Keir Starmer

This is one way a worthwhile poem can get itself written. I'm sure there are others.

I have a lot of time for Keir Starmer. You shouldn't need to be charismatic to be Prime Minister. Attlee was the best ever and Boris the worst until they somehow found Liz Truss but that needs us to redefine 'charisma' as 'see-through vanity project with no concept of the truth'. Churchill said that an empty taxi drew up and Clement Attlee got out of it. A possible near miss of an insult although not as accurate as saying, 'a better Prime Minister than me got out'.

It was when R.E.M. The Great Beyond came up on Spotify that the first impulse to write something in tribute to Keir Starmer was joined by a way of doing it. It's useful for more than one thing to be going on in a poem. While it might be true to say 'the sky is blue', it doesn't make a poem. Once one's done something to explain how or why, there begins the possibility of a poem. It turned out that Keir was,

 pushing an elephant up the stairs,

  tossing up punch lines that were never there

Over my shoulder a piano falls

Crashing to the ground 

 

I liked Keir Starmer while always aware that he was a politician and thus, almost by definition, not entirely to be trusted. He had the right iconic hero among his reference points in Harold Wilson and, thanks to the disasters of the obviously outgoing Conservative administration, had the same sort of gimme landslide General Election win that Blair had, once he'd reformed the Labour Party from its inward, Corbynite paradoxes. 

I remember Tony Benn, decades ago, claiming that Labour only won General Elections on 'left-wing' manifestos. But, no, the presumed natural Labour constituency in the lower-paid and under-privileged aren't interested in political correctness, gender identity and Palestine. They haven't read Karl Marx and are more interested in a better world for themselves than one for everyone and so express their rebellion by voting for Farage and his ramshackle band of under-vetted, makeshift chancers.

 

Our electoral system provided Starmer with the most unlikely majority in the House of Commons, so overwhelming in seats but so unjustified by the popular vote and, more crucially, so unsupported by the rank and file of those seats once he had shifted from the 'leftist' attitudes he had espoused in order to get there to the Blue Labour attempts that he and Rachel Reeves undertook to actually balance the books.

Anybody in any sort of business is aware that one can't sustain a loss for long. A country is no different once it's so overly borrowed that its interest payments are taking all the money it would prefer to spend on- defence, NHS, Police, potholes and every other crisis one hears about to which the answer the expert advises is 'more government spending'.

Despite inheriting the 'years of Tory misrule', Keir ran into the 'headwinds' of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the unreliability of a gimcrack President of the USA who had so enthusiastically endorsed Boris but subsequently failed to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours as promised. But as much as anything he ran into his own backbenchers who hadn't thought they'd been elected to cut benefits and maybe the fatal flaw in the Starmer tragedy was that he got there under false pretences and so wasn't in a position to balance the books once it was his job to.

He might well feel aggrieved, though, having achieved a certain amount on NHS waiting lists, migration and a steady if not expansive economy. He was a vast improvement on his predecessors and got little credit for it.