himself shaking hands with the Ukrainian Foreign Minister.

The photographs are instructive. On one side of the handshake stands a man in traditional embroidered shirt, the sort of garment that announces cultural continuity and a certain seriousness of purpose. On the other stands Britain’s first citizen, looking as if he has come to collect a parcel from the sorting office. One almost expects him to ask whether there is somewhere he can change into something more comfortable. He did, of course, later put on a suit to meet President Zelensky. The suit, we are told, is reserved for the proper occasions. Watching Everton, for instance. This is the heart of the matter. Burnham will dress with proper formality to sit among the faithful at Goodison (or wherever the Toffees are currently lodging their hopes). He will not, it appears, do the same for the symbolic arrival on the soil of a country fighting for its existence. The clothes, as the man once said, maketh the man. In this case they maketh a very particular kind of man: the Primark Socialist.

Primark Socialism is not the old-fashioned variety that involved cloth caps and genuine working-class resentment. It is something more modern, more retail, more carefully calibrated. It is the politics of the affordable polo shirt. It signals solidarity without the inconvenience of looking like one has made an effort. It is authenticity by the metre, cut to fit the average chest and available in bulk. One need not rise early to iron a collar; one simply reaches into the drawer of democratic understatement and emerges looking like everyone else, only with a security detail. There is a certain genius to it. In an age when the public has grown weary of the polished and the remote, the Prime Minister arrives looking as if he has been travelling on the same train as the rest of us. The message is clear: I am one of you. I too know the mild discomfort of synthetic fabric on a warm day. I too understand that a quarter-zip is the outer limit of formalwear for a man who does not wish to appear to be trying too hard. 

Never mind that the journey was not, in fact, the same one the rest of us take, nor that the destination was a capital city under wartime conditions rather than a Saturday afternoon in the stands. The clothes do the talking, and they speak in the reassuring vernacular of the high street. One detects in all this the lingering influence of Burnham’s long apprenticeship in Manchester, where “Manchester clothes” became a political brand of their own. The rejection of the Westminster suit was presented as a kind of moral hygiene: a washing away of the old, stuffy, southern ways. Suits, after all, were what the other lot wore. Suits were for people who had never stood on a cold platform waiting for a delayed Northern service. The polo shirt, by contrast, was democratic. It said: I have not forgotten where I came from, even if where I came from is now a rather more elevated address.

The difficulty arises when the same logic is applied to the world stage. Diplomacy has always had its theatrical side. Leaders dress not merely for comfort but for the occasion, signalling respect for the host, the gravity of the moment, and the continuity of their own office. Zelensky himself has made a political virtue of military-style informality, a choice born of wartime necessity and carefully maintained. Burnham’s version feels less like necessity and more like a lifestyle preference that has been allowed to travel beyond its natural habitat. One does not, as a rule, turn up to a funeral in the clothes one wears to the supermarket, however sincere one’s feelings may be.

There is also the small matter of consistency. A man who will put on a proper suit to watch a football match is making a statement about what he considers worthy of formal attention. Everton, it seems, still commands the full armour of respectability. The Independence Day of a nation under existential threat does not. Or rather, it does once the cameras have recorded the arrival in the preferred uniform of the people. The subsequent change into a suit for the actual meetings has the air of a man who has remembered, slightly late, that he is no longer merely the Mayor of Greater Manchester but the representative of a nuclear power. The delay is telling.

Primark Socialism thrives on this careful management of image. It is cheap in the best and worst senses: accessible, unpretentious, and ultimately disposable. It costs little in the way of genuine formality and returns a high yield in perceived authenticity. One can almost hear the focus groups approving. The public, it is believed, no longer wants leaders who look like leaders. They want leaders who look like the man behind them in the queue at the coffee shop, only with better security and the ability to authorise long-range missile assistance. Whether this is sustainable remains an open question. Clothes may maketh the man, but they can also unmake him if the occasion demands something more than the democratic polo. There is a difference between refusing the pomposity of the past and refusing the basic theatre of seriousness. The former is refreshing. The latter risks looking like a failure of imagination, or worse, a failure of respect.

Burnham has long cultivated the image of the ordinary bloke who somehow found himself in extraordinary circumstances. It has served him well. Yet there are circumstances in which the ordinary bloke is expected to rise to the occasion rather than insist that the occasion come down to his level. A train platform in Kyiv on Independence Day may be one of them. The suit that appears for Everton and vanishes for the initial diplomatic handshake suggests that the hierarchy of priorities remains intact, only inverted in a way that would have puzzled an earlier generation of socialists, for whom dignity in public life was not a bourgeois affectation but part of the point.

In the end, Primark Socialism is less an ideology than a wardrobe strategy. It is the politics of looking approachable while holding power, of signalling solidarity through the absence of effort. It may yet prove popular. The British have always had a soft spot for the unassuming. But one wonders how long the soft spot will last when the soft collar becomes the permanent uniform of the office. 

There are times when a nation needs its leaders to look as if they have dressed for the history they are making, rather than for the journey they took to get there. On the evidence of that Kyiv platform, the current Prime Minister is still working out which is which.