Sir Keir, the perfect leader for the party of liberal sanctimony and duplicity

THE first time I met Sir Keir Starmer he was his airbrushed self. Articulate. Intelligent. Engaging. Right up until a colleague asked him: ‘Do you think of yourself as middle-class?’ For about ten seconds, the man currently odds-on to be next leader of the Labour Party sat in excruciating silence as he struggled to formulate a response. Finally, he capitulated.

Yes, he probably was middleclass, he conceded.

As far back as 2016, Sir Keir had clearly identified his affluent back story as a political weakness. Which will surprise his growing fan-base.

When I pointed out earlier last week that Labour was on the brink of appointing yet another middle- class North Londoner, they rallied swiftly to his defence. ‘He’s the son of a nurse and a toolmaker,’ I was told. So what if he’s middle- class? He has proper Labour values. Why should class matter?

It shouldn’t. But until the electors sent Jeremy Corbyn packing, class mattered to Labour quite a lot. ‘The state is a set of institutions. It’s also a relationship of dominance, particularly a dominance of working-class people,’ was one of John McDonnell’s more moderate justifications for his neo-Marxist agenda.

It also seems to matter to whoever produced Sir Keir’s slick leadership video. The class warfare of the 1980s features prominently. The miners. The Wapping printers. The Poll Tax rioters. According to the narration, Sir Keir stood shoulder-to-shoulder with them all. Literally.

‘He was in the crowd that night [at Wapping] when police on horseback charged into that peaceful picket,’ it informs us.

Oddly, his election as an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, appointment to the Middle Temple and elevation as Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath don’t get a mention.

But again, why should Sir Keir’s knighthood matter to anyone? Well, because it certainly seems to matter to Starmer himself.

When asked about his reported antipathy to being called ‘Sir’, he responded: ‘I’ve never liked titles. When I was Director of Public Prosecutions, everyone called me Director and I said, “Please, don’t call me Director, call me Keir Starmer.” It’s a very similar battle now.’

Titles also seem to be an issue for a few of Sir Keir’s colleagues. When Iain Duncan Smith’s New Year’s knighthood was announced, they erupted in fury. ‘Dishonouring the honours. I remember watching him laugh in the chamber as he passed welfare cuts to the most vulnerable,’ raged Angela Rayner.

I’m not sure if Sir Keir laughed when, as DPP, he unveiled his new drive to target benefits cheats and lock them up in prison for ten years. But he certainly pursued his campaign with relish.

‘It is vital that we take a tough stance on this type of fraud and I am determined to see a clampdown on those who flout the system,’ he proudly proclaimed in 2013.

Labour is beginning another of its regular inquisitions into a cataclysmic General Election defeat. The fact Ed Miliband has been appointed to lead the latest one provides a clue into how successful this exercise in gazing into Corbyn’s navel is likely to be. But I’d like to throw a suggestion of my own into the mix. If Labour really wants to recapture the trust of working communities, then its senior politicians have to do a simple thing. They have to stop being a bunch of holier-than-though, self-serving hypocrites.

In the Election campaign, Labour’s slogan was apparently ‘It’s time for real change’. A more honest one would have been ‘Shut up plebs and do as we say, not as we do’.

For years, the party has been subsisting on a diet of liberal sanct i mony and duplicity. And as it prepares to anoint Sir Keir Starmer as its leader, all the signs are it is preparing to gorge itself again.

Two years ago, Corbyn announced he was launching a campaign to oppose plans for a range of new grammar schools, roundly endorsed by his Shadow Cabinet. Corbyn attended Haberdashers’ Adams Grammar School in Shropshire. Sir Keir attended Reigate Grammar School in Surrey.

On t he day of his campaign launch, Sir Keir revealed he would look to construct a ‘human rights based foreign policy’. He also praised the ‘radicalism’ of Corbyn’s leadership and later described him as ‘a friend’. The fact his radical f ri end accepted t housands of pounds from the Iranian-backed Press TV channel seemed to have slipped his mind.

His moral compass also seems to have gone awry over human rights violations closer to home.

I asked a senior member of the Jewish community if Sir Keir had proven himself to be an ally – even in private – during their lonely battle against Labour antisemitism. ‘He came and spoke at the synagogue during the campaign and talked about his Jewish wife and kids, but nothing else of significance,’ they reported.

Sir Keir’s own campaign slogan is: ‘Another future is possible – but we have to fight for it’. But during the Corbyn era, he engaged in precious little fighting. In fact, there’s been precious little fighting during the post-Corbyn era. To date, the most serious criticism of his leader I can find is the complaint he didn’t let him on TV more during the Election.

BUT there’s one thing about the impending Starmer coronation that lodges in the craw more than any other. For years, Labour has been l e c t ur i ng t he nation on the importance of diversity. Class diversity. Racial diversity. Gender diversity.

Now, when it comes to the crunch, the party is going to do it again: fall obediently into line behind the white, heterosexual, liberal, middle-class man. Yes, it would be stretching things to say Labour is overwhelmed with political talent. But the experience of Yvette Cooper. The authenticity of Lisa Nandy. The ‘school-run-mum’ appeal of Jess Phillips. The bloody-mindedness of Emily Thornberry. None of those is suitable for the task of even beginning to knock Labour into shape?

Apparently not. If Sir Keir wins, the party that harangues us about the importance of diversity will have selected its past three leaders from within the same four square miles of North London.

But if Labour is again going to cling to daddy, so be it. Just so long as what’s OK for Sir Keir and his party is OK for the rest of us.

If he’s going to make himself a champion of the self-made man, good luck to him. So long as he also intends to become the champion of self-made plumbers and electricians and builders, not just self-made barristers.

If Labour, under his leadership, is going to consign its class-based warfare to the dustbin of history, more power to his elbow. If he’s going to tell his party that targeting welfare cheats is a noble enterprise, not a cruel assault on the most vulnerable in society, or champion the selective education he himself enjoyed, respect.

And if he’s going to say senior appointments to our important national institutions should be based solely on merit, fair play.

But if he isn’t, Sir Keir is destined to become just the latest in a longline of poster boys for the Left’s sanctimony and hypocrisy. And his near neighbours Jeremy and Ed can tell him what happens next.