LAST YEAR I pointed to a “now they tell us” feeling about the newspapers, as pundit after pundit who had backed Keir Starmer now admitted he was — as the left had said all along — an empty vessel for right-wing Labour operators who can’t win under their own name.

We are now having a second, greater rush of “now they tell us” across Fleet Street.

So Catherine Bennett in the Observer wrote a sharp column about how Starmer is becoming a Cameron-copy-PM. Bennett did the work to prove the point, especially with this paragraph: “Since it can’t be plagiarism, only shared passion can explain why Starmer and David Cameron have phrased their ambitions in identical terms, in wanting, say, a “bonfire of red tape” (Starmer 2024; Cameron 2014). Starmer thinks regulations are “suffocating” (likewise Cameron); Starmer says “we are the builders” (ditto George Osborne); Starmer wants to end “dithering” (Cameron, “cut through the dither”); Starmer declares Britain “open for business” (Cameron, same, 2012); Starmer confronts those “talking our country down” (so did Cameron, 2011).”

Hard-hitting. Apart from the careful avoidance of how the same Catherine Bennett had worked hard to get Starmer in post. In 2020, during the Labour leadership election, she wrote a long article backing Starmer, claiming he was the most “feminist” candidate, despite standing against four female candidates. Bennett was especially disparaging of leftwinger Rebecca Long Bailey, as well as Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry.

Bennett also went out of her way to attack both Long Bailey and deputy leadership candidate Angela Rayner in another column, a crushingly unfunny “imaginary” situation comedy sketch in their flat. Bennett imagined Rayner saying things like “bloomin ’eck” and “Put wood in’t ’ole” while showing Long Bailey in thrall to Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, swooning over them as “powerful male powerful men” while Starmer again proved himself to be the real feminist.

Similarly, John Harris wrote an excoriating — or maybe despairing — column on Starmer this week, arguing that “in power, Labour’s agenda has been stripped back to an empty obsession with growth and an imitation of Reform UK” that is rapidly losing support. 

Among Starmer’s many failings, Harris pointed to his new “deregulation” enthusiasm, arguing: “Most of us know what that kind of zealotry has led to: the financial crash of 2008, the Grenfell Tower disaster and a country full of sewage-strewn rivers.”

But when hundreds of thousands of grassroots Labour members worked hard to build an alternative to this free-market fundamentalist Labour, and turned left with Corbynism, Harris did his best to undermine it. Harris called Corbyn’s Labour a “deep irrelevance,” a “pantomime” and asserted that it was “blindingly obvious” Corbyn should resign, and that Corbyn was “lost in a rose-tinted vision of Labour’s past.”

So why is this outbreak of Starmer-is-an-empty-rightwinger pouring out of pundits who tried to stop Labour being anything other than a vehicle for empty rightwingers?

It is a perfect example of the tendency of centrist and soft-left pundits to complain about the rightward drift in politics at precisely the point it can’t easily be changed. There were moments when democratic intervention from below had a better chance to change the course of politics — the Labour leadership elections, the general election. But the pundits are less interested in change driven from below. They are more in the business of keeping things the same, but finding the right time to complain about it.

They may also be worried because the absolute naked failure of Starmer to enthuse the public creates an opening again for the left. So they have to head that off. The new wave of pundit “now they tell us” complaints about Starmer is about filling the space created by Starmer’s failures with non-left alternatives, be that Lib Dem revival, “licensed” rebels on the Labour back benches (the kind who aren’t left wing or rebellious enough to be suspended), wet “soft-left” think tanks, bigoted Blue Labour or just general handwaving.

A lot of the recent wave of Starmer-criticism from centrist pundits has been prompted by Times journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s book on the rise of Starmer, called Get In. They show that Starmer has few politics beyond personal ambition to be PM, and that his advisers from the Labour right use him as a plausible front for their otherwise unpopular pro-market policies. 

In Maguire’s words, advisers like Morgan McSweeney “hoodwinked the Labour membership into abandoning Corbynism with Starmer’s soft-left leadership campaign,” then swiftly abandoned this “soft-left” politics for the pro-market lurch. 

The current wave of centrist Starmer criticism is as much about another round of hoodwinking to keep actual economic redistribution off the agenda as it is about examining how we ended up with Starmer in the first place.

Freebies hypocrisy

LAST WEEK week I showed how all of the “special advisers” (Spads) behind Labour ministers — the ones who are shown in Maguire and Pogrund’s Get In to be such an influence for the more hapless ministers — were, like their ministers, showered with Taylor Swift tickets over last summer.

They joined their ministers in the embarrassing, grasping freebie fervour that made the Labour government look like they were all about grabbing gifts from corporate lobbying.

If you read the Sun back then, Murdoch’s rag was keen to lambast Labour over Swift tickets: The Sun churned out loads of headlines on the “Taylor Swift Tickets Row” or “Swiftgate” or “Labour’s Freebie Row,” claiming this was another sign of “Free Gear Keir,” ministerial greed and hypocrisy.

If you looked closely at my list of Spads getting free Swift tickets you will have seen that Matthew Doyle — Downing Street director of communications, Starmer’s chief “spin doctor” — got his Swift ticket free from… Victoria Newton, editor of the Sun. 

The simple lesson here is that The Sun is happy to get involved in buying friendship and favours with freebies on one day and attacking you for accepting the same freebies the next day, because they are snakes.