I didn’t see many pundits mention the fact that Starmer’s election victory marked a century since Ramsay MacDonald became the first Labour Party prime minister in 1924, after Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives lost their parliamentary majority. True, the MacDonald minority government lasted barely ten months, but it marked the moment Asquith’s Liberal Party went into sharp decline. Anyone who thinks the Tories had a catastrophic night on Thursday should reflect on how the Liberals went from 400 seats in 1906 to only 40 in 1924. Lloyd George had also promised the British people – still shellshocked literally and metaphorically from World War I – employment, prosperity and a massive home-building programme, but failed to deliver. One final straw for the disillusioned electorate was the sale of honours scandal, which saw Liberal Party donors paying £10,000 for a knighthood, while the starting price for a peerage was £50,000. The House of Lords was soon filled with shysters and spivs. Sounds familiar? Then, as now, voters could give politicians a ferocious kicking if they felt a party was ruling for their cronies, rather than for them. 

I became acutely aware of these eerie parallels after reading Simon Heffer’s brilliant history of the interwar period, Sing as We Go, (rather like doing a modern history degree in a week), for our conversation at the Essex Literary Festival last Sunday. We discussed how the ruling classes feared the rise of Labour in 1924 would lead to a Bolshevik-style revolution. But George V counselled reason and told his mother, Queen Alexandra: “They have different ideas to ours as they are all socialists, but they ought to be given a chance and ought to be treated fairly.” MacDonald meanwhile noted of the monarch that he “plays the game straight, thought I feel is apprehensive. It wd [sic] be a miracle if he were not.” These historic reflections should be noted by all those who’ve become a tad hysterical at the thought of Starmer’s “radical agenda”. Most politicians become fairly pragmatic once in high office, while MacDonald would go on to be viewed as a “traitor” by many Labour supporters after forming a National Government in 1931 – working with Conservatives and Liberals to try and deal with the stringent challenges of the Great Depression. Keir Starmer must be well aware that no victory is etched in stone and even landslide wins can swiftly be washed away if politicians fail to delight.

How far up the ladder do you have to be before you cease to be working class? I’m asking on behalf of our new prime minister, who referenced “working-class families like mine” during an otherwise excellent, purposeful speech outside 10 Downing Street on Friday. I would say that if you’re the university-educated, former Director of Public Prosecutions, have been knighted, own a period house in affluent Kentish Town and your wife wears dresses from Me+Em, then you are thoroughly, professionally, almost terminally middle class. Yes, Starmer’s dad was, as we’re endlessly told, a “toolmaker” but your parents don’t define your class, as air hostess’s daughter Catherine, Princess of Wales, proves. Our June-July “Class Cocktail” issue of Perspectivewas devoted to this topic, because social class is still such an issue in British public and private life.

I feel strongly about Starmer passing himself off as a member of the proletariat because his trajectory isn’t a million miles away from my own. He grew up in the small Surrey town of Oxted, which is six miles away from the country pub my parents ran over the county border in Kent. My dad can be found, aged ten, on the 1920 census living with his family in a single room above a London shop and left school to work for a grocer four years later. Starmer and I were both propelled up the social ladder by free selective schooling (though his was a grammar and mine a private school that then offered some 11-plus places and bursaries). So far, so similar, but there has to come a point – probably when you find yourself buying avocados in Waitrose or going on holiday to Southwold – when you just admit you’ve become part of the privileged. Even John Prescott knew when he’d become middle class, FFS.

Despite this niggle, I am head-over-heels delighted that the new government at last reflects the nation it represents (since 2010 at least 60 per cent of cabinet ministers have been privately educated, except for under Theresa May, when that number halved). But in Starmer’s cabinet only one minister has been privately educated, while 23 of them – 92 per cent – went to comprehensive schools. I’ll need to familiarise myself with the new regime before I decide, like a fruity, female Nicky Haslam, who’s posh, who’s middle class and who’s genuinely WC. Apart from Angela Rayner. Even in a £550 Me+Em suit, she’s a working-class heroine.

No one’s quite sure what Shakespeare meant by the title of his bittersweet comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost, or even if we have the apostrophes in the right place. In this early play, the King of Navarre and his circle give up on the work of real love for a life dedicated to composing fancy soundbites. Whatever the Bard meant, the takeaway for Sir Keir Starmer – who’s just cruised into Downing Street with 34 per cent of the vote, won on the back of a hopeful manifesto comprised mostly of mellifluous waffle – is that it did not end well. Promising change is not enough. If Labour want to govern for more than a term they need to tackle, head-on, the real issues facing us all.

