Notes On Now

Starmer’s Lack of Vision

Last year, Keir Starmer told the Guardian that he does not dream. We should never diagnose anyone from afar, but ‘aphantasia’ is now a well-researched inability to imagine and visualise scenes. It limits the sufferer’s capacity to envision future scenarios. Think of it as a metaphor, not just for a Prime Minister, but an entire political order chronically unable to share a compelling vision of a different future.

You can’t say we were not warned.

When Starmer was elected a year ago, the then Editor of the New Statesman, Jason Cowley, demanded to know his “narrative”. He was kind enough to publish my response. Starmer does not have a ‘vision’, I argued, he merely has a focus: to keep the show on the road and “make Brexit work”. As this is obviously hopeless, few believed me.

Instead, the ‘received wisdom’ gave him what it calls the benefit of the doubt. It is a strange beast, Westminster’s received wisdom. A unique mixture of prejudice, laziness, presumption, knowingness, vested interest, and reaction – aptly captured by Sartre’s term ‘the practico-inert’. You can find it personified in Andrew Rawnsley’s weekly Observer columns, which for more than 30 years has never had an original idea and has now migrated to the new Tortoise-run Observer publication.