Sir Keir Starmer meets the public. Sort of

It IS two days after the general election was called and Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, is on the campaign trail. Sir Keir likes to meet people, in a natural way, “where they are”. In Ipswich he once went “to the bingo” to find people “where they are”; in Blackpool, he went “on the beach, on the pier” to find them; today he is visiting a builders’ merchant in Lancashire. Psephologists believe that there are also people in Waitrose in Islington but Sir Keir seems less bothered about meeting those people.

In Lancashire, a freshly washed forklift truck waits on the tarmac to allow Sir Keir to meet its driver, naturally, as he walks past. Less naturally, its driver is not doing any actual work or else, a fellow employee explains, “Starmer would have to chase after him” to talk. And Sir Keir is here not just to meet people “where they are” but ideally have them stay there for long enough to have his photo taken with them.

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Election campaigns are odd things. In theory, Sir Keir is in Lancashire to see a business “at the heart of the…manufacturing industries”. In truth, the manufacturing on any election campaign is that of carefully curated clips to be shown and re-shown in the media and on social media. By the time Sir Keir arrives at today’s two venues (he also visits Glasgow) they feel—with their lights, speakers, cameras, trailing wires and officious flunkeys with clipboards—more like film sets than anything real. Albeit for boring films.

If his visits are minutely stage-managed, it is with good reason. These kinds of “pseudo-events”, as academics call them, have been an unavoidable part of political life since at least the 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher first cuddled a calf for photographers (it died shortly afterwards). The potential for them to go very wrong, very fast is high—as Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, has already shown. His campaign already includes failing to get things going in a brewery (by asking locals in Wales if they were looking forward to a football championship for which their team had not qualified) and visiting a titanically ill-judged dock in Northern Ireland.

The list of other campaign casualties is long. It includes Gordon Brown, the prime minister at the time, calling one voter a “bigoted woman” and John Prescott, then the deputy prime minister, punching another; it also includes Boris Johnson doing almost anything—though “fridgegate”, when he hid in a fridge to avoid being interviewed, was a notable low. Politicians on campaign enter a “really hostile environment”, says Tom Baldwin, author of “Keir Starmer: The Biography”. To go into it relaxed and genuine is “like going into jungle warfare singing folk music…Good people have tried to do it and they have been eaten alive.”

No wonder then that political parties usually have “ops teams” (the vocabulary of electioneering is relentlessly military) sweep a venue before any engagement to find and neutralise any unflattering visual metaphors. In 2019, when Theresa May was in danger of being ousted as prime minister by members of her own party, a crack team carried around gaffer tape in different colours so that they could tape over door signs lest she be photographed next to a sign saying “EXIT” (another trap that Mr Sunak has already fallen into). In the general election campaign later that year Mr Johnson’s lackeys carried a supply of butcher’s hats lest he had to visit a kitchen and confine his vote-winning hair beneath a hairnet. As a former flunkey says, this seems “weirdly neurotic” but it matters.

The problem is not just the press but the person. An extrovert such as Mr Johnson could cope, even revel in, humiliation. Sir Keir could not. While Mr Johnson was larger than life, Sir Keir is somehow smaller than it: the former human-rights barrister has been described as “a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in something sensible and beige”. He often quotes things that people have said that “stay with” him. Mind you, it is not surprising that they do stick in his mind, for people apparently say such unexpected things to him as “Keir, we know…that you understand stability”—rather than, as you might expect, “Keir, what on earth are you doing in a bingo hall in Ipswich?” or “Why do you keep referring to yourself in the third person, Keir?” He is not a natural.

However, he is also not as awkward as he used to be. At the builders’ merchant, a woman has arranged a group of people into a horseshoe shape, like a choir in high-vis jackets, so that they can say things to Sir Keir that will stay with him. He looks swishier, more silver-haired, more at ease than the Sir Keir of a year ago. He is still not exactly charismatic but when people speak, he listens. If they ask him a question, he answers. In the moments in between he doesn’t call them a bigot, punch anyone or hide in a fridge. And in British politics at the moment, that would appear to be enough to win.

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