The challenge of political leadership, Henry Kissinger observed, is that all the easy decisions have been taken by someone else, leaving only the most difficult and agonising choices for those at the very top. The most difficult issues of all, he wrote, are those “whose necessity you cannot prove when the decisions are made” and, therefore, can only be judged once they have been made — by which point it is too late to change course.
Keir Starmer is currently wrestling with two Kissingerian tests of character: austerity at home and the Trump storm abroad, both of which are fast emerging as twin issues for which the Prime Minister and his government may — in the end — come to be judged.
By instinct, Starmer is a cautious and moderate politician who seeks to avoid radical decisions which might bind him and his government in uncomfortable positions. He weighs each decision on what he considers to be its merits, unbound by some grander ideological framework or great narrative. The hard edges of the Government’s political message are left to Morgan McSweeney to help construct.
This inherently conservative approach is most obvious in foreign affairs, where Starmer is doing all he can to protect as much of the transatlantic status quo as possible from the consequences of Donald Trump. Each move Starmer has made since Trump returned to the White House can be seen in this light: praising the US president’s leadership, thanking him for “creating an opportunity for peace”, and not retaliating against the steel tariffs imposed on the UK.
Submarine-like, Starmer hopes to quietly surface with Britain’s interests protected, a trade agreement reached which removes the tariffs and an American security guarantee still in place — perhaps even extended — supporting the “army of the willing” he is trying to assemble with Emmanuel Macron in concert with Ukraine. Who knows, it may work.
Starmer is certainly being advised by those closest to him that the best strategy available at the moment is to remain calm and not make any rash statements about the future. What “bold” moves he has made — increasing defence spending by cutting international aid and offering British troops as peacekeepers — are, in the end, intended to protect the essentials of the current geopolitical status quo.
“The Prime Minister’s push towards becoming ever more conservative, then, is leaving his party questioning its very purpose.”
At home, a similar story is playing out. Thus far, Starmer has shown a notable willingness to take decisions the previous Conservative government wanted to but couldn’t: closing NHS England, reforming planning laws, setting highly politicised house building targets and, now, cutting welfare. In recent weeks — and for the first time since he became prime minister — there has even been a tentative sense that the Government is finally finding its feet, although it has once again started to wobble in the face of the revolt over the proposed benefit cuts.
Still, even Starmer’s most vociferous supporters would admit that the sum of the Prime Minister’s decisions doesn’t add up to a radical vision of an alternative Britain, just one which looks strikingly similar to the one that exists today — only one that works. And perhaps this is all that is realistically available to us. Casting a jaundiced eye back over our post-war history, it is tempting to conclude that no prime minister has fundamentally shifted Britain’s economic position in the world. Even Margaret Thatcher, the most radical, only managed to reduce government spending by a few percentage points of GDP.
In many respects, then, there is something to be said for Starmer’s caution. “Since the affairs of the world are subject to chance and to a thousand and one different accidents, there are many ways in which the passage of time may bring unexpected help to those who persevere,” the 16th-century Italian statesman Francesco Guicciardini advised. Bide your time, in other words, don’t rush into decisions you do not have to. “Unless forced by necessity, do not restrict yourself.”
Over the past quarter century, we have seen the careers of countless great men (and women) left in ruins by the “bold” decisions they took during moments of crisis, believing they would usher in a better future — but which instead helped bring about a world entirely at odds from the one they wanted. In 1999, Tony Blair used the Parliament Act to force that year’s European Parliamentary elections to be held under proportional representation, giving a young firebrand called Nigel Farage the most important break of his career. Without another of Blair’s more radical decisions — his decision not to impose transitional controls on the rights of Eastern Europeans to move to Britain for work in 2004 — Farage himself has said Brexit would not have happened. The paradox of Blair, then, is that the liberal Britain he wanted to build would have been better served had he been more conservative in government.
