Across successive PMQs scuffles, Kemi Badenoch has characterised her opponent, the prime minister, as in hock to some clandestine sect of North London solicitors. Keir Starmer is a “lawyer”, the Conservative chief chides, not a “leader”. He is concerned with dinner party invitations and the righteous commendation of former colleagues, not with the national interest. Cue the Tory roar.
So frequently does Badenoch pursue this (at times conspiratorial) line of inquiry that Starmer’s team has prepared a specific comeback. “We know she is not a lawyer, she is clearly not a leader”, Starmer declared in a recent session. “And if she keeps on like this, she is going to be the next lettuce.”
The riposte ensured Starmer won the exchange and the surrounding session. Labour MPs lapped up the PM’s allusion to Liz Truss’ defeat at the hands of a bewigged leaf vegetable. (The lettuce did have hands). How the Tory benches hushed.
But Badenoch’s question — an old Boris Johnson quip from his buccaneering heyday — remains outstanding. The development of this government in recent weeks points to a prevalent tension between the PM’s two distinct personalities. Keir Starmer the methodical lawyer and Keir Starmer the ruthless politician still vie for supremacy.
At the peak of Partygate, Starmer’s dual nature worked in tandem to defenestrate his bête noire. The now-prime minister, treating the commons as his courtroom, ruthlessly cross-examined Johnson into submission. In the House, Starmer’s self-contained professionalism contrasted reassuringly with the accused’s blithe bluster. Politically, the lawyer versus the liar imagery portrayed a potent dichotomy. Harriet Harman and the privileges committee did the rest.
But since entering No 10 Downing Street, Starmer’s split personality — and the tension between legal and political imperatives — has infused his government. If there is a disjointed, unbalanced feel to the government’s priorities, it flows from the individual in whose contested image Whitehall is now constituted.
Consider the case of Lord Hermer, the prime minister’s pick to serve as attorney general, whose striking prominence personifies the first half of this law-politics paradox.
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The law
Lord (Richard) Hermer was plucked from relative obscurity in July 2024 to perform the role that, it’s often suggested, once marked the apex of Starmer’s ambition.
The attorney general is a low-profile position, by design and necessity. Sure, sometimes they appear before MPs to declare a parliament “dead” — sometimes they are Suella Braverman. But attorneys general, generally, accomplish their work behind the scenes. They counsel ministers on how mooted measures will interact with the judicial system; they are tasked with reviewing Crown Court sentences that are considered “unduly lean”. Crucially, their advice to officials is delivered in the strictest confidence. Requests to see such guidance are usually vehemently denied. The attorney general’s activity should be imperceptible.
Brace for faint praise: Starmer, who became an MP in 2015 after a long career in law and officialdom, would have suited the role. Indeed, had Ed Miliband won the general election of that year, the prime minister’s law officer destiny would surely have come to pass. As Labour leader, Miliband persuaded the now-PM to join his party and stand for parliament as the MP for Holborn and St Pancras. (Contemporary reports suggested the constituency’s candidate selection process was stitched up in Starmer’s favour). Miliband must have imagined Starmer, an institutionalist with progressive prowess, as perfect for the role of attorney general in a Labour government.
Lord Hermer is cut from the same silk as the Starmer of 2015. The human rights law specialists are close personal friends, having practised as colleagues at Doughty Street Chambers in the noughties. And like Starmer, Hermer’s lawyer past is considered prime hunting ground for Tory attack dogs. The attorney general once represented Sri Lankan refugees to the Chagos Islands and ex-Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams (in separate cases). He acted, too, for the human rights group Liberty in the case of Isis bride Shamima Begum. His record of clients reads as a Tory rogues’ gallery.
Hermer’s public commentary, delivered before his time in office, is a similarly rich resource for Conservative propagandists. He once said that pledges to “control our borders” were dehumanising; acknowledged a “moral argument” for Britain to pay reparations for slavery; decried Donald Trump as an “orange tyrant”; and, as late as May 2023, celebrated Just Stop Oil group’s disruptive protests as “inspiring”.
Nonetheless, it is Hermer’s role in government, as a distinctly perceptible attorney general, that continues to attract the greatest share of SW1 chagrin. And nor is such criticism limited to the 121 MPs who named Badenoch as Tory leader last year. According to recent reports, a string of cabinet ministers consider Hermer as a spanner in the machinery of government: a quibbling block on the worthy churn of politics and policy. Ministers have described Hermer to The Times as a “freeze on government”, who opposes measures on the off chance of conflict in the courts.
