News from Nowhere: Labour Pains

• 

Last week, the new actor to play the lead character in the British science fiction series Doctor Who was announced. The story made the front page of The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, and Sun newspapers and featured prominently on the BBC and independent websites. The appointment of a Scottish actor to the role even prompted Scotland’s Culture Secretary to go onto Twitter to express his congratulations.

Ncuti Gatwa will become the fourteenth actor to star in this iconic show when he takes over from Jodie Whittaker this autumn in a special episode produced to mark the BBC’s centenary. The series itself will celebrate its own sixtieth anniversary next year. It is one of the UK’s most popular, pervasive, and enduring television exports. It is listed by BBC Studios, the commercial wing of the corporation, amongst its chief global brands. It is, as such, an influential ambassador for British soft power, or a major player in the British empire’s legacy project of ongoing cultural colonialism, for those who prefer to see it that way.

The programme concerns the adventures of an eccentric, unpredictable but generally benevolent alien known only as the Doctor, who travels through time and space in a British police telephone box from the 1960s. This Doctor appears human but has the capacity to regenerate into new bodies, and does so every few years (whenever the incumbent actor wants to move on). 

The first twelve actors to star in the show were white men; the thirteenth actor was a white woman. Ncuti Gatwa will be the first person of colour to take the lead role. Though he is emphatically British, he will also be the show’s first star to have been born outside the UK – he was born in Rwanda. 

(Gatwa came to Britain as a refugee from genocide. In a strange reversal of fortunes, the British government last month announced a plan to send refugees seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda instead. This irony was not lost on Jonn Elledge in the New Statesman who supposed in this context that this casting decision made it clear on which side of the ideological divide the series was planning to land, and declared that ‘just occasionally, this silly kids’ show makes me feel genuinely, properly proud’).

Like its American cousin Star Trek (and like much speculative fiction and drama), Doctor Who has tended to espouse a predominantly liberal set of values. It has in recent years particularly prided itself on being at the forefront of progressive representations in relation to ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and gender identity. Yet, at the same time, it has consistently portrayed its hero as a sort of late British imperialist on a friendly mission to police the universe. (And, while it may often ridicule this attitude, it still shares it). It also, at least in its early decades, repeatedly employed white actors in make-up to play minority ethnic characters; and it has a long history of portraying disability and physical disfigurement as symptomatic or symbolic of maleficence. While it has in recent years featured people of colour in recurrent supporting roles, its efforts to champion multiculturalism had not previously stretched so far as to cast a non-white actor as its star.

In this sense, Doctor Who might be said to resemble the British Conservative Party. Despite its claims to modern liberal progressive values, it remains profoundly traditionalist, even patrician, and continues to prioritize beliefs it identifies as reflective of its innate Britishness. Like the Conservative Party, it has featured a woman in its top job (Doctor Who once, the Tories twice), although its major roles have tended to be dominated by men. Like Doctor Who (which was last year rocked by allegations against two former cast members), it has also lately been hit by a series of sexual misconduct scandals.

The Tories, like Doctor Who, have recently given significant positions to people of colour: currently, the Chancellor, Home Secretary, Health Secretary, Education Secretary, and Business Secretary. However, they have so far reserved their lead role for white women and men.

By contrast, the British Labour Party has never had a female leader and has never appointed a person of colour to one of the great offices of state. (We may note that even the United States has a better record on this, with people of colour having served as Secretary of State, Vice-President, and President). The most senior non-white member of Keir Starmer’s frontbench team is currently David Lammy, the Shadow Foreign Secretary. Under the previous leadership, the veteran MP Diane Abbott – the first black woman ever elected to the British parliament – served as Shadow Home Secretary, although she has never held a ministerial position of any kind in a Labour administration.

It is far too easy to accuse the Labour Party of hypocrisy on issues of gender and race, and on an increasing number of other issues. That is why so many people do so.

The current Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has brought his party back from the electoral catastrophe of 2019 and has worked hard to make its image rather more acceptable to the British public. Mr. Starmer has generally been considered an honest and honourable individual. He has however lacked the charisma necessary to inspire both his own party and the wider electorate. He has also tended to dodge opportunities for firm policy commitments. He has, for example, criticized the government’s strategies on Brexit, the environment, and the economy, while he has not always made it at all clear what he would do if he were in power.

He has, however, been very good at one thing: making Boris Johnson look dishonest. That is not, of course, a particularly difficult thing to do. It hardly takes a former Director of Public Prosecutions to show that the current British Prime Minister is a scoundrel and a liar. A small child could manage it. It hardly takes Sherlock Holmes. Scooby-Doo could do it. But Sir Keir has done it rather well. He has stood as a shining example of moral probity next to the country’s depraved wreck of a premier.

Yet all that has suddenly changed. The Labour leader has spent months berating Mr. Johnson for breaking his own administration’s Covid-19 lockdown rules when he attended a series of parties that took place in Downing Street. Starmer has demanded that Johnson resign, and – now that the Prime Minister has received a police fine – has succeeded in initiating an investigation into whether he lied to parliament. Boris Johnson is the only Prime Minister to have been found, while in office, to have broken the law; he is the only British Prime Minister ever to have to face such an inquiry. This should have provided Her Majesty’s Opposition with enough ammunition to blow him to kingdom come.

However, it now appears that Mr. Starmer may also have broken lockdown rules. It is alleged that, in the company of his deputy, he enjoyed a takeaway curry and a bottle of beer at a scheduled social gathering in the office of a Labour MP in the northeast of England last Spring. Following a vociferous campaign by the right-wing Mail newspaper group, the police have now opened an investigation into this incident.

Mr. Starmer has previously denied breaching any regulations. His deputy has previously denied attending the event. The Labour Party has since claimed that this denial had been a ‘genuine mistake’. 

Labour’s initial volley of excuses, denials, and volte-faces on this matter had appeared to many to bear remarkable similarities to the Tories’ attempts to wheedle their way out of taking responsibility for their own unlawful activities during lockdown. However, a week ago, facing the cameras with the transfixed expression of a deer caught in an SUV’s headlights – in a stark contrast to Boris Johnson’s insouciant charm – Sir Keir announced to the nation that he would resign if issued with a fixed penalty notice for a breach of lockdown regulations. He really had no choice. He has over the last few weeks talked himself into this corner. 

He had been photographed holding a small bottle of beer. If found to have broken the rules, Mr. Starmer would not be the first great man to be brought down by drink, but he would be remarkable in having had his career destroyed by such a modest amount.

It of course remains to be seen whether Keir Starmer will receive a police fine at all. The Labour Party have stated they hold documentary evidence that their leader continued to work for hours after his meal, and that therefore his Indian takeaway was a working meal in line with national guidance. It nevertheless seems clear that the Mail’s campaign against the Labour leader – intensified in the run-up to this month’s local elections – for a while succeeded in persuading many voters that he is not quite so virtuous and trustworthy as he had once appeared.

Those days of vicious invective launched at him out of the front pages of the country’s best-selling and most influential newspaper were not the only reason that Labour failed to profit as well it might otherwise have done from the massive Tory losses at those elections. But they certainly cannot have helped.

If, though, Mr. Starmer fails to restore his reputation for absolute integrity and does eventually end up quitting his job, then this may represent a chance for his party to confront its hypocrisies – not the shameless dishonesty and corruption of some of those currently in government, but a set of nagging hypocrisies that go back a quarter of a century – and to seize the opportunity to regenerate itself – to be reborn – into something rather fitter for the Britain of the twenty-first century. The agonies of its current leadership may prove to be the price it has to pay for that renewal.