From Blair and Britpop to Starmer and the Oasis comeback: why character, not personality, matters

We get both the leaders and entertainers we deserve.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Tony Blair talks to a member of Oasis at a reception.

Number 10.

Last time we had a new Labour prime minister, there were no Partygate fears in Number 10. Quite the opposite. Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia project threw its front door open to the likes of Britpop overlord Noel Gallagher of Oasis at a bash in 1997. Inheriting a rising economy, things for New Labour, as well as for Oasis, could only get better.

This time around, Sir Keir Starmer has “tough decisions” to make, such as trying to deny a universal winter fuel allowance to most pensioners. Blair arguably never had a really tough decision to make, until his Iraq war nemesis. Since then, Oasis has turned into an unacceptable face of capitalism, as the Gallagher brothers’ reunion tour next year turns into a Ticketmaster greed-fest of “dynamic pricing”. Diabolical pricing, more like.

Starmer and Blair both aspired to usher in an era of change and renewal. The similarity of their circumstances ends there. Nearly 30 years on, Starmer is in a different world. And the transformation of Oasis is totemic of that – from the joys of Britpop to the horrors of rip-off.

That times change is axiomatic. The nineties had busts and booms; the UK’s Black Wednesday currency crisis was of the former, the snarky underclass anthems of Oasis a paradigm of the latter. Now, in the 2020s, there are only busts. Like the note left in the Treasury drawer in 2010 joked, there really is no money left now. Except, apparently, for Oasis.

Which brings us to the false idols of politics. Since personality, rather than policy, became the political trump card it’s inevitable that we would get Trump. Or someone like him.

An engaging question arises as to how the two Labour PMs were and are equipped spiritually for the times in which they lead. The spiritual state of Oasis is a linked matter, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Blair’s government famously didn’t “do God”, though it turned out he did privately, converting to his wife’s Roman Catholicism almost immediately after leaving office in 2007. Perhaps he had a priest hole in the family flat above Number 11. He consistently denied claims that he prayed with American president George W. Bush before or during the Iraq war.

Starmer doesn’t do God rather more formally, as a self-declared atheist. We can conclude that prayer is not a resource that he needs as he faces a more challenging immediate political future than Blair’s early days as PM. I only wish Starmer would appear in a T-shirt with the slogan “No Prayer, Like Blair”.

Arguably the spiritual life doesn’t matter for any leader. The job of PM is all about simple competence, mostly in money management. To paraphrase the pithy quip from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign (on which Blair’s so strategically relied), it’s all about the economy, stupid.

So the worship is of mammon rather than God. Here the current and former PMs might care to track the career trajectory of the two Lords Gallagher of Oasis from Blair to Starmer. In 1997, they were in their pomp as authentic Mancunian working-class heroes. Today, the brothers have to make up and go back on the road to subsidise Noel’s £20million divorce settlement. A rather different demographic.

There’s perhaps no great political lesson there for political leaders, but it’s almost Faustian in its scope. See what happens when you bank only with mammon.

Which brings us to the false idols of politics. Since personality, rather than policy, became the political trump card it’s inevitable that we would get Trump. Or someone like him. It doesn’t matter, to his core vote, what he’s done or what he’s incapable of doing, Only who he is. He’s an idol, a cult image, a golden calf. Trump’s bull is sacred, whatever he does.

The UK thankfully hasn’t had one of those yet (though there were warning tremors in Boris Johnson). But it’s telling that Blair is said to have developed a messianic tendency after his premiership’s early intervention in Kosovo during the war in former Yugoslavia. At the termination of hostilities, crowds there sought to touch his clothes as he passed.

Strange that being touched should make him feel untouchable. But that’s the way of messianics. It can be the same with rock & roll stars. Live music, at its best, can offer a transcendent sense of communion. At its worst, it’s the adoration of stage idols that sends them a little mad. Or mad for it.

Oasis’s Liam Gallagher isn’t in this together with his fans anymore. He’s turned into a Marie Antoinette figure online in response to the ludicrous prices charged to watch him from Ticketmaster. He substitutes “Shut up” and “£100,000 kneeling tickets” for “Let them eat cake”.

He and his brother are warnings of what can happen in so short a period between the ascendancy of Blair and that of Starmer. True, pop stars aren’t as dangerous as someone such as Trump. But they do show us that we get both the entertainers and the leaders we deserve.