In other words: this government, unburdened by doctrine, has become burdened by legal strictures.
Delivering his first set-piece speech as attorney general last year, Hermer declared that the UK government would — after years of legal brinkmanship from Tory premiers — once more place the rule of law at the centre of its domestic and diplomatic agendas. To ensure as much, Hermer unveiled his plan to amend the guidance for “assessing legal risk” in government; that would ensure “the standards for calibrating legality” were raised, he said. “I want [lawyers] to feel empowered to give their full and frank advice to me and others in government and to stand up for the rule of law.”
Hermer has since defended these changes under question from sceptical MPs. Asked about the “practical impact” of his amendments at a justice select committee hearing, Hermer argued the legal risk guidance he inherited had “risked diluting legal standards”. Old guidance meant ministers were “being advised that there was a respectable legal argument” for a particular policy, but weren’t being properly informed it “was highly likely to be unlawful”, Hermer contended.
Labour MP Andy Slaughter, the committee chair, did not sound wholly convinced. In what seems like a far-sighted observation, he suggested that overly stringent advice could “impair” the ministers’ ability to construct a “radical and reforming government”. Slaughter cited the government’s “very ambitious targets on housebuilding and planning”. Labour MP Sarah Russell also expressed “some concerns”.
Hermer did not budge. “The guidance will not inhibit decision-makers”, he insisted. “The guidance will ensure that decision-makers are possessed with proper, full, comprehensive legal analysis on which to make their decision.”
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The politics
This was the context into which Lord Glasman’s pointed intervention was received this week.
In an interview with the New Statesman, the leading Labour peer said he considered Hermer an “arrogant, progressive fool”. “He’s got to go”, Glasman said of his noble colleague. “He is the absolute archetype of an arrogant, progressive fool who thinks that law is a replacement for politics… They talk about the rule of law but what they want is a rule of lawyers.”
Lord (Maurice) Glasman is the intellectual force behind Blue Labour, the party faction that advocates a counter-intuitive blend of economically left/statist policies and social conservatism. The Blue Labour weltanschauung has commanded significant attention in recent weeks; Glasman’s prominence has risen in direct proportion to the burgeoning threat of Nigel Farage and Reform UK.
The Labour peer’s appearance at Donald Trump’s inauguration, as the only party figure to receive an invitation (courtesy of vice president JD Vance), sparked particular intrigue — especially as it coincided with the formation of a new Blue Labour caucus at Westminster. Dan Carden, once a devout Corbynist, leads the grouping of MPs.
Lord Glasman also heads a Policy Exchange research programme called the “Future of the Left” — alongside fellow Blue Labourites Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford. No 10 is said to be paying close attention to the project’s work, and Rutherford is reported to have recently met several of Keir Starmer’s aides at No 10, including his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney.
McSweeney is a natural Blue Labour ally. Glasman and the man who masterminded Labour’s 2024 election victory first met during the latter’s time fighting the British National Party (BNP) in Barking and Dagenham.
McSweeney, fortunately, has never been less of a mystery. Thanks to Get In — Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s extraordinarily detailed new account of his rise to power (with Starmer in tow), we have never known more about McSweeney’s politics and motivations. Maguire and Pogrund, journalists with the Times and Sunday Times newspapers, purvey his loathing of elite progressive opinion and its pernicious capture of the Labour Party.
In one instructive passage, McSweeney is reported as asking Labour colleagues a series of pressing questions: “Are we always going to be for the judges? Are we always going to be for the BBC? Why should Gary Lineker be paid £2 million a year?”. The No 10 chief of staff, it is written, felt “Labour’s instincts had become conservative, elitist, too willing to defend failure provided those failing were its friends: lawyers, activists, columnists.”
For all its sentimental claims of iconoclasm and people power, [Labour] was really a ‘party of the status quo’, an echo chamber for the received wisdom of metropolitan England that its traditional voters despised.
McSweeney has long argued Labour must adopt clear and robust positions on law and order, on immigration and on questions of culture — issues the party in previous iterations squeamishly avoided. Today, he spearheads a political operation that is, more and more, cast in the image of Blue Labour.
