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On Friday morning, Keir Starmer was posting without compromise. “If you’re one of the smugglers putting people in small boats across the channel,” ran the prime minister’s communique on X, “we’re coming after you.” Imagine the fear that would have struck into the hearts of all those people smugglers who follow his account.
Alternatively, you could consider the above as a performance for the benefit of people other than those to whom it appears to be addressed – which would certainly make it of a piece with Starmer’s entire shtick for “immigration week”. Because that really has been quite a performance – and one the critics are already calling unconvincing, excruciating and wooden. On several occasions the prime minister was outperformed by his lectern.
Monday was the big speech, which it is already clear will be remembered chiefly for Starmer’s “island of strangers” soundbite. Listening to any Starmer speech simulates the feeling of incarceration in a medium-security prison, and in this case it was like sharing a cell with a Chinese restaurant’s Enoch Powell impersonator. Starmer plays this hardline stuff about as plausibly as Elijah Wood played a football hooligan in that terrible movie, which I would still have preferred to watch again over the spectacle of the prime minister droning unconvincingly about the “incalculable” damage immigration had done to his polling numbers. Sorry, to the country.
For the left, the problem was what he said; for the right, the problem was the absurdity of it being him saying it. These days Starmer can’t encounter two stools without falling between them, with the problem entirely of his own making. I once read a hideous story about a Kansas woman who had sat on a loo seat for so long she had become stuck to it, and I fear something similar might have happened here with a fence. Starmer has sat on one for so long, on so many different issues, that it has become fused to his form. We are now watching a live fence-ectomy, and it is painful.
Whatever the clinical bodyshock diagnosis, the vibes-based one is clear: the British public has never loved Starmer, and never will. On the rare occasions he reveals things about himself, they often in fact seem to be the absence of things. Starmer doesn’t dream, we learned during his general election pitch last year, and couldn’t name a favourite book. There is something of the slight to him, and he knows it – in fact, he knows it so powerfully that these days all his big speeches contain frequent and plaintive tells. Specifically, phrases like: “I believe in this”, or “I am doing this … because it is what I believe in.” If things were going convincingly, believing in the things you were saying and doing would surely be axiomatic.
But things aren’t going convincingly, and so it is that we have a new gotcha question that Labour MPs – and indeed the prime minister himself – must most fear being asked. Namely: what is a Keir Starmer? The answer is – and I’m sorry to use a term that I know many people do find offensive, but accuracy matters – a lawyer. A Keir Starmer is an adult human lawyer, as capable of advocating for this side or that, or even both at once. And so it is that we have to listen to speeches like Monday’s, in which the PM decries the “incalculable” damage of immigration at the same time that the Tories are posting videos from about 10 minutes ago in which Starmer is gurning “we need to make the positive case for immigration”. Again: what is a Keir Starmer? Can a Keir Starmer have both these views? Of course he can and of course he does.
The counterpoint take is that the prime minister has a split personality where both the personalities are somewhat insufferable. A legal manager in the sheets; a legal manager willing to talk tetchy in the streets. Strangely, the more Starmer tries to flesh out his immigration plan, the more the logic suggests that the only thing that could make coherent sense of it would be the UK leaving the European convention on human rights. Yet at the same time, how could it, because the one thing the prime minister convincingly and consistently believes in is the primacy of lawyers.
Meanwhile, an incredibly wide spectrum of people find they can’t really believe in what Starmer’s saying. His speech contrived to unite Alf Dubs (“I don’t think it’s what he actually believes in”) with Robert Jenrick (“It looked like a hostage situation where he was reading out words someone else had written for him”). The “somebody else’s opinions” stuff is becoming a recurring theme, recalling that BBC Question Time moment during the general election campaign last year when a member of the public put it to him that he came across like a “political robot”.
By Thursday, he had travelled to Albania, and by most accounts, he was blindsided live on air by that country’s prime minister ruling out the very idea of hosting processing hubs for asylum seekers. Perhaps it could be spun as a blessing in disguise for Mr Consistency. Arguably the only thing worse than a defunct Rwanda scheme the taxpayer has paid hundreds of millions of pounds for is a notional Albania scheme that the taxpayer will get stung for, only for it to run into the same problems. But instead, No 10 is trying to convince everyone that no Albanian hubs was the plan all along. Can you believe it? As with most things about Keir Starmer … no, would increasingly seem to be the answer.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