Column

Culture

Politics

11 January 2024

4 min read

After Angela: why Christian Democracy still works

Feeling somewhat labelled, George Pitcher unpacks why Christian Democracy still appeals to him, even in the UK, and explores its philosophical roots in the breathless thought of Jacques Maritain.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A politician stands a labelled lectern speaking and gesticulating with a hand.

Angel Merkel, addresses her political party.

When I’m accused of being a “leftie” in the predominantly Conservative area of East Sussex in which we live – though there are signs of automatic Tory support fragmenting – I usually reply that actually I’m a Christian Democrat.

At one level, this is a case of simple literal determinism: I’m a Christian and a democrat. Tick. But Christian Democracy is more complicated than that – not least because its continental European iteration was built on the re-building of a pan-national concord after the Second World War and the establishment of the European Union, a narrative from which the UK has largely excluded itself.

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was a paragon of this ideology, growing out of the re-unification of Germany that began in 1989. It’s unlikely that her political ideology would have prospered in Britain.

The so-called three Fs of social conservatism are family, faith and flag. I sign up to the first two. But not the nationalism of the third. Here, I’m squarely in Christian Democrat territory.

It’s that ideology that appeals to me. Essentially, Christian Democracy is rooted in an attempt, since the 19th century, to reconcile Catholic social teaching with democracy and capitalism (tick, again). In that context, it combines left-wing economics with social conservatism.

I awoke with a start some years ago with the realisation that I’m socially conservative. My divergence from my socially liberal friends had been so gradual as to be imperceptible. But here I stand, I can do no other.

I oppose assisted suicide – a liberal standard – not, as I’m accused, because of some vague commitment to the sanctity of life but because I believe there’s extreme moral jeopardy in the state endorsing in its legislature that some lives are not worth living. I believe that same-sex unions should be blessed in Church (and I have done so), but I also believe that’s a definitional difference from marriage as celebrated in church.

The hard right uses woke as a term of abuse when all it really means to many of us is being "awake" or "quite nice". By this ascription, for instance, someone who holds that refugees should be treated with dignity can be described as woke. But I also believe that a male cannot become a woman – and be recognised by the state as such – simply by declaring that he is so. Nor do I think that history can be judged by contemporary mmores,and I find cancel culture abhorrent. That makes me anti-woke in some circles.

By these criteria, I’m socially conservative. So be it. The so-called three Fs of social conservatism are family, faith and flag. I sign up to the first two. But not the nationalism of the third. Here, I’m squarely in Christian Democrat territory.

As for a social economy, I believe in a state big enough to provide free health care at the point of delivery, education as a right and not a privilege and a welfare state robust enough to support the marginalised and vulnerable – in scriptural terms, “the poor”. Again, that’s Christian Democracy, at least as Merkel might understand it.

But ideologies need ideologues and Christian Democracy’s problem in the UK is that we have not too few, but too many and too varied.

All of which will guide my vote this year’s general election. There won’t be a CDU on the ballot paper and, even if there were, our ridiculous first-past-the-post electoral system mocks our democracy. When the Liberal Democrats struggle to maintain a toehold in parliament, despite being a widely credible alternative in many Tory seats, what chance for a more esoteric political initiative?

An argument may be mounted that with the Church of England established in law, 26 bishops sitting in the legislature of the House of Lords as a consequence, and the head of state as the Church’s supreme governor, Christian Democracy is already pretty well served in the UK.

Wisely, British Christian Democrats have endeavoured over the past three decades and more to be a movement within politics, rather than a political party (though no disrespect is intended here to the Christian People’s Alliance). This is Christian Democracy as an idea, rather than a voting option.

For this idea to have traction, it needs a political ideology, which may or may not be along the lines of the one I’ve adumbrated. But ideologies need ideologues and Christian Democracy’s problem in the UK is that we have not too few, but too many and too varied. So it may be as well to look to a contemporary historical leader of thought.

The nearest thing that European Christian Democrats have to a uniting figure is the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who died in 1973. To read Maritain at length is to leave one breathless with anticipation for what could be.

An albeit dangerous summation of Maritain is that he calls the West to a “New Christendom” that defines the state not by Christian faith, but attempts to define our faith through a secular prism, to make it active in the public square.

I particularly like the way this is described by American theologian William T, Cavanagh: “[T]his means in effect that there is trash to be picked up, businesses to be run, wars to be fought. These things are not our ultimate end, but neither are they simply cut loose from any spiritual significance.”

If we’re able to unpack that sense of purpose, then just maybe we can approach an election with this unifying political slogan: Vote Christian Democrat.