There is a stupid mistake political courtiers make when they try to work out why things are not going well for the politicians they follow around. The mistake they make is to try to explain it based on something that happened at court. They spend all day with politicians and so when political fortunes rise and fall, front and centre in their heads is press releases, what was announced or said.
And so for the political court, foreign policy is irrelevant because foreign policy doesn’t really register. Which means there is no pain from foreign policy (unless you do something really stupid). Then again, they think there is no negative outcome from rising house prices either. They don’t get that what matters in the rarified atmosphere of ‘insiders’ doesn’t really matter to the rest of us – but we see it.
This basic error is why the political court hasn’t had a clue what is going on in Europe for a decade now, because the political court is wrong and doesn’t understand the world beyond the court. The rest of us do not form our opinions based on the conversations courtiers have.
It is why this pathetic and utterly hypocritical European approach to Trump’s patently illegal invasion and coup in Venezuela is such a great way to understand why Europe is lost. The courtiers are all transactional – for them politics is a game of trading, coverage for access, flattery for exclusives. The public? We’re much more moral.
I don’t mean better or kinder or more humane, I mean that whatever our personal sense of morality and how it should operate, we measure politicians against that. I hate hypocrites and that is important to me, so hypocrisy on my side bothers me as much as on the other side.
For me, if someone can lecture you on the iniquity of unfair wealth distribution and the cost of housing and then be found to have a personal property portfolio (for example) then I can’t hear the next thing they say in the same way. It rings hollow and so lands badly.
Principle is a bit different but works the same way. We respect people who stand up for their principles whether we share those principles or not. I remember being a child in the 1980s, being a very strong atheist and yet watching Chariots of Fire and having the most enormous respect for Eric Liddle. His faith wasn’t mine, but I greatly respected the sacrifice he made to hold his.
No-one wants to look at a leader and think ‘well, there is no way they’ll stand up to a bully’
Similarly, honesty. People don’t vote for you just because you don’t lie, but they do want to hear what I would call an honest position. Lack of lies isn’t enough (Nicola Sturgeon was mostly careful not to tell out-and-out lies); we need to feel some kind of emotional or ideological honesty in our politicians because they are telling us stories we take to be true and consistent, even if they’re not.
Another key aspect of how we assess politics is by how human we find the politicians. Too much is made of ‘likeability’ but we really do struggle when there is just something ‘off’ about a politician. It gives us the ick. It weakens trust and empathy.
But there is one thing above all that we want in our politics; strength. Once again, that doesn’t mean any one thing. It is possible to be strong in a wide range of different ways. But our politicians are part bodyguard protecting us from a world we have little control over and part construction workers reshaping the world in ways we want it reshaped.
Both of these are about strength and courage. No-one wants to look at a leader and think ‘well, there is no way they’ll stand up to a bully’. If that leader looks weak, it is a massive turn off.
Well almost all of Europe’s political leaders are hypocritical cowards, weak-minded liars who have neither principle nor consistency. The last five years of European weakness and hypocrisy has destroyed any semblance of respect anyone has left for them. (And when you think that the least weird of the big three European leaders is probably Emmanuel Macron who met his 24-years-older wife when he was 15 and she was his 39-year-old teacher it positively redefines ‘ick’.)
The point isn’t that you have to feel strongly about the children of Gaza or the Venezuelan regime or the primacy of the international legal order, it’s that if a politician keeps lecturing us on these issues in one context and then does the opposite as soon as it gets difficult for them, we lose our faith in them. And rightly so.
You don’t even need to care about foreign policy at all, you just need to hear that invading Ukraine is bad but invading Venezuela is mumble mumble. You just need to hear that Greenland should be protected but not Cuba, Nigeria, Venezuela or Panama. It’s almost as if, I don’t know, it’s a completely racist position from a group of people who shout ‘antisemitism’ whenever Netanyahu demands it of them.
will be seen as a co-conspirator with Trump and his wannabe fascists, he will be remembered for hastening the end of the world order created to stop another Hitler and he will probably cause the biggest crisis in the history of the Labour Party
I didn’t think Keir Starmer had any moral authority left to lose after his appalling Gaza positioning but I was wrong, because I can feel more moral authority draining away from him right now. It is clear as a bell to anyone with ears or eyes – there is no principle Starmer will not sell out. None. Well, Israel, but only that.
Donald Trump is now absolutely, undeniably the biggest threat to world peace on the planet. That makes Starmer Neville Chamberlain. He is appeasing a tyrant and should be judged accordingly. But he is doing it while pretending to stand up for the things the tyrant is destroying. Which is to say I have much more respect for Neville Chamberlain.
What is funny in all this (in as far as there are any laughs to be had at all) is watching the political courtiers failing so incredibly. The ‘pragmatists’ are the ones who said that we should be clinging to America even after it was clear America was the problem. They now say that instead we should cling to Europe, like Europe isn’t the problem too.
The pragmatic thing to do now is isolationism. The UN has been destroyed (in large part due to the British Labour Party, it should be remembered), Nato is an alliance with a global tyrant at its helm, Europe chose to pursue subservient irrelevance and neither China nor Russia offer us any security. Only an idiot wouldn’t realise we’re in this on our own now. Yet idiots they all are.
There is only really one upside of all of this; I now fear we’re heading towards some kind of world conflagration. I am not sure it will look like a world war of old, it might just look like an ever-proliferating bin fire of countless individual conflicts. But the world has broken apart and it was Britain and America that did it.
That upside? Labour will be destroyed and Starmer will be remembered by history for what he is. He will be seen as a co-conspirator with Trump and his wannabe fascists, he will be remembered for hastening the end of the world order created to stop another Hitler and he will probably cause the biggest crisis in the history of the Labour Party. Good. He deserves to be remembered that way.
As for the rest of us; the push now must be for disengagement from the US. We should of course be sanctioning them but this must hasten the removal of all US technology platforms from British soil. Trident must go and we must start spending our defence budget not to be a junior partner in American adventurism but to defend ourselves from America.
And as contempt for the hypocritical racists of Europe rises throughout the rest of the world, more enlightened national leaders must start rebuilding a world order with those who are still capable of demonstrating principle and a commitment to peace.
The response to Venezuela has been exactly like the response European leaders have shown to every adversity they have faced – surrender while pretending they’re the heroes. But they are not. They are the global cowards who history will remember with contempt.
And as for the courtiers, is this the moment when they finally get it? No – I’ve just heard the BBC report that because only a small number of Labour MPs have decried what is happening, Starmer is going to completely get away with all of this. It truly is a fool who never, ever learns.