The Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty recently made an observation about the Prime Minister that has been echoing around the chattering classes. Watching Keir Starmer promise change, Chakrabortty noted, is like watching a man on the verge of divorce holding flowers from the nearest petrol station and pleading, “Honestly, love, stick with me.”
To which I must simply ask: what exactly is wrong with petrol station flowers? Have you seen the price of a proper bouquet at an artisanal florist these days? If my Prime Minister is squandering his weekend sourcing ethically grown hydrangeas, I want to know why he isn’t at his desk refusing to fund a children’s hospital. The petrol station flowers show he is serious. They show he understands the fiscal rules. They show he bought them while simultaneously filling up a sensible mid-sized sedan to drive to a focus group in Stevenage. This is the rigorous, unsentimental leadership Britain has been crying out for.
I had the distinct privilege of sharing a lukewarm tap water and an unbuttered crumpet with the Prime Minister last Thursday at a private symposium on the future of manageable decline. He was, as ever, completely devoid of anything resembling human warmth, and I found it utterly intoxicating. As we sat in the sterile, windowless conference room of a Mayfair think tank, reviewing a spreadsheet of poll numbers that showed a total collapse of public goodwill, he looked incredibly calm. He did not flinch at the fury. He did not waver at the loathing. He simply adjusted his tie and asked if we could turn the thermostat down to save on heating costs.
The electorate is, frankly, acting like a spoiled child. They complain about disappointment. They complain that public services are crumbling, that their wages are stagnant, and that the government offers no vision for a better future. But they completely fail to grasp the macroeconomic triumph of things getting worse responsibly. The public wants charisma. They want a vision. But vision is dangerous. Vision costs money. Starmer is delivering exactly what he promised: a total absence of anything that could be mistaken for inspiration, delivered exactly on budget.
Let us consider his Monday morning address to the nation, delivered in the wake of one of the worst election results in Labour’s history. The populist mob, driven by emotion rather than data, sees this electoral drubbing as a rejection of his leadership. I see it as an absolute masterclass in expectation management.
If you win an election with overwhelming support, you are immediately burdened with the expectation that you might do something. The public feels entitled to demand better schools, functioning trains, or a healthcare system that does not require you to perform your own minor surgeries. By actively shedding voters and alienating his own base, Starmer has successfully insulated his government from the dangerous pressures of a mandate.
It is a stroke of political genius that only those of us who have spent decades analyzing the structural integrity of the Westminster consensus can truly appreciate.
The public simply does not understand the immense courage it takes to look a starving child in the eye and explain the concept of the national debt.
When Starmer rolled his sleeves up on Monday, the commentators sneered. They said it looked rehearsed, stiff, and utterly unconvincing. Of course it was unconvincing! That is the point. The rolled-up sleeves were a sartorial masterclass in managed disappointment. They said, “I am prepared to work very hard to ensure absolutely nothing changes.” It was a signal to the markets that the adults are back in the room, and the adults are incredibly boring.
I find it exhausting to constantly have to explain this to the working class. Whenever I leave the M25 to speak on a panel in one of the provincial towns, I am invariably cornered by someone complaining about the cost of living. They ask me why the Labour leader seems so disconnected from their daily struggles. I have to patiently explain that his disconnection is a feature, not a bug. If he were connected to your struggles, he might feel compelled to alleviate them, which would inevitably spook the bond markets.
We must remember the dark days of the recent past, when politicians promised to transform society and uplift the marginalized. It was chaos. People actually believed their lives might improve, which led to wildly unrealistic consumer confidence. Starmer has rightly diagnosed that the only way to cure the British disease is to systematically lower the nation’s serotonin levels until we accept our gradual impoverishment as an immutable law of nature.
In these highly polarized times, dunking on the Prime Minister has become the one thing that unites people. Chakrabortty suggests this is a crisis. I argue it is the ultimate fulfillment of the two-party system. Starmer has achieved something truly remarkable: a national consensus. Left, right, and center can all look at this man and feel a profound, unifying sense of emptiness. He has brought the country together by giving us all a shared target for our mild, simmering depression.
We ran the polling models on hope and found it to be highly inflationary. By systematically depressing the national mood, Keir has effectively stabilized the currency.
So yes, the Labour leader has quite the job on his hands. He must continue to stand at podiums, day after day, assuring the public that things will remain exactly as difficult as they currently are, but with slightly better paperwork. He must continue to hand us the petrol station flowers of minor bureaucratic adjustments, and we must learn to be grateful for them.
The next time you see Keir Starmer on television, promising that he has heard the electorate’s anger and is preparing to do absolutely nothing about it, I urge you not to wince. I urge you to marvel at the sheer, unyielding discipline of a man who refuses to be liked. I, for one, will be cheering him on from the comfort of a subsidized dining room in Westminster, absolutely thrilled that nothing is going to change.