Prime minister is a job for the odd fishes

If you look at most prime ministers, certainly going back as far as I can remember, they are strange fish. Odd people who seem to get to their position often because they are the least offensive of the jockeying candidates. 

One thing that unites them is their utter conviction that they really do know what to do next. That as they pass through one of their crises – for they all pass through them – they’ll be able to talk their way out of it. That they can make a cogent and convincing pitch to the press that gets them turning the corner, and they are again in safe waters. 

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If you’d collected the comments and articles and general media opinion over the past week or so you would have concluded that Sir Keir Starmer was dead in the water. The stench of a dying regime was about No 10, ran one comment. Only for Starmer then to gird his loins, draw his supporters to him and make a speech that pulls the rabbit out of the hat. Home and dry and all the commentators returning to their trenches disappointed that they did not bring down the PM. 

Truth needs protecting. The brouhaha that surrounded Starmer recently over Peter Mandelson is the press doing its job. Demanding answers from power, wanting to know why they were asleep at the wheel. Left, right and centre, or what’s left of it, piled in to do their best to unseat the incumbent. Only his unseating would have assuaged their appetites for action. Yet it is their job to knock down the incompetents, if that is what they are found to be. The problem is that it often becomes a bean feast of bloodletting. And with great success the press can round on the particular ‘odd fish’ who’s got the job at the moment, because all these odd fish look at times as if – to mix metaphors – they have feet of clay. 

The appalling corruption that the Epstein issue throws up would not have seen the light of day if it were not for a vigorous insistence by the press on knowing more. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor could still have been the colonel of regiments and on the taxpayers’ payroll; and still enshrined in our prayers as a prince. 

Read more:

• Harold Wilson’s failure to reform the country is why Keir Starmer needs to listen to history 
• What does Keir Starmer’s personality type tell us about him?
• Keir Starmer might not have ‘rizz’ – but maybe we should give him a chance

Thankfully people still listen, watch and read what the press has to say. Else we would truly be in the land where the government was in charge of marking all of its own homework. For there would be no markets for truth. But the press should stick resolutely to the truth. The truth is the only guarantee that they have a future. For if they are seen not to be purveyors of the truth then the market will shrivel up and the bilge of half-truths and rumours will take over. 

Unfortunately there is evidence that much of the press output bears little relationship to the truth. That there are too many opportunities for half-lies and lies to find a ready audience. The truth must also, as the latest odd fish in the job said in his rescue speech last week, allow the odd fish to get on with what he was elected for: to deliver on knocking the spots off poverty. Making us feel safe again. Getting people into good jobs and good houses. Protecting our health service from its failings. Protecting the ill and the weak from the inflation that makes living increasingly impossible. And to establish a sense that we are not just a pot-holed, drunken and lawless isle vulnerable and obese in a sea of troubles, which is what often seems to be the picture. 

My only meeting with Mandelson involved him opening a Big Issue conference in the early days of the Blair government. He spoke well about the intentions of the government to obliterate poverty and bring prosperity to us all. This was in the dying days of the last century and there was a general buzz around that we were going to have a revival in the quality of public life. As Mandelson left the stage in a great hurry to get to his next appointment I presented him with a large board on which I had written: ‘You have to fare well on welfare in order to say farewell to welfare.’ 

He seemed confused by my statement and rushed off, leaving the statement behind. It was like one of those big cheques companies give out to charities. I explained to the audience that I hoped this didn’t mean that the Labour government was going to turn its back on those stuck on welfare. Where social
security made many people feel insecure. And that social security should also be about social opportunity. 

The PM should be left to get on with the job. The error of his decision to appoint Mandelson as US ambassador without fully checking him out should drive his government to dig out all the unsavoury Epstein connections between the British establishment and Epstein. Wherever the millions of documents take the investigation. Are there other Mandelsons and Andrews still hiding in the closets of power? A vigorous press should keep us informed. 

The Labour Party chair, in celebrating the rallying around of Starmer, spoke movingly of a government committed to getting half a million children out of poverty by 2030. Leaving us once again to ask, what about the other four million. What are the new tools they are going to use, as of yet unidentified, to rid us of the tragedy of children with no future?

Starmer has lived to fight another day, but where is the deep work and deep thinking not just to lift over half a million out of poverty but to rescue the vast majority. That’s where the press could be helping us all: keeping Sir Keir to his promise to leave us in some place new: on the road to a UK free of poverty. But as of yet there is precious little evidence that child poverty is ending any time soon.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

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