BY SEAN WALSH
“I am satisfied the relevant processes were followed. The men are ascending and descending at the same time.”
— Keir Starmer
The English language is pretty useful when it comes to describing things, but it can only do so much. Some things are beyond its scope: the malignant, ordinary-yet-strange quality of the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, Keir Starmer, for example.
And I’ve given it my best shot. I’ve called him an algorithm, a complex of algorithms, an android, a robot (I know these are variations on a theme), shameless, a post-shame politician (likewise), a post-truth PM, a humiliation fetishist, Pooter’s nastier sibling, an insignificance wrapped up in mediocrity enfolded in irrelevance, psychopathic, sociopathic, political dark matter, a black box process engine, etc.
I am a Catholic and therefore a supernaturalist. I know that ordinary language is inadequate when it comes to capturing the essence of the transcendent and divine. What I’d failed to appreciate was that it could be similarly confounded when so many varieties of greyness come together in a single “person”.
If there is a dullness singularity, then Starmer has surely moved past it, and his essence is perhaps approachable only via the variables and equations of recondite mathematical systems. You certainly can’t sum him up in ordinary English.
Fifty or so years ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay titled What Is It Like to Be a Bat? In it, he argues that the theory of psychophysical identity – that the mind and the brain are the same thing – does not take into account the irreducible character of subjective consciousness.
Nagel is thankfully still with us. He has done nothing bad to me personally, but I think it would be fun to introduce Nagel to the Starmer algorithm so that he can stress-test his argument against the documented existence of an entity which is sentient and yet, at the same time, bafflingly incapable of self-awareness. Is there even such a thing as what it is like to be Sir Keir Starmer?
This absence of recognisable phenomenology is his political superpower. Starmer is outside the range of orthodox journalistic weaponry. There is no commentariat firepower, no leading article in a former newspaper such as The Guardian, that could persuade, cajole or embarrass him into resignation. The lobby journalists who look to precedent when assessing how much time he has are guilty of a category error. This prime minister is sui generis, and therefore all attempts at comparison to his predecessors are misconceived.
It’s possible that Starmer is the correct prime minister given the process culture we now inhabit and to some degree collude in. A settled yet vibrant constitutional dispensation has been crushed into a cube and dropped into a black box, rarely to be spoken of again.
The English common law – the national story written up as a collection of sometimes very strange disputes between very eccentric people – has been replaced by the deracinated categories of internationalist jurisprudence, in which there is no room for discussion of “national character”, or of nations at all, come to think of it.
And we sort of let this happen, to be fair. We looked on as the ghastly syllogism unfolded, its major premise being Blair, its conclusion the syntax junkie Starmer – a formal argument whose structure sets out our slow-motion capitulation to the process state.
Is it possible that process fetishism is the new Rubik’s Cube, a sort of craze we’ll eventually get bored with? Maybe we’ll become sane again and insist, to the extent we are permitted to, that our elected representatives once more are representative and not fungible units in this awful new political currency.
Then we could thank Sir Keir for his service and repurpose him in a way that maximises his unique gifts, allowing him to carry on with his life of public service. We could turn him into one of those robot lawnmowers and set him free to do his bit on one of the remaining national spaces not choked off by his boss Miliband’s solar panel factories.
I’m not optimistic. The process state has turned Britain into an Escher sketch, an impossible universe in which only the most gullible can function. Sir Keir meanwhile looks on and insists that we are ascending even though we feel like we are descending. He knows this because the enquiry has concluded that all the relevant procedures are being followed.