Is Keir Starmer turning into Harold Wilson?

New Statesman​

02-07-2025

Photo by Henry Nicholls -Another week and another crisis for Keir Starmer after another U-turn. It should not be like this, of course. He is one year into a five-year parliament with a working majority of 165. The Conservative Party is in free fall. Nigel Farage leads a party with just five MPs. And yet something is clearly wrong in this government. The Parliamentary Labour Party is refusing to be led. Hostile briefings are everywhere. The Chancellor is under attack; so too the Prime Minister's most influential adviser. Starmer himself appears remorseful, apologetic and unsure what to do, searching for a sense of mission and direction, assailed from all directions by the kind of advice no one wants.
There is a scene in Ben Pimlott's biography of Harold Wilson that I cannot shake at moments like this. Wilson was a wily intellect and an even wilier politician, able to dodge and weave to keep his party together and himself in power. He also had a clear sense of direction, promising to modernise Britain and reinvigorate its faltering economy. It was a sparkling prospectus, delivered with sparkling rhetoric. And yet, it failed. By 1976, after an unlikely return to power, Wilson retired a broken man, drinking in the afternoon, quick to tears, mournful and unsure. Before he left office, he told one interviewer that he hoped to spend more time thinking about the country's problems.
I once retold this bathetic story of political history to one of Starmer's closest aides, warning him of the dangers of power without a clear sense of direction. I tried to make a joke of it, not wanting to be too Eeyorish. Still, Wilson's fate seems to hang over this government in some strange, spectral fashion. 'The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,' Karl Marx once observed. So they do. Whether Wilson, Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, it often seems as though our ruling class is haunted by the traditions of those who came before, a feeling captured on page 50 by Nicholas Harris's review of Shifty, Adam Curtis's new series about Britain in the run-up to the millennium. Our new culture editor, Tanjil Rashid, is haunted by different ghosts on page 32.
In many ways Starmer is underestimated as a politician. Although the calibre of prime ministers has noticeably declined since Wilson's day, it still requires skill, political acumen and what might generously be called 'wiles' to reach the pinnacle of British politics. (The most powerful leader in this issue isn't even a politician: read Zoë Huxford on page 33 to see what I mean.) Starmer has all these traits and more. Yet the man before us today looks far more like late Wilson than he should at this stage of his premiership.
At the heart of Starmer's apparent crisis of confidence lies a crisis of direction. From as early as 1967, Wilson began to lose his verve after abandoning his economic plans and devaluing the pound. In Pimlott's telling, Wilson's failure to see through his economic plan became a crisis for social democracy itself, which never really lifted. Without economic planning, what does Labour stand for, Pimlott asked? For a while Blair and Gordon Brown appeared to answer this question, but their model – as we can now see – died with the financial crisis of 2008. In many ways, Starmer's crisis is the reverse of Wilson's. His plan cannot be said to have failed, because he did not have one to begin with. Rather, his struggles are those of a man searching for a plan and finding instead a fleeting politics, as Finn McRedmond finds at Glastonbury on page 8.
My ambition for the New Statesman is to step into this obvious ideological void on the left of politics; to be a journal of ideas that can help light a new direction for this government, and for progressive politics more generally. Our cover story this week begins this process. As Will Dunn writes on page 20, it is time for the government to confront our baffling, irrational tax system, which fails to raise enough for the kind of country we all want to live in.
Without a clear direction, Starmer is being pulled in all directions. His friends urge him – in private and, it seems, in public – to ignore the Blairites, move left and abandon his hopes of recovering voters lost to Reform. Those of a more Tony-ish hue whisper to me and others that this is the siren call of Milibandism. A battle is now underway for Starmer's ear – and for the soul of this government. As both Andrew Marr and George Eaton write, a new politics is opening up, one that is far more radical and dangerous for both of Britain's main political parties than before. History appears first as tragedy, and then as farce, Marx observed. It seems he knew what he was talking about.
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[See also: The rebellions against Starmer are only just beginning]
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