2 days ago
Look away, Sir Keir! Labour's bible has given its verdict on you
There was a time when the question of who would be editor of the New Statesman really, really mattered in the Labour leader's office.
I know, because I was a journalist on the left-wing weekly when Neil Kinnock took a close interest in who would succeed Hugh Stephenson, an ally of the Labour leader, when he left in 1986.
With a general election looming, Kinnock was determined that the title should not fall into the hands of the Bennites, as the Corbynites of those days were known. Fortunately, the board of the magazine was chaired by the former Labour MP Phillip Whitehead, and John Lloyd, a Financial Times journalist on the right of the Labour Party, was safely installed.
Unfortunately for Kinnock, Lloyd was a principled Labour right-winger: so much so that he wrote a leading article on the eve of the 1987 election condemning Kinnock's policy of one-sided nuclear disarmament.
Labour duly lost – but Kinnock seemed to conclude that the New Statesman was not the decisive factor in that defeat and that, actually, Lloyd was right. He took no interest in who would take over when Lloyd's brief but brilliant editorship ended after the election, but he did ditch the defence policy of giving up 'something for nothing'.
It wasn't until Tony Blair that the relationship was restored, when Ian Hargreaves, a former editor of The Independent, turned the magazine into a cheerleader for New Labour – although in 1996-97, few outposts of cultural life had not been drawn into the collective ra-ra for the Great Moderniser.
Blair lost interest the moment he became prime minister, but Gordon Brown, who hoped to succeed him, remained engaged. Brown had the advantage that the magazine at this stage was owned by Geoffrey Robinson, his friend and, briefly, a fellow minister – but, according to Peter Wilby, editor from 1998 to 2005, Robinson didn't interfere: 'I knew that, on critical appointments such as political editor, Robinson would want to establish 'what Gordon thinks' (fortunately, Gordon was usually too indecisive to settle on any particular name).'
Since then, Jason Cowley, who was editor for 16 years until the end of 2024, barely concealed his disdain for Ed Miliband's leadership and was hostile to Jeremy Corbyn. Cowley was positive but distant towards Starmer.
But now, Tom McTague, a former political editor at the Independent on Sunday and Cowley's successor, has launched his editorship with a 9,500-word profile of the prime minister, having accompanied Starmer on his recent travels.
McTague succeeds, more than any recent interviewer, in giving a sense of Starmer's character. He asks about Nick – Starmer's brother who had learning difficulties and who died of cancer on Boxing Day last year – and produces an unexpectedly emotional and inarticulate response. 'I can't really explain this,' Starmer admits.
McTague writes: 'He leans forward, still staring into my eyes, intense and lost, no longer a prime minister but a normal man bereaved, the tears back in his eyes.'
Since the 1980s, the roles of New Statesman editor and Labour leader seem to have reversed. Starmer seems puzzled and unsure about McTague's interest in him, while McTague insists that the prime minister ought to have something to say to the British people, including the left-wing segment of them that read the New Statesman.
McTague sees the magazine's role as being to explore and give voice to whatever it is that the modern Labour Party – or more specifically, the current Labour government – stands for.
Yet he seems to come away from his time spent with Starmer with a sense of frustration and disappointment. He sets off on a weeks-long project asking what connects Labour's missions and milestones: 'How do they form a coherent analysis of what has gone wrong in Britain and, therefore, what the government needs to do to fix it? Over the next few weeks, I will come back to these questions again and again, and wonder whether the nation will ever hear a convincing answer to them.'
McTague says of Starmer: 'He seems reluctant to poke at the reasons the country is so tense and angry and poor, to analyse the cause of the country's malaise.'
One striking feature of the profile is that Starmer's aides seem to have a clearer idea of the government's purpose than the prime minister himself. One of them is quoted as saying: 'If you don't give people hope, you will get the alternative – the destruction of failing institutions.'
McTague comments: 'On one level the prime minister appears intellectually to understand the challenge, even sometimes to agree with the analysis. And yet on another, he does not seem able – or willing – to channel such thoughts in a way that the country understands.'
It is a damning verdict because McTague is so obviously sympathetic to Starmer the person.
It would seem that the latest episode of the on-off relationship between Labour leader and the country's leading left-wing magazine will not end in a breach over an election-losing policy – as was the case with Kinnock and Lloyd – but in a complaint that Starmer seems unable to communicate what he thinks he won the election to do.
