The setting may have been a rose garden, but there was nothing rosy about the prospects for Britain adumbrated by Sir Keir Starmer in his miserabilist sermon last Tuesday. By the end of this dystopian discourse, many of those who heard his message must have felt nostalgic for the light-hearted, hedonist rule of Oliver Cromwell. When Churchill promised this country “nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat”, he did so in a spirit of grim purposefulness, refusing to deceive the public about the challenges that lay ahead, harnessing British stoicism to the task of the war effort, but always with the ultimate prospect of victory and its rewards.
Starmer, in contrast, displayed little sense of purpose, beyond attempting to deflect blame onto the preceding administration for the self-harm he intends to inflict on the country, ultimately inspired by the joyless prescriptions of doctrinaire leftist ideology. In terms of political communication, Tuesday’s speech and complementary utterances before and since, both by Starmer and senior ministers, amount to a PR disaster. The idea seems to be to mount an operation in management of public expectations, in the hope that the actual outcome will be slightly less severe, gaining the government credit for a relatively soft landing, in challenging conditions.
