When someone is said to look or sound like a politician it is never a compliment. That is unfortunate for Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. Both were chosen to lead their respective parties because they offered a style of leadership that was more conventional, more typically political, than their predecessors.
Starmer’s pressed suits and lawyerly demeanour promised a new direction even before his disposal of Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto. Sunak’s brand as the diligent managerial type was cultivated by proximity to Boris Johnson, who embodied the opposite. It still took 40 days of Liz Truss for Tory MPs to grasp that seriousness is indispensable in a prime minister.
Having Joe Biden in the White House has helped. He was a senator for nearly four decades, a veteran operator of bipartisan congressional machineryand vice-president for two terms under Barack Obama. Biden’s victory in 2020 reprieved a mode of politics, a dignified conventionality and obedience to rules of democracy that could be seen as quaintly ineffectual when Donald Trump was in his pomp.
Biden’s presidency has also been a rolling rebuke to Brexit. A president who values western alliances sees Britain’s habit of burning bridges to Europe as stupid and dangerous, a kindred folly to Trumpism.
Johnson and Truss both heard that message from the White House, but only Sunak listened. He chose compromise and diplomacy over confrontation and bombast in dealings with Brussels. Biden’s view was not the only reason for the pivot but it added motivation.
The prime minister’s reward for negotiating like a grownup was the Windsor framework for settling Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit status. Better still, it was agreed ahead of a deadline that was noted, if not set, by Washington – Biden’s visit to Belfast marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement.
That commemoration is also a celebration of politics in a sense rarely used nowadays: politics as the highest art of compromise; as a technique for managing conflicting social interests without recourse to violence; as the road out of armed struggle, in which context to be labelled a politician no longer sounds like an insult.
It is unfair to hold the daily trade of Westminster machination to a standard set by historic peace talks. The scale of vision and statecraft needed to end a civil war is what makes the Good Friday agreement exceptional. If it was routine, we wouldn’t be counting 25 years since its like was last seen.
There is a poignancy in recalling what was required to end the Troubles that puts the achievement beyond rarity. It was not so very long ago, barely a generation, which is time for only thin scar tissue to cover wounds made by bullets and bombs. And yet, set against the current political culture of vacuity and spite, the 1998 talks at Stormont look like a tableau from antiquity.
Even applying the most generous filter, straining to correct for the rose-tint of nostalgia, it is hard to picture Sunak’s frontbench rising to any occasion more demanding than a photocall. And it is hard to believe that Johnson and Truss would even have become prime ministers if their MPs had measured candidates by suitability for the job.
There is no single moment when British politics chose triviality and historical amnesia, but a line was crossed in the Brexit referendum. The line was Northern Ireland.
On the morning of 9 June 2016, John Major and Tony Blair gave a joint press conference in Derry. They warned that UK departure from the EU would disinter a border submerged in peace.
Here were two former adversaries, authorities in the politics of neutralising sectarian strife, raising an alarm with one voice. Was that not remarkable? Momentous? Apparently not. The media circus hardly swerved to glance at a story that was breaking too far from Westminster. Major and Blair were men of the past. Northern Ireland was old news, and too complicated. The warning from Derry was forgotten within hours.
Setting aside old enmities was less compelling than the manufacture of new ones. British politicians, including many supporters of EU membership, had not internalised the foundational moral argument for European integration – the ambition to use politics to resolve differences that had formerly been settled by war. When the remain campaign made the case in those terms, the leave side easily shut it down as hysterical fearmongering.
The one part of the UK where it made sense to speak of Europe as a peace project, more than just a trading bloc, was the part that had recent memory of inter-communal bloodshed. It might have been possible to make a treaty like the Good Friday agreement if Britain and Ireland had not both been EU members, but it would have been much harder. It was hard enough when they were.
That observation is not made to insert a remainer lament into the 25th anniversary celebrations. The point is about two conceptions of politics. One is a game where victory goes to whichever side most thoroughly destroys the credibility of their opponent. The other is a painstaking problem-solving exercise where success is eked out on slivers of common ground between apparently irreconcilable forces. The problem-solvers see democratic politics, conducted within recognised parameters of decency, as society’s guarantee against civil strife. The game-players treat politics as an extended metaphor of all-out war.
Sunak and Starmer style themselves as problem-solvers, as professionals and pragmatists, as antidotes to incompetence, tribalism and dogma. But they campaign as game-players. Starmer deploys attack ads casting Sunak as an apologist for paedophiles. The flagship of Sunak’s legislative programme is a bill with no viable purpose except to prove that Conservatives will be more reliably hostile to immigrants than Labour.
Maybe this stuff works. Maybe posters that punch below the belt and race-baiting statutes are the only things that can shift the dial when voters are in a slump of cynical torpor. In that case the dirtiest tactics make good politics, in one sense of the word.
But it is a long way from “the very best of what our politics can achieve”, which is the praise that Starmer lavished on the Good Friday agreement when marking the anniversary. Nor is it an exemplar of “compromise, bravery and political imagination”, which was Sunak’s verdict.
The prime minister and leader of the opposition are alike in recognising that politics should be noble in principle, but alike also in lacking the charisma – or is it the courage? – to make that principle the basis of their pitch to the country. Sunak and Starmer both owe their positions to a shift in the political mood, a change in the wind that seemed to carry an appetite for more serious leadership, for restoration of politics that actually solves problems. Instead they only look serious about playing the game.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
