Will Keir Starmer be Labour’s compromised hero?

As Soviet communism fell in 1989, the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote a defence of the art of possible that deserves to endure. Terrible regimes aren’t always toppled by romantic revolutionaries, who reject everything they stand for, he wrote in The Heroes of the Retreat.

‘In the past few decades, a more significant protagonist has stepped forward: a hero of a new kind, representing not victory, conquest and triumph, but renunciation, reduction and dismantling.’ Only insiders, who are complicit in the regime’s crimes, have the access to power needed to destroy them. Only they had enough credibility with enough of the regime’s supporters to limit resistance from the old guard.

Keir Starmer looks as if he will be Labour’s hero of retreat. If Labour members had the moral capacity to accept the shame that is theirs, Jess Phillips and Lisa Nandy would be far ahead in the leadership contest, and Starmer wouldn’t stand a chance.