No sooner had the exit poll dropped on election night than commentators were warning that Labour had a mountain to climb and there was no time for complacency. But Keir Starmer did not need telling. He has a mountain-climbing expression, all tense determination and hovering unease. Contrast the gung-ho simplicity of Boris Johnson’s “Get Brexit Done” with Starmer’s dogged mantra: “Let’s get to work”. Or set Tony Blair’s 1997 victory speech (“A new dawn has broken, has it not?”) against Starmer’s promise of “the sunlight of hope, pale at first but getting stronger through the day”. Pale sunlight is the perfect metaphor for Starmerite realism.
The election may have been more a rejection of the Tories than a love letter to Labour, but then there was so much to reject. Of the five prime ministers, representing five flavours of failure, David Cameron is this book’s villain and the deficit-cutting, neoliberal mania of austerity is the murder weapon. Brexit, Covid and Liz Truss made matters worse but austerity was the Tories’ original sin, cheered on by half the population at one point. The book opens with the Dickensian image of someone’s teeth falling out because he cannot get a dentist and proceeds grimly through food banks, NHS waiting lists, collapsing local councils and everything else that left even the most politically disengaged citizens with a sense of national decline. The Conservatives failed to conserve. The biggest question mark hanging over Labour now is whether Rachel Reeves can find enough money to repair the damage.
