If there was one thing Keir Starmer might have hoped the UK media would support him over, it was his refusal to follow a US president blindly into war in the Middle East. After all, his Labour predecessor Tony Blair only really got hammered in the press over warmongering in Iraq. Those hopes must now be dashed.
On Sunday, three major newspaper groups led with dire warnings from the Israeli Defense Force about Iran’s ability to hit London. Leaving aside the lack of official evidence or impartiality of the source, the tone of attack against the prime minister was striking. The Telegraph gave the floor to Starmer’s conservative rivals, mainly Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, who accused him of cowardice and presiding over a party “moving to a very extreme hard-left, Islamist-allied position”. The Express was equally dismissive (“Donald Trump brutally mocks Keir Starmer by sharing skit showing ‘scared’ Prime Minister”). And even the Sunday Times repeated the Israeli scaremongering, before adding far lower down that “it is not known for certain that Iran possesses a missile capable of reaching Diego Garcia”. Let alone London, 400 miles further.
Echoing a US president who sees fit to belittle a once close ally with abuse and video clips, the picture presented of Starmer is rarely of a former human rights lawyer struggling to support a war he considers illegal, but that of an indecisive coward. Despite more supportive coverage in papers such as the Independent and the Observer, the housing secretary, Steve Reed, was forced to defend the government on the BBC on Sunday morning, as broadcasters followed the majority newspaper agenda.
The criticism over Starmer’s lack of action at the start of a war no other European allies have joined is striking, but it has of course been building since at least Labour’s landslide victory. The Mail was too busy yesterday with a scoop over a plan to clone royal corgis to report on the war, but last week chose to headline a picture of two senior members of the British establishment wearing bathrobes with Jeffrey Epstein with “Starmer’s dereliction of duty” – making the prime minister’s bad ambassadorial decision the essence of the story. Again.
Labour prime ministers have rarely been popular in news organisations owned by wealthy men worried about higher taxes, but there has also been a shift more generally that has worked against Starmer. Forced to compete in a 24/7 marketplace where controversy and cant drive clicks, the media are never going to appreciate a man whose soundbites sound wooden and whose substance lacks speed and scale.
Even British broadcasters, forced to be impartial, have become more evidently frustrated with Starmer.
The BBC used to employ a man, affectionately known as Gobby, to stand outside 10 Downing Street and shout: “When are you going to resign?” Now, so many broadcast journalists, seemingly charged with the daily task of denigrating the PM and inspired by the need to become content creators with viral clips, want to be Gobby.
Some of Starmer’s problems are of his own making, rather than the hostility of the media. The PM, a man who has undoubtedly made some poor decisions, too often fails to connect with the public. The fact he seems to adopt the same tone for all public speeches – whether referencing the war or his favourite snack food – makes him an easy target.
But he must face the fact that his government’s handling of the press has been poor and that his initial policy of appeasement did not work. The government has indicated it will not to attempt to reopen the issue of independent press regulation, nor to open a broader inquiry into its wilder practices. But that bought him neither love nor time. “Can there be anyone at all left in the country who still believes and trusts this degenerate government,” thundered one Mail leader. There is no quarter given, no sign of a ceasefire.
So with his press tormentors on a permanent war footing, what can Starmer do? Some former party advisers who counselled Blair when he was in office suggest that the prime minister could take a more confrontational approach. They sigh that he is too polite, even to the most aggressive questioner, and suggest the party has failed to recognise that in moving into government from the long years of opposition it can now set the agenda more.
Others suggest a quickfire rebuttal unit that would help stem the most negative takes on government statements.
Starmer has been advised to try to bypass the media more, channelling Trump, with major statements on his own social media platform and weekly fireside chats on YouTube to get his message across. The media, the theory goes, would have to report on what he said. But whatever he produced would always be vulnerable to Saturday Night Live-style satire, of which he was the subject of the first episode last week.
“I don’t think he needs to change who he is so much as he should stop trying to be someone else,” says Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, who thinks he will always favour substance over style. “Being some sort of inauthentic ‘insurgent’ is right now the worst thing he could possibly be.”
Starmer has stories to tell the British public. He pushed back against Trump on matters such as Greenland, tariffs and even paracetamol for pregnant women, but he has never developed the ability to turn his positives into a coherent, dynamic electorate-pleasing narrative. To stop a hostile media telling negative stories about him, he needs better stories to counter them with, and a cannier plan to make sure the public sees and hears those stories. That’s not peripheral to his mission, that’s central – and any plan to move his government forward needs to give it the priority it deserves.
Jane Martinson is an academic and Guardian columnist. She is a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group, and writes in a personal capacity
Source:
www.theguardian.com
