Harriet Harman once described a politician’s waking nightmare. As social security secretary in the New Labour government, she was delivering her first speech to the party conference in October 1997. “All these unfamiliar words started coming up on the autocue. I couldn’t go back to my notes, and just had to carry on. I realised that Gordon Brown had made the changes to delete all my references to spending plans.”
Something similar happened to Keir Starmer in May, as he read a speech on immigration from the prompter in Downing Street. He told Tom Baldwin, his biographer, in an interview published on Friday, that when the unfamiliar phrase “an island of strangers” scrolled up on the glass screens, he just read it out.
“I wouldn’t have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of [Enoch] Powell,” he told Baldwin. “I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn’t know either.”
Starmer had arrived back from a three-day trip to Ukraine the night before, and learned that morning that his former home in Kentish Town had been firebombed in the small hours. His sister-in-law was living there and called the fire brigade: no one was hurt, but Starmer was “really shaken up”. He said, “It’s fair to say I wasn’t in the best state to make a big speech,” and that he almost cancelled it.
Baldwin wrote: “Emphasising he is not using the firebomb attack as an excuse and doesn’t blame his advisers or anyone else except himself for these mistakes, Starmer says he should have read through the speech properly and ‘held it up to the light a bit more’.”
Now, a month and a half later, he said: “That particular phrase – no – it wasn’t right. I’ll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it.”
Both parts of his confession to Baldwin were unwise in the extreme. It was unwise to admit that he doesn’t always read his speeches before he delivers them – or that he doesn’t always read them “properly”, which is the same thing.
The pressures on a prime minister’s time are intense, and any prime minister has to rely on speechwriters they can trust to produce most of the words that have to be pumped out. But a politician should never admit that their words are not their own, or blame their speechwriters while insisting that they are not blaming them.
Especially not one, such as Starmer, who already has a reputation for being the puppet of Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, who saw him as the figurehead for his bid to take the Labour Party back from the Corbynites five years ago.
But this confession was particularly unwise because it suggests that Starmer’s critics were right to detect the echo of Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in the prime minister’s words.
The message of the speech was entirely different. Powell complained that the effect of immigration was that the existing population “found themselves made strangers in their own country”. Starmer’s speechwriters, by contrast, were making the point that “fair rules” hold a country together. “In a diverse nation like ours – and I celebrate that – these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.”
The sentiment is worthy and uncontroversial, even if the phrasing is a bit poetic. But the meaning was completely clear in the next paragraph: “So when you have an immigration system that seems almost designed to permit abuse … you’re actually contributing to the forces that are slowly pulling our country apart.” I don’t know who would actually disagree with that – apart from Enoch Powell, who didn’t want any immigration at all.
Some of Starmer’s critics have also seized on his comment – in the foreword to the immigration white paper, so he presumably did hold these words “up to the light” – that the “damage done to our country” by the Conservative “experiment in open borders” is “incalculable”. But again, it is hard to disagree: the writer of Starmer’s foreword is not saying that immigration is damaging, but that quadrupling it when you promised to reduce it is.
Even those who think the UK can easily absorb a net immigration of 906,000 in a 12-month period have to accept that the Tory failure to control immigration has, as the foreword’s author said, opened a wound in “trust in politics”.
So Starmer should have defended “his” words to Baldwin. The message was the right message: that there should be fair rules for immigration, and that immigration has been too high.
Now we just do not know what the prime minister thinks. Is the real Starmer the liberal lefty human rights lawyer who implied to Baldwin that he thinks that any attempt to control immigration is Powellism?
Or is it the man reading McSweeney’s words off the autocue, saying, as he did just before he got to the “island of strangers” paragraph: “I know, on a day like today, people who like politics will try to make this all about politics, about this or that strategy, targeting these voters, responding to that party. No. I am doing this because it is right, because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in.”
What does he believe in? I thought I knew, but now that he has given that self-pitying interview to his biographer, I am not so sure.
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