Britain’s Next Prime Minister Has Shown Us Who He Is, and It’s Not Good

The outcome seems predestined. The British Conservative Party, moribund after 14 years in office and struggling to defend its record of routine corruption and economic mismanagement, is heading into Thursday’s general election with the backing of just 20 percent of the electorate. The opposition Labour Party, having run a colorless campaign whose main aim was to channel frustration with the government, is projected to win a huge parliamentary majority. That means that Labour’s leader, Keir Starmer, will be the country’s next prime minister.

How is he likely to govern? A former lawyer with a bland rhetorical style and a tendency to modify his policies, Starmer is accused by critics on the left and right alike of lacking conviction. He is labeled an enigma, a man who stands for nothing, with no plans and no principles. His election manifesto, which The Telegraph hailed as “the dullest on record,” appears to confirm the sense that he is a void and that the character of his administration defies prediction.

But a closer look at Starmer’s back story belies this narrative. His politics are, in fact, relatively coherent and consistent. Their cardinal feature is loyalty to the British state. In practice, this often means coming down hard on those who threaten it. Throughout his legal and political career, Starmer has displayed a deeply authoritarian impulse, acting on behalf of the powerful. He is now set to carry that instinct into government. The implications for Britain, a country in need of renewal not retrenchment, are dire.

Starmer has seldom dwelt on the specifics of his legal career, and his personal motives are of course unknowable. But it seems clear, based on his track record, that Starmer’s outlook began to take shape around the turn of the millennium. By that time, he had gained a reputation as a progressive barrister who worked pro bono for trade unionists and environmentalists. But in 1999 he surprised many of his colleagues by agreeing to defend a British soldier who had shot and killed a Catholic teenager in Belfast. Four years later, he was hired as a human rights adviser to the Northern Irish Policing Board — a role in which he reportedly helped police officers justify the use of guns, water cannons and plastic bullets.

Feted by the judicial establishment, Starmer was hired to run the Crown Prosecution Service in 2008, putting him in charge of criminal prosecutions in England and Wales. Professional success brought him closer to the state, which he repeatedly sought to shield from scrutiny. He did not bring charges against the police officers who killed Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian migrant who was mistaken for a terrorist suspect and shot seven times in the head. Nor did Starmer prosecute MI5 and MI6 agents who faced credible accusations of complicity in torture. Nor were so-called spy cops — undercover officers who infiltrated left-wing activist groups and manipulated some of their members into long-term sexual relationships — held accountable.

He took a different tack with those he saw as threatening law and order. After the 2010 student demonstrations over a rise in tuition fees, he drew up legal guidelines that made it easier to prosecute peaceful protesters. The following year, when riots erupted in response to the police killing of Mark Duggan, Starmer organized all-night court sittings and worked to increase the severity of sentencing for people accused of participating. During his tenure, state prosecutors fought to extradite Gary McKinnon, an I.T. expert with autism who had embarrassed the U.S. military by gaining access to its databases, and worked to drag out the case against the WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange.

For his service, Starmer was knighted in 2014; the year after that, he entered Parliament. After biding his time there, he played a central role in kiboshing his own party’s position on the European Union, maneuvering to secure Labour’s support for a second referendum rather than accepting the vote to leave the bloc. This stance alienated many Brexit voters and helped ensure his party’s defeat in the 2019 election. It then fell to Starmer to recapture Labour from the left-wing supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and cleanse it of radicalism, using the same repressive repertoire that he developed as chief prosecutor.

Starmer more than met the brief. Since becoming leader, he has begun a merciless crackdown on the mildest forms of internal dissent. He expelled his predecessor, blocked left-wing candidates from standing for Parliament, proscribed various socialist groups, barred politicians from joining picket lines and introduced antidemocratic rules for leadership elections. He has also demanded a stifling level of ideological conformity. Lawmakers who criticize NATO face instant expulsion, and members who oppose Israel’s actions are cynically accused of antisemitism.

This purge has turned Labour into a mirror image of the Conservatives: obsequious toward big business, advocating austerity at home and militarism abroad. It has also foreshadowed how Starmer would operate in Downing Street. He has said he intends to retain the Public Order Act, which places unprecedented restrictions on protests and makes it easier to lock up activists. He has described climate campaigners as “contemptible” and “pathetic,” pledging to impose harsh sentences on them. He has even backed a proposal to punish protesters who vandalize monuments with 10 years in prison.

Some say such hawkishness is merely good sense or excuse it as the necessary cost of credibility. But the repressive reflex reveals a fundamental truth about Starmer: At every turn, he seeks to protect the regnant order from disruption. The Labour Party’s offering, which promises to alter things so little that it is enthusiastically backed by prominent business leaders, can be seen as an extension of that principle to the country as a whole. Starmer’s nebulous invocation of growth and change, without any clear route to secure either, is a feature not a bug. A Labour Party made in his image can be expected to do little to upset the status quo.

Fortune has often smiled on Starmer. The government praised his performance at the Crown Prosecution Service. The media celebrated his remaking of the Labour Party. Now, thanks to the Conservatives’ implosion, he is set to inherit the country. Yet contemporary Britain is not well. It is afflicted by stagnant growth and gutted public services, its workforce is shrinking, its prisons are overcrowded, and more than a fifth of its population lives in poverty.

Solving such problems requires more than reverence for established institutions and small-minded attempts to silence their critics. But this, seemingly, is all the incoming prime minister has to offer.

Eagleton is a journalist and the author of “The Starmer Project.”

The New York Times