The politics of boring: Why Starmer won — and why Biden probably won’t

LONDON — In the United Kingdom, a new yawn has broken.

With his gelled hair and fondness for dark blue shirts worn under a sensible jacket — like a teacher about to hit the dance floor at a school disco — Keir Starmer may not appreciate being called boring.

But compared with the unchained forces of mayhem that characterized British politics in recent years, the new prime minister’s dull ordinariness is arguably his greatest electoral asset.

Starmer’s landslide win for his center-left Labour Party over the conservative Tories in a parliamentary election Thursday is a testament to the fact that in politics, boring isn’t always bad.

Like U.S. President Joe Biden in 2020, Starmer capitalized on a demand from voters desperate to just end the madness.

“Lots of the public we speak to in focus groups say, [Starmer] is boring, but maybe boring is what we need right now,” said Luke Tryl, executive director of More in Common, a political consultancy. “It’s certainly the case there’s both exhaustion at Tory chaos, but also the general sense of politics as being never-ending.”

The question, now that Starmer is preparing to govern, is whether he will be able to keep making boring work — or whether, like Biden before him, it will come back to bite him.

Starmer’s promise: ‘Change,’ but not the scary kind

For now at least, Britain’s new prime minister is happy enough to have won a historic victory. Analysts (and Starmer’s defeated Conservative opponents) agree that many voters just wanted to change the record from the worn-out British soundtrack of comical capers and economic misrule after 14 years of Tory governments. 

Brexit, with all its violence and divisions, split the country down the middle and unleashed years of bitterness, destroying the careers of two Tory prime ministers: David Cameron and Theresa May. The Covid pandemic swept away a third, after Boris Johnson was caught up in a series of scandals including being fined by police for partying in Downing Street in breach of his own lockdown. 

Starmer’s promise: ‘Change,’ but not the scary kind. | Anthony Devlin/Getty Images

Then, after just 45 catastrophic days, Johnson’s successor Liz Truss became the fourth Tory prime minister to be shown the door of 10 Downing Street. Having crashed the financial markets and sent borrowing costs into orbit, she destroyed not only her political career but her party’s already battered reputation for competence. Even Rishi Sunak’s soothing managerial style as he cleared up Truss’ mess couldn’t repair the Tory brand.

Enter Starmer.

A pedestrian political orator who loves the banal pleasures of football and a good curry (and dislikes working late on Fridays), the understated Labour leader embodies the politics of boring.

During his risk-averse election campaign, he chose to promise little, offering instead a quiet, one-word slogan: “Change.” 

To mayhem-weary British voters, however, being forgettable has proved attractive. Pitted against Sunak — not the most exhilarating politician either — Starmer achieved his party’s biggest victory since former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s 1997 trouncing of the Tories.

As Starmer’s biographer, Tom Baldwin, notes, the Labour leader didn’t need a book of 100,000 words to sell himself to the nation after years of Tory disarray.

He only needed four: “I am not them.”

Biden 2020: Make the White House Boring Again

Starmer’s appeal is reminiscent of another center-left, largely uninspiring orator.

After four years of U.S. President Donald Trump — who spent his term in office ripping up established norms, provoking allies, ditching international agreements and getting himself impeached — a majority of the country rallied behind the unstated theme of the Biden 2020 campaign: Make the White House Boring Again.

In office, Biden largely continued to dole out the same medicine, trying to cool Washington’s feverous partisanship by reaching across the aisle. 

But as the president’s team found out, it’s one thing to campaign in a pedestrian fashion, and another to try to govern that way.

White House aides — and the president himself — took satisfaction in contrasting the successful results of Biden’s work with Trump’s failed, flashier efforts. “He promised ‘Infrastructure Week’ every week for four years and never built a damn thing,” Biden said this spring to a group of laughing union members while touting the launch of 50,000 projects due to one of the signature domestic spending laws he signed.

A majority of the country rallied behind the unstated theme of the Biden 2020 campaign: Make the White House Boring Again. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

“Americans overwhelmingly chose President Biden’s competent leadership over Trump’s chaos and weakness,” said Charles Lutvak, campaign spokesman, speaking before the U.S. president’s disastrous debate performance kicked off another round of concerns about Biden’s age, leading to calls he should step down to make way for another candidate.

