It happened again the other day. The daughter of a friend of mine turned to me as she was trying to explain how teenagers use emojis and fixed me with an earnest look. “Has anyone ever told you that you like Keir Starmer?” she said. Yes, many times.
The last time was at a book event. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the lady sitting to the right of me squinting at my face. Perhaps she recognises me from my picture byline in The Herald, I thought. It does happen. The other day, a man stopped me while I was out on a run. “You write for The Herald don’t you?” he said. “I do,” I replied, all proud at being recognised, “how did you know?” “Because I shout at your column every week,” he said.
In fact, it turned out that the lady next to me at the book event wasn’t a regular reader of my column, just another person who thinks I look a little like the Labour leader Sir Keir. When she told me this, I looked a bit horrified I think – I’m a good ten years younger than him for goodness sake – and so she qualified her statement. “Better looking of course,” she added.
The truth is, if I do look a little like Keir Starmer, and I admit there may be something in the noble swoop of our quiffs, there are other similarities too. Both Starmer and I come from families with long-standing Labour loyalties except that my parents drew the line at naming me after a famous Labour leader. Perhaps instead of Mark, I could have been Clement or Harold.
And the similarities don’t end there: both Starmer and I were sent to independent schools and we both studied law at university except Starmer actually followed through and had a career in the law whereas I, after graduating, decided I would rather be a journalist. My poor parents. First, he votes Conservative, now this!
The other familiarities I can see in Sir Keir run even deeper and were exposed by the Labour leader’s recent reshuffle of his Shadow cabinet.
First, he’s not the greatest manager in the world – otherwise he would have properly briefed his deputy Angela Rayner – and I know how he feels. The few years in which I did middle management proved I’m not a good manager either. But it’s important and it matters, especially in politics and especially in the Labour party: if you can’t get your people to work with you or respect you, the clock is going tick, tick, tick. Starmer needs to work that one out pretty quick.
In other respects we all know what Keir Starmer is doing with his cabinet reshuffle, which underscores another of the similarities between him and I and millions of other people to be honest. After the failure of Corbyn, the new leader of the party is simply attempting to steer the Labour party back to the centre. People may call me – and Starmer for that matter – a conservative, or a unionist, but my views and his are pretty much in the same place: the middle, the centre, and the place that always was, and still is, the sweet spot of politics.
I say sweet spot because it’s where elections are won, even in Scotland. The First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says she’s a radical leftist but in government she actually behaves like a conservative centrist and thereby attracts votes from centrists who wouldn’t vote Yes in a referendum. You might say that Boris Johnson, with his radical election-winning Brexit agenda, was an exception to this rule, but perhaps the fact that it appears to be unravelling for him now proves he isn’t an exception after all.
As for me, watching the man who may, or may not, look a bit like me coming back to the centre ground is reassuring and promising. We need a leader who eschews radical and damaging ideologies – Brexit, Scottish nationalism, whatever – and promotes the instincts of the core. I don’t necessarily want a leader who looks like me. But I do want one who thinks like me.
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