Let’s start with the obvious. Any system that delivers a 170-or-so seat majority on the back of just over one-third of the vote, is unfit for purpose. Consider this: Labour’s thirteen million votes in 2017 resulted in their catastrophic defeat, but their ten million votes this time resulted in a triumph. The absurdity is compounded when you consider that less than 60 per cent of enrolled voters actually bothered to exercise that right. Which means that just one in five cast their ballot for Labour. On top of this, an estimated seven million potential voters have been disenfranchised due to convoluted boundary changes. The injustices of our twisted system are manifest. How can it be right that SNP gets nine seats with less than three per cent of the vote, while Reform gets four, with fourteen? Both can feel robbed. Under a proportional (ie democratic) system, they would have won around fifteen and 90 seats respectively.  Indeed, only the Liberal Democrats and, to a lesser extent the Conservatives, received roughly the right number of seats for their share of the vote – a result only achieved by clever targeting (and inane stunts) on the part of the Lib Dems and, one suspects, a great deal of tactical voting by the electorate.

The best that can be said is that about 65 per cent of voters chose parties on the centre left (also characterised as those not intent on demonising immigrants), and we now have a government of that hue. Starmer is clearly a decent man, and thankfully a serious politician. He has both the opportunity, and the potential, to be a great PM, and seems committed to seeking consensus. But despite the Labour Party’s commitment to it in principle, electoral reform was not in their manifesto and is unlikely to be a priority. Starmer knows that under proportional representation he’d now be trying to forge a coalition with the Lib Dems, the Greens and Independents. Next time around, he might wish he had that opportunity. It’s not inconceivable that while he grapples with how to solve our many woes, from the state of our public services to the ruin of our environment, Reform will be conducting a reverse takeover of what’s left of the Tories and completing their metamorphosis into an English nationalist party. If Labour struggle to deliver on the change they’ve promised, in 2029 it could well be Nigel Farage marching through the door of Number 10 with just a third of the votes in his pocket.

Back in the mid-90s, when I was a newbie to Britain, the word “sleaze” became a catch-all for MPs behaving badly. It covered everything from undeclared financial favours to a “three-in-a-bed” sex romps. That these scandals ended up on the front pages was something of an own goal by the then PM, John Major. He’d set the bar, at the Conservative party conference of 1993, by pleading with his party to get “back to basics” and rediscover “the old values – neighbourliness, decency, courtesy”. His MPs, and even he himself, spent much of the next four years limbo’ing right under it. To his eternal credit, Major’s response was to set up the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which led to the identification of the seven “Nolan Principles” to be adhered to by all public servants. These were: Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty and Leadership.

Rishi Sunak’s ignominious departure from Number 10 is in no small measure a direct result of the extent to which Boris Johnson and his ministers not only flouted these standards but torched them in a bonfire of vulgarities over 2019 to 2022. While the worst of it was the mire of corruption oozing from the billions of pounds paid out in dodgy Covid contracts to the mates of a handful of inner-sanctum Tory MPs, it was his attempt to rewrite the parliamentary disciplinary rules to protect Owen Patterson – who broke the rules on lobbying – that triggered his own ejection from Downing Street, and began the Tories’ slide to near oblivion.

I did not vote for Keir Starmer’s party and disagreed with some of the stances Labour took in opposition. But I confess that I was both relieved and moved, listening to his first speech as PM. There is an obvious sincerity to Starmer that suggests both a genuine decency, and the kind of commitment to public service we once expected of our leaders. However successful or not he might be in delivering his other pledges, if he can make good on his promise to restore “respect to politics”, that in itself will be a major achievement.

Elsa, a young woman in her twenties, has gone back home to live with her parents after the break-up of her adventurous, exciting relationship with an older couple in the artistic community of New York. She lies around all day in her childhood bedroom, scrolling her friends’ lives on her phone and emerging only for awkward family dinners or to see her therapist, whose botoxed brows reflect her emotional numbness. Life looks up when a handsome movie actor Elsa has a crush on miraculously turns up for the annual theatre festival. Hoping to meet him, she gets a job in the local coffee shop and is rewarded by his regular visits – though it’s the intriguing, androgynous Sam, a member of his entourage, on whom she ultimately projects her fantasies and sexual confusions. 

Newbound’s story glides between dream and reality so the reader is never quite sure how much of the narrative is a projection of Elsa’s imagination. She relates more deeply to her fantasy of the movie actor than she does to the man in person. The fact we can guess he’s based on Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name is simply another illusive strand in the author’s smoke-and-mirrors narrative. Significantly, no one apart from Elsa’s boss, her friend, her dog and Sam, is given a name; the couple who were her former lovers are simply referred to as “the man and the woman”. Are they real, or just another figment of her fantasies? 

Misrecognition explores familiar 2020s territory in which young women navel-gaze about the meaning of desire and the parameters of their sexuality, refracted through the frame of the internet. But Newbound keeps it light and Elsa’s self-obsession is often relatable: “The issue is that there’s no blueprint for how to live,” she observes: “Or what to do when your fantasies no longer love you back.”