“After the past four years of delivering on the issues that matter most to them, voters are ready to do it again this November,” Lutvak added.

In truth, however, most voters weren’t buying it. Even before Biden became interesting for all the wrong reasons, his poll numbers were already slipping, with surveys predicting a defeat in November against a politician whose ability to dominate a news cycle — good or bad — is unparalleled in modern American history.

And even where his major infrastructure bills were successful, many voters who saw their benefits didn’t know he was responsible for them, a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll showed.

“We wanted to let tired Americans think about the White House less,” said one former senior Biden campaign official not authorized to speak publicly about internal conversations. “But at times, it’s possible to wonder if we did too good of a job.” 

Recently, White House and campaign advisers have grown frustrated with how difficult it has been to take their message — of Biden being the competent adult in the room — and break through the cluttered, fractured media landscape, according to three officials not authorized to publicly discuss internal conversations. 

Part of the problem has been the messenger himself: Biden, like Starmer, isn’t the most dynamic communicator. His age and a series of crises — including the war in Gaza and stubborn inflation — has hindered his ability to sell the public on his accomplishments. 

But Biden’s team has also run up against the short attention span of a public — and political media — that all too often, the officials feel, is enraptured by whatever controversy Trump spins off next.

“The key for Biden is to remind moderates and his own base just how much the opposite of stable Trump is,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. “The downside is that being stable and politically normal is not exciting.”

The cruel irony for the Biden team is that the president is currently monopolizing the media and public’s attention — but not for the reasons they had hoped.

The other winner of the U.K. election: Nigel Farage

In the U.K, Starmer has more time to play with, but maybe not that much. While another election is almost certainly four or five years away, he’ll face the same dangers of an impatient media and a public with smartphone-short attention spans, according to government and party insiders. 

A Labour aide likened Starmer’s challenge to that faced by Clement Attlee, the party’s most celebrated historical prime minister, who won power after World War II with a mandate for change and introduced Britain’s iconic state-run National Health Service offering free care for all. 

Elected in 1945, Attlee was known as competent but outwardly quite dreary. And he was thrown out of office again within six years.

Baldwin, who has spent many hours in Starmer’s company for his biography, insists the new premier isn’t trying to be drab. 

“He doesn’t like the boring tag. No one wants to be called boring, no one wants to be called dull,” Baldwin said. “What he is, in his mind, is serious. And that means recognizing that the problems facing this country are complicated, the solutions are complicated and that offering a three-word slogan and saying it will solve everybody’s problems all at once is not his kind of politics.” 

But punchy slogans are punchy for a reason. If anything, they’re likely to resonate more loudly against a backdrop of quiet government that doesn’t excite or enthuse voters’ passions.

According to one senior government official, Starmer and his team are intent on “long-term thinking” and view their mission as a project to rebuild Britain over the next 10 years. That will require him to win the next election, too. 

“Keir is very passionate about a mission-led government,” the official said. “He’s talking about a decade of renewal.” The civil service will welcome such an approach, the official said. “If you really want to fix the NHS or the economy it’s going to take a really long time.”

It’s an open question whether he’ll have it. Just as Trump has returned to upend Biden’s reelection plans, so Britain’s populist right — which delivered the 2016 vote for Brexit — may not lie sleeping for long.

Starmer wasn’t the only winner of this week’s election. Voters also gave Nigel Farage, one of Brexit’s most influential firebrands and now an anti-immigration campaigner, his best result ever and a platform to build on.

After winning a seat in parliament for the first time, Farage vowed to “build a mass national movement over the next few years” to challenge Labour for power at the next election, expected in 2029.

“Something very fundamental is happening,” Farage declared. “This is just the first step of something that is going to stun all of you.”

Some defeated Conservatives will be tempted to unite the right and throw their lot in with the rabble-rousing, beer-drinking Farage. There has even been talk of a merger between the old Tories and Farage’s Reform UK party. 

“As much as you’ve got that desire for calm and a quieter type of politics, there’s also deep dissatisfaction with the status quo,” said Tryl, from More in Common. 

“If things don’t start to feel better in this country, the sense that Starmer is just another boring politician versus someone like Nigel Farage — who is more exciting, who would actually get stuff done, would bring about real change — will hurt them.”

When the right finds its voice again, as it surely will, the question for Starmer and his supporters will be whether to stay quiet or start shouting back.