The Labour leader’s method of quiet but ruthless opposition appears to be in tune with this cynical age, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr
The Labour leader’s method of quiet but ruthless opposition appears to be in tune with this cynical agerime minister might not be the hardest job in Britain, but it combines the highest level of responsibility with the lowest barrier to entry for inadequate candidates. You don’t get to be a rocket scientist, for example, by reckoning you’d be good at it and persuading enough people to give you a go.
That feels like a bleak proposition to those activists and radicals who like to break things and see incremental change as pointless fidgeting with the status quo. The task is more subtle and much bigger than conventional political persuasion. It is nothing less than rehabilitation of the idea that politics can make a positive difference in people’s lives. It is making a virtue of what Max Weber, the political theorist, characterised as “the slow boring of hard boards”.
On that front, the Labour leader’s pre-political career is more instructive than raking over Tony Blair’s record and auditing ways in which 2023 is like and unlike 1997. At 61, Starmer is on course to be the oldest new prime minister since James Callaghan and the first since Blair to arrive with zero experience of government.
Prosecute when you know you can win and not just because people are demanding that something be done. It is not hard to see in that adage the kernel of Starmerism as practised in the opposition leader’s office.
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