Keir Starmer’s fatal flaw? The blankness on to which voters projected their years of frustration | John Harris
His government was directionless and confused, and from that murk emerged the Peter Mandelson scandalOn a bone-chillingly cold morning in January, it felt as if I had suddenly found at...
By John Harris · The Guardian Opinion
His government was directionless and confused, and from that murk emerged the Peter Mandelson scandal On a bone-chillingly cold morning in January, it felt as if I had suddenly found at least part of the reason for Keir Starmer’s chronic unpopularity. I was in the Mancunian constituency of Gorton and Denton , where the prime minister and his people’s decision to block Andy Burnham from standing was about to hand victory to the Green party. More specifically, I was in a forlorn covered market about to be regenerated into a “food and drink cluster”, talking to a sixtysomething man nursing a mug of tea. What, I wondered, did he think of the man at the top? He gave me roughly the same answer that I’d heard from a lot of my other interviewees: “I really don’t like him at all.” But like most other people I met that day, he couldn’t quite explain what fired his antipathy, which seemed to make it worse. His face scrunched into a mixture of scepticism and exasperation. “I don’t know why – I just don’t,” he said. The most specific answer I got from anyone else was: “He hasn’t done what he said he’d do.” So there it was: as well as a modern tendency to loathe politicians that regularly seems arbitrary, whipped-up and way over the top, a sense that Starmer’s sheer blankness – his painful lack of clarity and the absence of a halfway coherent story about his own government – was making a lot of people dislike and mistrust him all the more. John Harris is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...