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Disruption
For the faithful Blue Labourite, Lord Hermer represents all that is wrong with elite progressive opinion and its grip on the party at large. His entrance into Labour politics last July was, in truth, a natural evolution; Hermer followed in the footsteps of many a human rights specialist. Blue Labour loathes the supple partition between the legal profession and party politics.
After all, the attorney general possesses the exact managerial, arch-institutionalist impulses Glasman insists Labour must eschew to resist the insurgent right. Hermer’s legalism is antithetical to the Blue Labour cause in a most literal sense. He embodies a contradictory theory of government. He values establishment thinking over political insurgency.
From Keir Starmer’s vantage point in No 10 Downing Street, this dichotomy is no mere abstraction. It is presented to him as a practical political choice — one that could define the shape of his premiership.
Last month, responding to critical briefings at Hermer’s expense, a No 10 spokesperson voiced the prime minister’s full confidence in the attorney general. But the government’s politics has developed rapidly in recent weeks — and Hermer is looking more and more like an anachronism from a bygone reset.
Starmer’s increasingly strident stances, borne unmistakably of McSweeney’s influence, speak volumes. There is a new, all-encompassing emphasis on growth; a harder line on border security; a resurgent frustration with Whitehall inertia. As the prime minister embraces his role as a pugnacious insurgent, the tension at the heart of his government throbs.
Addressing ministers at a cabinet away-day last month, Starmer berated “progressive liberals” who have become “too relaxed about not listening to people about the impact of [immigration]”. This sentiment was echoed by the official readout. The PM urged his team “to increase the pace of change to meet the demands of a new era”. He added: “My reflection is that while we are working away the world is speeding up.”
Starmer’s language reflects his gradual-turned-sudden conversion to the cause of political disruption. The focus on immigration and globalisation, the smashing of progressive taboos, the addressing of societal anxieties — it’s all ripped straight from the Blue Labour playbook. In truth, Starmer’s suspicion of his surrounding structures has been escalating ever since his statement on the Southport murders took aim at egregious state failure.
Disruption is coming, Starmer and McSweeney have concluded. They will be its author — not its victim.
But just how categorical is this tangible tone shift in practice? The PM’s commitment to the inherent good of institutions and to international law runs deep — arguably deeper than his recent reformation. Hermer’s place in government is a testament to this — and therefore an intellectual continuity in the prime minister’s otherwise fluid politics.
Hermer, in some compelling senses, reflects the Starmer of 2015: before No 10, before the Labour leadership, before Westminster — before McSweeney. The government’s strategic tension — between insurgency and institutionalism — is so politically profound because it is personal to Starmer. The tension reflects his striking evolution since 2015, since 2020, since 2024 — and simultaneously highlights aspects of his politics McSweeney is yet to dispel.
The prime minister’s past is in conflict with his future — a future that the momentum of events and McSweeney demand.
And this tension must be resolved. Starmer’s apparent embrace of Blue Labour doctrine has birthed an untenable hybrid: the PM is both a brazen populist and final bastion of the establishment — gatekeeper and barbarian.
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The Politics vs The law
The contested concept of “sovereignty” encapsulates how legal and political principle can interact in acute disharmony. So too does the concept of “Keir Starmer”. Can the prime minister resolve his ideological contradictions and discover his true political calling? Does he want to? Will he dare?
History serves as a guide in two senses. First, in a reductive rock-paper-scissors sense, politics beats law. The legal reality that sovereignty is vested in the United Kingdom parliament does not correspond with — or delegitimise — the political aspirations and assumptions of Scottish nationalists, for instance. The “pooling” of sovereignty to supranational bodies, such as the European Union, creates a new political reality — even though the default legal position does not change. Referenda express a new, arguably more potent, form of sovereignty than simple statute law confers.
Oh, and there is also Donald Trump — convicted felon and 47th president — to consider.
Abstraction aside, perhaps a more pertinent precedent is this: the McSweeney-Starmer dynamic ratchets only in one direction. Sometimes it can take time for the cogs to shift and convulsion to resolve — but as Get In elucidates, when the prime minister settles on a course of action, he pursues it with genuine remorselessness. Baroness Gray and Jeremy Corbyn can attest. McSweeney and Starmer’s resonance, after an unforeseen ruction, is restored. But the consensus is forged on the former’s terms. Morgan always wins.
