The Two Body Problem

Keir Starmer does not understand what being Prime Minister means. Also: ray cats, atomic priests and nuclear semiotics; and the difficulties of defining a city.

In the 16th century, faced with the inherent contradictions of building a durable legal and political order around people who had a frankly inconvenient habit of dying, some clever lawyers came up with the nifty idea: the “king’s two bodies”. There was the body natural, the bit of the sovereign that could and would sicken and expire. But there was also the body politic, a legal personification of the bits of royal power that needed to endure for the state to properly function. A monarch is made of more than just a human being.

I have neither the philosophy nor the theology to be anything other than hazy on all this, but Keir Starmer, I am coming to suspect, is significantly hazier still: that it’s simply not occurred to him that Keir Starmer the Prime Minister is more than just the sum of the actions of Keir Starmer the man. We expect the head of a government – a party, a business, a team – to be more than themselves, but a representative of the body they run, the power they can exert, the things that are done in their name. Witness the way we attribute actions taken by people whose names we may never know to “the department” or “the palace”. Donald Trump probably doesn’t know or grasp many of the things being done by the “Trump administration”. No one in their right mind thinks that should get him off the hook.

Keir Starmer’s actions this week suggest that he might think it should. Olly Robbins, until late last week head civil servant in Britain’s foreign office and the latest designated can carrier, said Peter Mandelson’s ambassadorship was approved in spite of his failed vetting under pressure from “Downing Street”. Starmer has said, repeatedly, that he’s furious at any such suggestion: he, a good man, believes he exerted no such pressure.

Possibly the Prime Minister is lying, in which case, game over. More likely, I think, is that he just doesn’t grasp that “Downing Street” can be both him and not him. He may never have instructed underlings to do something; it was still done in his name nonetheless. The pressure came not from Starmer natural, but from Starmer politic. That does not mean it did not involve Keir Starmer.

If the two bodies theory helps explain how he got into this mess, it may also explain how he can’t get out. To shore up his position, with the media gunning for him and every other party leader demanding his head, Starmer needs his party to do more than sullenly accept this is not the time for a leadership contest: he needs outriders willing to make his case. A leader’s authority, like their actions, extends beyond themselves: Boris Johnson’s premiership finally collapsed, after all, when MPs got sick of being sent out to say things to journalists which it would turn out, within hours, were untrue.

It is not clear, to put it mildly, that Starmer has any such extended self any longer, if he ever did. There’s actual footage of the moment Ed Miliband seems to have decided not to burn his own credibility here. Or consider these lines, from a “Labour insider” in Politico on Monday (“Lots of people think Keir Starmer is a good man who is out of his depth. Wrong. He’s an asshole who’s out of his depth”) or backbencher Sarah Champion (”I’ll be honest with you people don’t like Keir on the door but it’s not over this Mandelson thing. They don’t like him personally”). These are not the words of a party prepared to man the barricades for their beloved leader. They are also an entirely predictable outcome of a strategy of declining to charm MPs and repeatedly throwing underlings under the bus.

And as with Westminster, so with the country. One of the many issues with a political strategy based on deliberately alienating your own supporters for being soft on migrants/working at universities/on the wrong side of the culture wars is that none of them are going to make the argument for supporting you. Local elections are due, the leadership is under fire – and it’s spent the last two years machine gunning its own first line of defence.

If we take the Prime Minister at his word as to what he did and didn’t say, Keir Starmer wants to be judged entirely on his own actions – not on anything else that was done by others who worked for him. That, though, is simply not how government works. I can believe Starmer did not lie to the Commons. But the nature of his defence suggests he’s been more than negligent in doing his job: it amounts to an admission he did not understand it. A Prime Minister, like a king, can be said to have two bodies. And both of them are f*cked.

An extremely quick reminder…

…that I’ll be talking borders to the Open University’s Daria Chernysheva at Waterstones as part of the Milton Keynes Literary festival on Friday night. Tickets here. Why not come along?

Of ray cats, atomic priests and nuclear semiotics

How could you, as a Roman tavern owner, hope to communicate the availability of delicious and surprisingly affordable wine to the large number of potential punters whose money was as good as anyone’s but who could not, in fact, read? Easy: stick a bush outside your shop. The symbol may have been a reminder of grapevines; then again, it may have represented the ivy associated with the appropriate god, Bacchus. But how it came about didn’t really matter: the point was, people saw a bush, they understood there to be wine. Lovely. In the same way, it doesn’t matter whether the three golden balls reflected the three bags of gold coins once given by St Nicholas to enable a poor family’s three daughters to marry – an unexpected link between pawnbrokers and Santa Claus, there – or just the heraldry of the Medici family. Everybody knew they meant pawnbroker.

Visual symbols like that, though, are still a form of language, a way of communicating based on consensual understandings about what something means: the red and white stripes of the barber’s pole don’t inherently mean “you can get your hair cut here”, any more than the series of shapes that make up the written word “barber” do: it’s simply that those reading it grew up in a culture in which that’s what it meant.¹ So what do you do if, instead of being a trader trying to communicate with illiterate people who share the same cultural assumptions you do, you’re a nuclear scientist trying to communicate with people who may not share those assumptions at all? People who won’t even be born for millennia, whose worldview you can’t even imagine?

In 1981, the US government and engineering giant Bechtel brought together a group of archaeologists, psychologists, climatologists and experts in verbal and non-verbal communication, under the distinctly MCU-esque name of the Human Interference Taskforce. Their mission: to work out how to tell people in the unimaginably distant future that they were at risk of radiation poisoning.