The main feeling is still a deep sense of relief. A long and hollowing sickness lifted at last. After that, though, comes hope and anticipation and curiosity. Like everybody else, I’ve been trying to understand him. How does the manner proclaim the man?
The vibe from veteran journalist friends is that they can’t quite render Keir Starmer on the page. He’s not exactly evasive, they say, but over coffee, over lunch, even in semi-private… much is reserved; he declines the interaction, his inner life is occluded. Has he got one? Must do. But when you’re with him, things can feel… well, emotionally clumsy or even cauterised. Except this can’t be true. Look at the range and scope and intelligence of his closest friends. We’re missing something. We don’t quite get him.
I speak with fellow writers – novelists, dramatists. There’s much post-election buoyancy, of course, and a rare delight in a community that habitually specialises in its opposite, but they’re also perplexed on the person and the personal. Something is impeded or withheld, they observe. Something is unavailable. His habitual public demeanour is remote-but-resolute or remote-but-resilient; there’s an immobile or monumental quality to him. He has an Easter Island face. The eyes stare back at you as if from a grainy photograph of a submarine captain cut off by the ice for the winter and now stranded in Baffin Bay. (Yes, he survived. No, nobody was eaten. Yes, he got the entire crew home. Now he runs the Navy.) He has a voice that prefers to defuse words rather than deploy them. His favourite terms of disparagement are “nonsense” and “ridiculous”. He used them often in the campaign – and you sense that he feels a great deal of the world is one or the other. His terms of engagement though, his terms of endearment… what are they?