Time for some steps back. Get In does not reveal what McSweeney thinks about Hermer specifically. There is no suggestion Lord Glasman was speaking for McSweeney in his NS interview. McSweeney’s natural affinity with Blue Labour is not reflected in any official collaboration.
Nor is Hermer, despite the headline suggestions of critical columnists and Conservative frontbenchers, solely responsible for the government’s principal legal-political debacle: the Chagos Islands handover.
All that said, the Chagos fiasco does flow from a familiar hierarchy of imperatives: strict legal probity has been privileged above and beyond considerations of political sense. The government took the view, reportedly on Hermer’s advice, that Britain has an “obligation” to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius — even though the International Court of Justice’s opinion on the matter is not legally binding.
The details of the deal reflect dismal politics. Assuming the new US administration consents, the UK government will cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands on the agreement it can lease back the Diego Garcia military base for 99 years at the cost of £9 billion.
But even if Donald Trump objects, the political damage is surely done. The saga has made Labour look profligate with the public purse and unpatriotic. In electoral terms, that is the losing Labour formula.
McSweeney won this argument in opposition. How quickly Whitehall inertia smuggled complacency back into Labour politics.
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His friends for his life
Starmer stands tallest at the crossroads. Moments of apparent flux prompt a decisive response. The prime minister finds solace in ending the career of a former friend or ex-comrade.
Get In author Patrick Maguire, Westminster’s most accomplished Starmerologist, reckons that the prime minister is “capable of going anywhere he believes political advantage might lie”. His tome’s opening epigraph repurposes an old Jeremy Thorpe quote, issued in response to Harold MacMillan’s Night of the Long Knives cabinet reshuffle: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.”
Hermer, the personification of all Blue Labour exists to eradicate, has good reason to fear Starmer’s self-interested scythe. His exit from government, if it does eventually come to pass, would be a sure signal of prime ministerial intent.
Practically of course, shuffling Hermer out of the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) would be a simple administrative task. He is a Labour peer with no political-factional grounding in the party. Hermer owes his ermine robes and ministerial red box to Starmer. There are plenty of Labour KCs who could assume his post. There would be none of the political tremors caused by Jeremy Corbyn’s exile in 2020; or logistical quandaries posed by Sue Gray’s deposition. Hermer, materially, is Starmer’s most vulnerable minister.
Psychologically though, the act of removing Hermer would be harrowing. It would mark Starmer’s most ruthless act by some distance. The PM’s relationship with his attorney general renders the above Thorpe quote doubly applicable; Starmer would also be signalling a definitive break with the philosophy he once cherished, before McSweeney burdened him with power and contradictions.
And yet this is the choice the prime minister faces. The level of noise that surrounds Hermer means that any decision to retain his skills would be an active one. For what it is worth, Starmer’s defence of Hermer at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday was described as “impassioned” by the Guardian. We have seen Starmer defend safe colleagues (Rachel Reeves recently for instance). He could have been far stronger.
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Morgan always wins
Hermer is doing the job Starmer hired him to do — and doing it well. That’s the problem.
As Miliband once wanted Starmer, Starmer knew Hermer would be a statement appointment. His zealous emphasis on proper procedure symbolised the government’s stability is change maxim.
But this sentiment has been slowly eroded by the harsh realities of government. Voters care about ends not means. Since July 2024, Labour has won no plaudits for its due respect for norms and veneration of convention. We can say Hermer’s appointment, in these terms at least, reflected the wrong priorities.
In practical terms, to appropriate the PM’s own vernacular, the attorney general is a blocker in a government to builders. Further tension between Starmer’s political initiative, as reimagined in recent weeks, and the legal advice Hermer consummately enforces is inevitable — on asylum law, on housebuilding, on growth projects. Meanwhile, the attorney general’s belief in the sanctity and inviolability of international law — restated in a speech to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe last month — could become a significant sticking point if Labour turns on the ECHR. That is far from out of the question.
The bottom line is this: an insurgency with glaring internal impediments is no insurgency at all — not politically, not practically. McSweeney must recognise this.
Now, if the politics proceeds as precedent suggests, the prime minister will come around to the McSweeney view. Starmer’s final sacrifice will be his former self. Mr Rules will be replaced by someone willing to shatter norms to deliver for voters.
And McSweeney will have utterly reconfigured the man he happened upon in 2019. Total victory.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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Source: Politics
