You are a rich lawyer, past middle age. Life has, despite the natural evils and tragedies to which we are all subject, been quite good to you. You’re prime minister. You believe in almost nothing. What do you do? Most of your day consists of having meetings with people who know things and care about them. You don’t know much — your schedule is prohibitive — and you don’t care much about anything. When papers land on your desk you read them carefully. A predecessor of yours did not pay attention to the details, and his example is a bad lesson, one you don’t want to follow. You always read the papers. You read them very carefully.
The people who surround you are younger than you. They’re ambitious to the point of institutionalisation. Broadmoor beckons. They want your job and they want your head and like you, they don’t care much about outcomes. They have certain sacred totems, amulets of steel and glass, amulets with budgets, that they want to protect. But vision? They are devoid of vision. They want a nicer and fairer world, if pressed. They believe there is no such thing as human nature. When they encounter reality they run screaming away, and pretend it does not exist.
Now you’re a diplomat-civil-servant-adviser, a creature of the state and its rulers, a thoroughgoing product of the regime. You’re getting on, now. But you don’t think about it. You had power before but that was a time ago. You’ve got it again, got it handed to you. You’re a tough guy, a really tough guy, and your publisher thinks you’re so tough it’s worth remarking upon. He says you’re the heir to Machiavelli. You aren’t, of course, because Machiavelli was intelligent and you have only what passes for intelligence in regime circles. But you think you’re Machiavelli, too, and you once read The Prince, so that’s only fair.
You’ve been angling for many years to return once again to power. What will you do with it? That is in question. You think of yourself as an administrator of power, a steward. You have no goals, per se, just instincts. Just instincts and a sense of how things ought to be comported, how poses ought to be held. You’re a genius, you tell yourself. A genius. What occurs to you so rarely occurs to other men.
Now you’re close to power. Something has come up. A foreign state, a small one, comes to you and offers you another deal. You can clutch it in your gnarled fingers. It’s almost like a return to youth and strength. You take it, and talk it up on the TV. It’s like you’re young again. It’s like you’re young again.
For people who believe in nothing, means matter quite a lot more than ends. Nothing matters per se, so whatever you choose to do is a good deal less important than the fact that you did it. Distinct accomplishment is for the birds. Plans of varying quality, beautifully administered. That is what the history books will say about you.
I believe the foreign policy of Keir Starmer and his grey cardinal Jonathan Powell is primarily understood on a psychological basis. A hormonal basis.
Starmer is a lawyer used to being esteemed by lawyers. He cares, possibly below the level of conscious thought, about what lawyers and courts say and what papers issue forth from their printers. What they say is carved on stone tablets. He would not wish to be shunned in their company. If a court tells Keir Starmer to do something, he does it. He would do anything if they told him to. Give away a piece of British territory: of course, he’s already done it. Sabotage Britain’s economic growth for a generation? The Supreme Court has only to publish a pdf on its website. It’s psychological, below the level of conscious thought. He may be beyond saving.
Jonathan Powell is what remains of the wreck of a man. He is old, prematurely old, and thinks of himself as a genius. He’s the very worst of what an old man might be. A walking ruin. Hormonally deficient, intellectually absent, morally dead. An enemy of Britain, an enemy of its future and its people. If he were vivisected, it’s possible they’d find some horrible parasite in his torso or his head, eating away at everything that might have made him a person — a human as distinct from a speck of yeast. But he’s empty now, fake like a wax dummy, an example of the living dead.
Yet empty people can do much evil if they are given power. Powell loves power, worships it. It’s his whole life. It’s sold his books, power and its pretence. But because he is nothing, believes in nothing, how he chooses to use power is empty, too. Britain is close to total destruction. And this man, this lack of a man, is the one who has been chosen to give the country strategic vision.
You are a prime minister who believes in nothing. Your chief adviser is a walking cadaver who believes himself Machiavelli. What would you do? What will you do?