Understanding Kier Starmer

Kier Starmer is not as other politicians. He is a trial lawyer - he was Director of Public Prosecutions for a while, and that's one of the more thankless jobs in the country. Now many other politicians have law degrees, but they are not trial lawyers: they are politicians with law degrees. Kier Starmer is a trial lawyer who somehow found himself in one of the top ten jobs in world politics.

Most professions, and even many vocational degrees, teach a way of thinking, and of approaching and treating the problems of the profession, as well as the specific technical knowledge and skills of the trade. Trial lawyers are trained to focus on the facts of the case: anything else is irrelevant, and will have their learned friend jumping up to object, if not the judge telling them off. Trial lawyers cannot look at "wider contexts" and "wider consequences": these things are for other people to think about. A human rights lawyer makes specious pleas to the Human Rights Act to keep their client in the UK, and if the client goes on to bomb a bus, that is nothing to the defence lawyer. Trial lawyers are not in the truth-and-consequences business, they are in the get-the-result business, or more often the go-through-the-motions-and-get-the-fees business. And their professional ethics condones this - lawyering would not work otherwise.

Politicians don't work like that. They are in the wider-contexts and wider-consequences business: it's their job (or it used to be) to think about how a decision or a policy will be received, how it will interact with other policies, whether the money can be raised or the cost foisted off on local councils or other people. The better ones are in the goals-and-visions business: what do we want the country to look like? how do we want the world to perceive us?

The ability to think about contexts, consequences, policy reception, interactions, let alone to produce a vision of what kind of country Britain could be, and a path towards that... that ability has been trained out of Kier Starmer.

But here's the real downside about trial lawyers: they live and die within the institutions of the law, and with the whims of judges. Judges, legal institutions and processes cannot be questioned, or the very fabric of the Universe will rend. Starmer is emotionally incapable of contradicting a judge's verdict, which leaves this Government wide open to lawfare, and he is incapable of ignoring the judgements of a trans-national legal institution, which means he will follow the ECHR, the ICC, and any other court the UK has signed up to.

Take a look at his career, and it's clear that he was a young man in a hurry who made the right impressions on the right people at the right time. I have no doubt that within his subject he's smart and capable.

But his subject is human rights law. Whereas it needs to be politics and direction.

And he's going to be Prime Minister until 2034.

God help us.