10 OCTOBER 2024 | OPINION
This article was reposted with kind permission from the Bruges Group.
In a word and my opinion, no.
Undoubtedly, he is ‘different.’ Many people, including myself, have commented on his atypical gaze, one of the features on a checklist for autism (see #14 here); the tunelessness in his voice; the apparent lack of empathy; the rigidity of thinking, and so on.
But if the PM were crazy, he wouldn’t be the first.
Take his PR adviser Tony Blair, for instance. Look at this photo from 1972 and spot the warning signs 25 years before Hurricane New Labour struck. It didn’t stop him winning three General Elections and inspiring a zoo of subsequent Conservative leaders. He and his chums spotted the vulnerabilities in our Constitution, and the mass media, and hacked them ruthlessly, externalising the chaos in their own minds. Nothing has felt quite real since 1997; we tried to wake up in 2016, but the Matrix resedated us.
And now we are inside Starmer’s dream; or the one he subcontracted to ‘Golden’ Brown, the great micromanager.
Sir Keir’s dad was an engineer, one of the trades that attract ‘autism spectrum’ neurotypes who are more task-oriented than people-focused – and it’s a heritable trait. Could it be something like that? And if the task is a political ideal…
Do not get in the way of a man with a vision; if he has enough power, he will roll right over you, and with 400+ MPs, Starmer is a juggernaut; he does not need social skills. Rosie Duffield? A crunching of bones.
Sir Keir is a lawyer, but one who works with the letter of the law rather than serves its spirit. So when the SNP’s Brendan O’Hara claimed Israel’s bombing of civilian areas was against international law, Starmer said it wasn’t; there we are, technically correct. Did only 20.2% of the electorate vote Labour in July? So what? We won by the rules of the game; suck it up.
Is he too Alli-pally, taking the loan of the millionaire’s penthouse? Why, that was to let Starmer Junior revise for GCSEs in quiet. But they only went into the flat ten days after the examinations had started! So what? You should have made that point earlier – the case is over now. Remember, lawyers’ moots are about winning judgements; leave Truth to the philosophers.
Is he greedy and corrupt? Probably, he doesn’t think about it – he told a Guardian journalist that he isn’t self-reflective. That’s why he needs the chronically image-conscious Blair (‘eye-catching initiatives… I should be personally associated with as much of this as possible.’) Besides, Starmer doesn’t come across as someone who is in it for the money; we’ll find out after he leaves office.
Perhaps the mindset is akin to that of the ‘good Communist’: the holiday dacha by the Black Sea was a perk but it still belonged to The People. Moral inconsistencies are inevitable in a paradoxical world, but we are working towards the Millennium when all shall be equal. Until then, stop whinging about irrelevancies.
In any case, it is a mistake to personalise these issues. Modern politics, like commerce, has become corporate. Since 2020, the US has been ostensibly led by Biden-Harris – what I call Sh*ts and Giggles – but it hardly matters what they are like as long as they say the lines. If Starmer resigned tomorrow, the show would go on.
We are in the time Peter Hitchens longed to see, the end of the two rotten parties that leaned on each other. The treacherous globalist Tories have died, though they are still twitching; now, unpatriotic and compassionless Labour are fast wearing out their grudging welcome.
We must endure, watch and wait.
