The Thick of It’s Ian Martin on the trouble with Starmer

This week: I’m on holiday so it’s a guest post from the lovely and Emmy-award-winning writer Ian Martin (The Thick of It, The Death of Stalin, Veep, etc).

Hello everyone, Jonn here. Henry Scampi and I are on a sort of minibreak, in Cornwall to visit my co-author and occasional stand-in Tom Phillips by some seaside. Look:

But! The lovely Ian Martin – writer, satirist, architecture critic, granddad – was kind enough to step into the breach to give me a chance to take a breath. I’ll be back next week. See you then. 

Heeeeeeeeeeeere’s Ian: 

Notorious bigot, Tory bogeyman and Dad’s Army spivalike Enoch Powell is chiefly remembered for three things.

1. At an early age he established a reputation as a dazzlingly brilliant classicist. He was translating Herodotus at 14 and was a professor of Greek at 25. 

2. Even now (he’s been as dead as a dial-up modem for a quarter of a century) he remains a totemic figure for the anti-migrant right. His 1968 Rivers of Blood speech, in which he warned of looming racial catastrophe for white Britain, got him ejected from the shadow cabinet faster than a villain from James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5. 

But it won him a huge working-class fan base. Dockers went on strike in support. Assaults by racists increased, and were dignified with “reasons”. A Gallup poll found 74 per cent of respondents in agreement with Powell on immigration; 69 per cent said Heath was wrong to sack him. In news that astonished absolutely nobody, soft-tissue Pez dispenser Nigel Farage cited him as a personal hero. God, how Powell would have loved Brexit.

3. Powell famously said: all political lives end in failure. Sort of. He actually said “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” But those were the days when editors and sub-editors ruled the written world and ruthlessly cut the waffle off midstream. 

He was cast out into the cold by Ted Heath’s Conservative party: how odd and unsettling to wonder if he’d be a much better fit these days with a party whose deputy chair recently invited asylum seekers to “fuck off back to France.” Powell quickly found a new political home: he was given a warm welcome by the famously convivial Ulster Unionists. And fittingly his political career ended not just in failure but in classic bathos. He lost his seat in 1987 to an SDLP candidate, thanks largely to boundary changes he himself had campaigned for. 

Anyway, allow me to cut this off at a happy juncture. My primary concern here is Keir Starmer and I can’t help wondering if Labour’s current bland manager hasn’t been inspired at least in part by Powell, the old dog-whistling, chauvinist, scholarly bastard. Obviously Starmer’s not a classicist. I mean sure, he’s ruthless. But even he would shrink from taking revenge upon his enemies in the style of 5th-century BC Athens – poisoned wine, stabbed to death in the bath, serving someone’s children to them as a surprise supper – at least until after Conference. 

Nor am I saying Starmer’s racist, despite some pretty flat-footed, robo-voiced digs at the Tories for “losing control of immigration”. No, I think he’s taken Powell’s observation about political careers, realised that it’s even more brutally true for prime ministers, and decided to present himself as the ultimate busted flush before he even starts. His tactics are flawed but his instinct is correct. He knows, we all know, that even if he were to float into office lofted by Blair-level waves of public adoration, he’d end his prime ministership as a blurry photocopy of his former self, the low end of a long arc from hero to Xerox. 

Younger readers may struggle to understand the sheer joy of 1997’s first day of spring, when Blair – early forties, sexually active, privately educated though knew his way round a glottal stop – ended 18 long, long, long years of patrician Tory government, during which our public sector had been carpet-bombed. 

Blair had a strong economic wind in his sails at first, of course. Golden years. Incomes for ordinary Brits grew 18 per cent between 1997 and 2006. Now look at us: industrial-scale looting cronyism at the top, worsening cost of living at the bottom and a human fidget spinner at Number 10. 

Yet in Blair’s own decade at the helm his public career went from high-spending defender of the public realm to lying shit to unloved post-political millionaire social entrepreneur. He promised so much, and disappointed so hard. But then that’s true of every prime minister in my lifetime, all of whom suffered a third-act tumble. It comes with the job. Being PM is a suicide mission.