Some of us have in recent weeks felt occasional twinges of admiration for Sir Keir Starmer as he fights to save his prime ministership.
Like an Englishman abroad making a valiant attempt to speak a foreign language in which he has not had any lessons at school, and which cannot be picked up simply by entering a restaurant and ordering random dishes from the menu, his doggedness compels a certain respect.
Some of us feel (I certainly do) we would make just as much of a hash of it as he does. “It’s dogged as does it,” a bricklayer says in one of Anthony Trollope’s novels, attempting to comfort a man who has done nothing wrong, but is in desperate trouble.
Whatever else one may say about Starmer, he is doing his best.
And as Charles Moore observed in last Saturday’s Telegraph, the media mob looks ugly as it sets out to lynch yet another Prime Minister.
The King’s Government must be carried on, and Starmer can carry it on at least as well as Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner or Andy Burnham.
The parts of the job which Starmer does competently are mostly ignored, but would become conspicuous once an inept successor was bungling those things.
It would be irresponsible of Labour MPs to engage in a leadership contest which, at a time of national vulnerability, would render us yet more vulnerable, and might easily land us with a PM worse than the present incumbent.
Our custom of defenestrating PMs at frequent intervals is a cherished part of our liberty. Like some absolute monarch, we the people consider ourselves entitled to sack our chief minister whenever we wish.
But we the people also know, if we have any sense, that doing this too often does not lead to good government, and allows the tenant of 10 Downing Street no time to learn from the early mistakes which he or she is bound to make.
A perfect government has never yet existed, but how easy it is to pretend, as a politician who is out of office, or indeed as a self-regarding commentator, that if only one’s intelligent and principled prescription were followed, perfection would follow.
Tories are by tradition allergic to Utopian schemes. We do not believe heaven on earth is attainable, and observe the terrible damage which is done by pursuing it.
As T.E.Utley remarked (in a piece published in The Daily Telegraph on 9th February 1981, reprinted on page 66 of A Tory Seer: The Selected Journalism of T.E. Utley) of the ideas he himself, Maurice Cowling and others had imbibed from various brilliant men in the Cambridge of the 1930s:
“It was presumption to believe that there was some single principle or simple body of principles on which human society could be reconstructed and sheer wickedness to be prepared to use massive public force for the sake of imposing such principles.”
So it would be wrong to chuck Starmer overboard because he is imperfect. Everyone is.
And although he may be incapable of learning from his mistakes, the rest of us can at least start to do so. Many people can now see how hopeless it is to enter government without having done the preparatory thinking which is required.
The combined abilities of Margaret Thatcher, Sir Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson and other brilliant figures were needed from 1979 even to begin to get the British state back into good (or less bad) order, and they had started work in 1975, having learned from the grievous failures made by various governments in the previous decade.
A similar labour of Hercules is needed now, if uncontrolled spending is to be reined in and the wealth-creating part of our economy allowed once more to flourish.
Nobody has yet assembled such a team, but it ought in the next two or three years to be possible for both the Conservatives and Reform UK at least to take some steps in that direction.
Why not leave Starmer in No. 10 while this work takes place?
The answer to that question is supplied when one sees him in action at Prime Minister’s Questions, as one did yesterday, and notes the profound depression on the faces of his colleagues.
It is not surprising he inspires no confidence in Conservatives. The problem is that he inspires no confidence in his own much more numerous MPs, most of whom know they are on course to be thrown out at the next general election.
Again and again, Starmer announces some footling measure, without admitting that even footling measures cost money. Here is another line from Utley, found on page 310 of A Tory Seer:
“It is, of course, the natural vice of democracy to elude the truth that anything which is worth having is bought at a price.”
Starmer and his colleagues attempt to protect what is left of the British steel industry by imposing a tariff which damages British manufacturers who use steel.
They decide to allow the import of some oil of Russian origin, without admitting that this damages our policy of backing Ukraine to the hilt.
They dabble with price controls on food, without recognising the shortages this will cause.
They set out to save the planet, without conceding that high energy prices crush the entrepreneurial spirit on which job creation depends.
They allow the welfare budget to swell, without confessing that this places a burden on taxpayers which is becoming less and less sustainable.
They denounce anyone who wants to reform the NHS, while refusing to admit the present system, founded on the pretence that treatment is free, will bankrupt us.
But while Starmer seems incapable of admitting the Government’s measures will cost money, one cannot yet see any greater enthusiasm among the Opposition parties for facing the truth, except in the most general terms.
We should not shoot the pianist, or in this case the PM. He is doing his best, and just now there is no one capable of assembling a Commons majority who could do better.