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Character
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Leading
Politics
2 min read

What would you give up to be Prime Minister?

There’s a cost to public service.
A smartly dressed politician talks while being interviewed
Prime Minister Keir Starmer responds to the gifts story.

Keir Starmer’s Labour Government recently celebrated 100 days in office.  

I say celebrated – I expect there hasn’t been much celebrating.  

For one, it’s not much of a milestone - though admittedly it is one that hasn’t been cleared by all of the Prime Minister’s recent predecessors.  

But in truth, in those 100 days, there hasn’t been much cause to celebrate. 

Sure, there was the biggest Labour majority since 1997, with the keys to Downing Street falling into Starmer’s lap wrapped up in a bow. 

But the shine wore off fast, and the honeymoon period is well and truly over.  

  

If the keys to Number 10 arrived for Labour like a gift, it’s perhaps some poetry that it is the recent scandal about gifts which has contributed to the rapid tarnishing of Labour’s 2024 election winner’s crown. 

Clothes worth thousands of pounds. Concert tickets. VIP boxes for football games.  

The gifts of wealthy donors to a party whose election narrative was to make a reset in the standards of integrity in public life. 

  

What has been remarkable in the middle of this scandal has been the absence of any apology.  

Some gifts may have been handed back – but not all. At the time of writing, out of the £100,000 worth of gifts and free tickets he has received, the Prime Minister has generously agreed to hand back £6,000.  

  

Instead of a fulsome apology, some gifts, like those VIP tickets to football games, have been defended.  

Why?  

Well, the line has been that it makes good sense for the Prime Minister to accept them. 

The Prime Minister has said that ‘As a result of security, I can’t go in the stand anymore’ going on to say that the tickets mean that ‘I can continue to do something which is really special to me’. 

  

With the risk of upsetting all the Arsenal season ticket holders in the room – I’m going to say something unpopular. 

Maybe going to see the football is just something you have to give up when you become Prime Minister. 

At the heart of leadership is sacrifice.  

Perhaps we, and the Labour party, have lost sight of that. 

To serve others, leaders are called to give up their comforts, their self-interests and their control over their own lives.  

As public servants, our leaders should remember the example of the Public Servant who laid down all he had to give his life as a ransom for all. 

It is in the example of the Public Servant that our ‘reset’ in the standards of public life must begin. 

It is a high standard, but it’s the only standard worth following. 

Article
Comment
Leading
Politics
4 min read

From Blair and Britpop to Starmer and the Oasis comeback: why character, not personality, matters

We get both the leaders and entertainers we deserve.

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Tony Blair talks to a member of Oasis at a reception.
Number 10.

Last time we had a new Labour prime minister, there were no Partygate fears in Number 10. Quite the opposite. Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia project threw its front door open to the likes of Britpop overlord Noel Gallagher of Oasis at a bash in 1997. Inheriting a rising economy, things for New Labour, as well as for Oasis, could only get better. 

This time around, Sir Keir Starmer has “tough decisions” to make, such as trying to deny a universal winter fuel allowance to most pensioners. Blair arguably never had a really tough decision to make, until his Iraq war nemesis. Since then, Oasis has turned into an unacceptable face of capitalism, as the Gallagher brothers’ reunion tour next year turns into a Ticketmaster greed-fest of “dynamic pricing”. Diabolical pricing, more like. 

Starmer and Blair both aspired to usher in an era of change and renewal. The similarity of their circumstances ends there. Nearly 30 years on, Starmer is in a different world. And the transformation of Oasis is totemic of that – from the joys of Britpop to the horrors of rip-off. 

That times change is axiomatic. The nineties had busts and booms; the UK’s Black Wednesday currency crisis was of the former, the snarky underclass anthems of Oasis a paradigm of the latter. Now, in the 2020s, there are only busts. Like the note left in the Treasury drawer in 2010 joked, there really is no money left now. Except, apparently, for Oasis. 

Which brings us to the false idols of politics. Since personality, rather than policy, became the political trump card it’s inevitable that we would get Trump. Or someone like him. 

An engaging question arises as to how the two Labour PMs were and are equipped spiritually for the times in which they lead. The spiritual state of Oasis is a linked matter, which I’ll get to in a moment. 

Blair’s government famously didn’t “do God”, though it turned out he did privately, converting to his wife’s Roman Catholicism almost immediately after leaving office in 2007. Perhaps he had a priest hole in the family flat above Number 11. He consistently denied claims that he prayed with American president George W. Bush before or during the Iraq war. 

Starmer doesn’t do God rather more formally, as a self-declared atheist. We can conclude that prayer is not a resource that he needs as he faces a more challenging immediate political future than Blair’s early days as PM. I only wish Starmer would appear in a T-shirt with the slogan “No Prayer, Like Blair”. 

Arguably the spiritual life doesn’t matter for any leader. The job of PM is all about simple competence, mostly in money management. To paraphrase the pithy quip from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign (on which Blair’s so strategically relied), it’s all about the economy, stupid. 

So the worship is of mammon rather than God. Here the current and former PMs might care to track the career trajectory of the two Lords Gallagher of Oasis from Blair to Starmer. In 1997, they were in their pomp as authentic Mancunian working-class heroes. Today, the brothers have to make up and go back on the road to subsidise Noel’s £20million divorce settlement. A rather different demographic. 

There’s perhaps no great political lesson there for political leaders, but it’s almost Faustian in its scope. See what happens when you bank only with mammon. 

Which brings us to the false idols of politics. Since personality, rather than policy, became the political trump card it’s inevitable that we would get Trump. Or someone like him. It doesn’t matter, to his core vote, what he’s done or what he’s incapable of doing, Only who he is. He’s an idol, a cult image, a golden calf. Trump’s bull is sacred, whatever he does. 

The UK thankfully hasn’t had one of those yet (though there were warning tremors in Boris Johnson). But it’s telling that Blair is said to have developed a messianic tendency after his premiership’s early intervention in Kosovo during the war in former Yugoslavia. At the termination of hostilities, crowds there sought to touch his clothes as he passed. 

Strange that being touched should make him feel untouchable. But that’s the way of messianics. It can be the same with rock & roll stars. Live music, at its best, can offer a transcendent sense of communion. At its worst, it’s the adoration of stage idols that sends them a little mad. Or mad for it. 

Oasis’s Liam Gallagher isn’t in this together with his fans anymore. He’s turned into a Marie Antoinette figure online in response to the ludicrous prices charged to watch him from Ticketmaster. He substitutes “Shut up” and “£100,000 kneeling tickets” for “Let them eat cake”. 

He and his brother are warnings of what can happen in so short a period between the ascendancy of Blair and that of Starmer. True, pop stars aren’t as dangerous as someone such as Trump. But they do show us that we get both the entertainers and the leaders we deserve.