(The below was written for The Yorkshire Post; perhaps they will print; perhaps they won’t)
Merry Christmas, Sir Keir Starmer KC.
As a former solicitor, I’m used to instructing barristers like you. So here is your brief and — under the cab-rank rule — you’re duty-bound to accept my unsolicited instructions.
As ’tis the season for the annual self-audit, I’ve just done mine as CEO of a Yorkshire political tech company. My verdict, of me, was pure Yorkshire: ‘Could do better. Must do better.’ Ring any Christmas bells?
In the legal world, you shouldn’t accept instructions unless you’re confident you can do the job properly. So: is Britain better off with different counsel? A certain Health Secretary, perhaps?
You know, Keir, we’re not too different. I ran a law firm in Leeds — the city where you read law. We’re both mad for football, have kids of a similar age, and I’ve worn a Labour rosette. We’ve both won a big public case for the same famous client. (And yes, as a barrister you’re smarter. I’ll cope.) We even share a small modern curse: our first names have been complicated by famous people. (No babies were called ‘Keir’ last year.)
And although we haven’t met, I feel like I have the inside track on you. You’re serious, hardworking, decent — and held back by lawyer instincts.
Barristers, with your intellectual firepower and courtroom oratory, arrive near the end of the case when the mess is already baked in — the narrative largely set — leaving you only a narrow room to manoeuvre.
Keir: stop acting like a barrister. Take inspiration from the junior profession — solicitors — and set the narrative. Then take inspiration from every walk of life — toolmakers and all — and tell us a compelling, optimistic story.
Lawyers think in ‘prospects of success’. Politics isn’t a case you win on the balance of probabilities. With a regulator in the background, lawyers default to caution. Politics is looser, riskier, and the rulebook is there to be rewritten. Politics is vibes; law is not.
Successful politicians are masters of storytelling. They tell us that the future will be better than the past. We want to be led, Keir. And what we do not want is to instruct a barrister to follow our shifting and contradictory instructions, because we don’t fully know what our instructions should be.
There’s the famous Henry Ford story: asked what customers wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse’. Voters can be the same — not great at designing a new vehicle, but very good at sensing when the old one has run out of road. We don’t quite know what we want, but we know we don’t want a faster horse.
My suspicion is the lawyer in you is wedded to the retainer — your focus group-approved manifesto. But a manifesto is no retainer, and like a retainer, few people read it. Manifestos are the political version of cookie banners: technically necessary, practically ignored. And yours was conceived in 2023, sold in 2024 to a public that mainly wanted to stop buying what the incumbents were selling.
And your “landslide” was a creature of the first-past-the-post system. That’s not your fault. So what did your client actually instruct you to do? Deliver on the retainer we never read? No. The instruction was: arrest managed decline and make tomorrow feel better than today. The electorate wanted change — and hasn’t got it.
Countries don’t run on policy alone. They run on belief. We need to believe that the future is worth investing in. If the national story becomes “things will get worse, but neatly”, people stop taking risks, stop trying, and the unfortunate exodus to Dubai will continue.
This is where the Blair-and-Clinton lawyer-leader comparison jars. Love them or loathe them — and yes, they were looser with the truth — they offered motion. They made the future feel like it was arriving; that things really could get better.
To your credit, you look most Prime-Ministerial when you’re overseas. Few leaders have handled President Trump better than you — and we don’t envy you, Prime Minister.
My instruction, counsel, is that your client is best served by you changing gear. In fact, change cars. Go electric. New Year, New Keir? Treat the election — and now the damning polls — as a demand to change the trajectory. Offer a compelling, positive national story people can repeat at the kitchen table. Pick a few outcomes and pursue them vigorously.
Because the public’s verdict isn’t that you’re lazy or incompetent. It’s worse than that: it’s “meh”, as our teenagers would say.
And “meh” is not a mandate.