Similarly, Angela Merkel’s decision to close Germany’s nuclear plants after the Fukushima accident in 2011, and to open the country’s borders to those fleeing the Syrian civil war in 2015, were both “bold” decisions which have come back to haunt her party. The decision to change the German constitution to impose a new “debt brake” in the wake of the global financial crisis is another move which might have fitted the zeitgeist then, but which has restricted the country’s ability to adapt years later.
The problem for Starmer today is that to protect the status quo at home and abroad requires ever more radical decisions which are politically disrupting. Take the scale of the proposed welfare cuts, the details of which will be set out today. These amount to billions of pounds a year, which, in practical terms, means taking thousands of pounds off millions of people. Until the weekend, the brunt of this would be borne by those in receipt of disability benefits who would see their support frozen — a real-terms cut. At no point during the years of austerity did George Osborne ever make such a decision. Similarly, to protect the party’s pledges not to raise taxes and to retain its own self-imposed “fiscal rules”, government spending in departments outside health, education and defence would have to be squeezed to an extent that even Osborne concluded was politically undeliverable.
The Prime Minister’s push towards becoming ever more conservative, then, is leaving his party questioning its very purpose. And it is here that the danger of Starmer’s caution begins to reveal itself. As Kissinger observed, the central challenge of leadership is not simply to make decisions before all the information is available — but to make them before the moment at which they are no longer effective.
By waiting months before making up her mind what kind of Brexit she favoured, Theresa May squandered the opportunity to set the agenda in Brussels — something which helped destroy her premiership. By the time she alighted on her “Chequers Plan”, it was too late — the EU had set its red lines and rejected her proposal outright. Similarly, Gordon Brown had an opportunity to call an early general election, which might have secured his premiership for five years and destroyed David Cameron, his most formidable opponent. He blinked, lost his chance, and the rest is history. Such is the lot of political leaders. Cameron himself sought to move early to avoid a future British crisis over Europe by calling a referendum to settle the issue for a generation. While he accepted — in Kissingerian terms — that the decision wasn’t strictly necessary, he believed he could better control the course of events by managing them himself. He was wrong.
The paradox of leadership is that just as Guicciardini advised leaders to bide their time he also says that opportunity often only knocks at their door once. “In many cases you have to decide to act quickly,” he wrote. “Lucky are those to whom the same opportunity returns more than once. For even a wise man may miss it or misuse it the first time. But not to recognise or use it the second time is to be very foolish indeed.”
Both at home and abroad, the challenge facing Starmer calls for caution and radicalism. Such is Britain’s exposure abroad, and so tight are the constraints of our fiscal position at home, he cannot afford to misstep: he might catch Trump’s ire or spook the bond markets. Yet such is the degree of turmoil, he also has an opportunity to push for something new. He would, though, need to have the vision for something different, something worth the toil — and risk — it would take to get there. Here, in a nutshell, is the skill which separates the real figures of history from the rest — not their ability to control events, but the chance to exploit them for their own ends — and their country’s.
Trump’s incessant, chaotic radicalism today holds out what the American geopolitical analyst Ryan Evans has termed “Trumportunities”; by accident or design, the US president offers even those he holds in the highest contempt the chance of significant change. For those in Europe who have long complained about US imperial overreach, Trump presents the opportunity to finally break free. For both Starmer and Kemi Badenoch, there is an obvious opportunity to define themselves against Trump politically in a way that will cause Farage particular trouble. For Britain, meanwhile, there is the opportunity to carve a new role in the world to replace the one that has not — after all — served it particularly well over the past 25 years. Being America’s willing imperial sidekick has led Britain not only into Afghanistan and Iraq, but Libya and now — potentially — Ukraine. But no one in British politics at the moment seems to have any idea what that role might be. Nor who might fill it.
The difficult truth for Britain, then, is that it has not worked out how to replace that political and economic settlement which settled in the mid-Nineties and was then blown apart by the great financial crisis of 2008. In the quarter of a century that has passed since then, the country has deteriorated, growing ever poorer and more exposed on the world stage. Britain is yearning for something new. As a moment for change presents itself, Starmer must be careful. But not so much that he misses his chance.
