Sir Keir Starmer gets a lot of grief for being inauthentic. Never has this been truer than in photos of him in the last 10 days since the local elections, where he has had to do his best to look buoyant, vital and workmanlike. He must be so miserable underneath it all.
He has been clear he won’t be “walking away” from Downing Street any time soon (which is true in at least one respect – prime ministers depart by car), not unless Labour MPs can organise themselves to follow due process to oust him. Putting Starmer’s obsession with process to one side (it is a regular theme), there is something admirable about his ability to cling on with a faux smile. A bit like Tom Cruise holding onto a plane mid-takeoff in Mission: Impossible. I suspect they use the same implacable hair product too.
The PM is in a horrible stage of his premiership. Most commentators already talk with certainty of an imminent leadership contest and of the prime minister as a lame duck. As I wrote months ago, harking back to my days as a political adviser in Theresa May’s end days, the writing has been on the wall for some time and reaching the end of each nightmarish week feels a grim achievement for the Downing Street team.
He knows at least 90 of his own MPs want him gone and, as a recent More in Common chart showed, swathes of the public most associate his achievements with the word “nothing”. As legacies go, it isn’t up there. Can you imagine what it must do to a person to have so many strangers have a deep, almost visceral hatred for you?
Worst of all, so many of the people he knows – and has known for a long time – have deeply hurt him. Many of the main characters in the Labour Party soap opera (sponsored this week by the Greater Manchester tourist board) have known each other for decades. Some of these conversations are the ones they were having in common rooms 30 years ago. Betrayals happen in politics, but they rarely heal.
So he’s in the depressing death march stage. But to show how he’s actually feeling – angry, depressed, wounded and misunderstood – is simply not possible. There are snippets of course. He hit the famous brand of “PM returning from Commons in back of Jag looking like a cadaver” photo some weeks ago. But when he knows there are cameras about, he’s put on a very brave face: to pop out with his wife to vote in the locals; to have a cup of tea in a cafe.
The thing is, he has actually got quite a fun stage coming, once he has stepped down and the sweet relief of all this ghastliness is over and he has recovered from the initial anti-climax. David Cameron bounced back immediately, humming between the lectern and the No 10 front door after he made his resignation speech.
Theresa May went to Lord’s and hosted the World Cup-winning England cricket team at Number 10 in her final days. Boris Johnson evidently had an absolute hoot putting together his resignation honours list. The football World Cup in America beckons. His kids and wife certainly deserve a holiday. And he may well be enjoying a sense of schadenfreude by Christmas, when his successor is discovering that the job comes with its problems, but that he (because it will be a he) has to plaster a smile on his face and step outside that famous front door to turn sing carols, turn on the tree lights and pretend that everything is absolutely fine. Never better. Honest.
Cleo Watson is a former deputy chief of staff to Boris Johnson and co-host of The Independent’s politics podcast, ‘In The Room’, with ex-deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara. New episodes come out every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube
