Sir Keir Starmer has removed the portrait of Margaret Thatcher from its pride of place in her former study in 10 Downing Street. His biographer says the Prime Minister finds it “unsettling”. It will be interesting to see what replacement our new Prime Minister chooses, or has chosen (at present, Downing Street is not saying). What you hang, and what you take down, often says a lot. When New Labour won its landslide victory in 1997, the new foreign secretary, Robin Cook, disliked the beautiful portrait of a Nepalese prince which had hung for many years in the office he now occupied. He saw it as too closely connected with the British Empire.
In an early skirmish in the culture war over what today is called “decolonisation”, he ordered its removal. Instead of the portrait, he chose a mirror. This allowed Mr Cook, while composing his new “ethical foreign policy”, to contemplate the politician he most admired – Robin Cook. The change was a fitting emblem of Blair-era narcissism. I doubt that Sir Keir will follow suit. He has less vanity. One does, however, wonder what he is thinking. In the run-up to the general election, he went out of his way to praise Lady Thatcher – though he said he did not agree with her – for “her sense of mission, a sense of driving purpose”. Does he want her out of the room because those piercing blue eyes make him realise he has not got one? It was the last Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, who commissioned the Thatcher portrait and gave it its place of honour. Contrary to the expectation of many, it turned out that Mr Brown had no sense of driving purpose and so lost the 2010 election. The Thatcher juju did not work for him. Perhaps that thought discomforts Sir Keir.
Since Labour’s capitulation to the doctors’ and the train drivers’ pay strikes, the view has been growing that the new Government wants to take us back to the 1970s. Since Sir Keir’s odd manoeuvre this week of entering the Downing Street rose garden only to say, as the song puts it, “I beg your pardon: I never promised you a rose garden”, critics have warned that Labour now intends to crush British wealth creation in the October Budget and then get the state to take over the commanding heights (if any are left) of the British economy. These forebodings may well prove justified. This paper’s feature on Tuesday of Britain’s eight most powerful trade union bosses – Mick, Sharon, Fran, Matt, Dave, Christina, Gary and another Mick – did re-create for people of my generation the stale smell of nearly 50 years ago – when it was Jack, Moss, Joe, Len, Ray, Fred, Clive and, yes, Mick (McGahey, the drunken Scottish Communist miner).
Today, the line-up contains women as well as men but, politically, there would appear to be no progress at all. It is at least possible, however, that what we are seeing is little more than the paying of political debts and some careful manipulation of expectations. It is now forgotten that when Mrs Thatcher came into office in 1979, she had reluctantly committed to honour the findings of the Pay Comparability Commission, an extraordinary public body whose purpose was, in effect, to guarantee above-inflation increases to trade union members. It took her 15 months to get rid of it. These pay rises could be Sir Keir’s equivalent: he is overpaying the unions now to keep them at bay while he gets started and means to be tough next time.
