Now Keir’s end is near and so he faces his final curtain. Regrets he has a few (MANDELSON), but of this much we can be certain. He did it his way.
It is, I think, unlikely that politicians of future times will see the Starmer ministry as a blueprint; more likely a cautionary tale. Even the man himself displayed some inkling of this when he led his first draft of history on the Downing Street steps with one quarter’s GDP figures which are widely seen as the artefact of a broken statistical model.
But this presents a problem. For as the sun sets on his premiership, tradition dictates (and we have done this often enough for a tradition to develop) that everyone has to be nice to him. Even Kemi Badenoch, against her will, through gritted teeth and with her fingers crossed behind her back will probably have to say something vaguely flattering about her vanquished foe.
With few substantive achievements and fewer still which command universal support, I think the tributes will fall back on the soon-to-be-former Prime Minister’s spirit of public service. He could, we will be told, have returned to the Bar after his time as DPP, but no. Sir Keir wanted to serve. So he put down his wig and picked up the backpack of politics. He may have a habit of saying one thing and doing another. He may have a fondness for firing his underlings, but he is an honourable man, motivated only by the public good
But in what way does a barrister not serve the public interest? He represents those who believe they have been wronged. He assists in the construction of precedent. And, in the case of a KC, he pays shedloads of tax.
He may not be trooping through the Division Lobbies, nor asking the question his whip has shoved into his hand, but it is hard to say he is not serving the public
We, or at least those in public life, have a habit of eliding “serving the public” with “being paid from the public purse”. On the one side you have civil servants, paramedics and teachers who add value to society, on the other everyone else. Those who, by implication, purely serve their own interests and whose activities add nothing to the sum of human happiness save their own.
Civil servants, of course, need someone to make the reams of paper they shovel around the office (when they’re not WFH), paramedics would not do much paramedicking had someone not made the tyres for their ambulance, and teachers won’t be teaching much if someone hasn’t grown the food they need to get through their double maths lesson.
Instead of conceiving of society as graphite-like, layer sitting smoothly on layer, it is a network, each node depending on countless other nodes to function.
This being the case, the intentions of each individual node are not particularly important to the system as a whole, as Adam Smith pointed out. That they do their job is infinitely more important than why they do their job. There is a (convoluted, I grant you) path between my ruthless pursuit of my own interest in the City and the discovery of the beta, gamma and delta variants of Covid. You may not approve of my dedication to the dollar, but the latter, I think we can agree, was a good thing.
Some people (let’s be honest, most people) are more publicly spirited than me. Some people want to be of service to their fellow man. But if society is a network, they already are. Whether they are nursing, teaching, or selling wine, they are already contributing. The question for such people is not, thus, how can I contribute, but how can I contribute most.
Politics is, to politicians at least, the obvious answer. But that answer can be wrong. And a politician who gets things wrong can impose costs on society which easily outweigh whatever benefits their being in politics brings. Even the Greens would say that Liz Truss would have added more value to society by staying at Shell and just paying tax, than she did by becoming Prime Minister.
The problem is that one cannot tell ahead of time. Politicians may go into politics because they are motivated by public service, but they cannot know whether they will be able to provide it. Politics is a unique sphere of human endeavour, for which other occupations give little training and offer no read-across. Entering it is a guess. Probably motivated by ego. No few recent Prime Ministers have sought the top job because they thought they would be good at it. It is early days, but history is unlikely to agree with many of them. If you were a Remainer, David Cameron would have added most value to the world by staying in PR. If you were a Leaver, Theresa May could best have served her country by remaining a local councillor.
Ought, philosophers tell us, implies can. Many politicians think they ought to be in politics because they can add value in it. Much of the time they are wrong. If they understood society and their role within it more broadly, maybe they wouldn’t be. Because for much of the political class, the best move is not to play.
It is early days, but history may decide that Keir Starmer, like many of his predecessors, would best have served the public interest by not going into public life.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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“It is early days, but history may decide that Keir Starmer, like many of his predecessors, would best have served the public interest by not going into public life.”
Priceless, Stewart…