Nobody needs to be told that Keir Starmer’s father was a ‘toolmaker’. At a conservative count, he’s brought it up around 40 times in speeches, party political broadcasts and softball interviews. Nor do they need to be told that he enjoys watching Arsenal and playing football. These biographical claims have become so familiar that they have produced something of an industry in mocking and contesting them, and even outright rejection of their truthfulness, which creates common ground between Corbynism’s online rump and the populist right. Starmer’s father owned the factory, we’re told, and he can’t tell his old-fashioned wingers from his modern wide forwards.
All of it, this line of thought proceeds, comes down to a pantomime of authenticity, a sustained but limited and disingenuous effort by Starmer to distance himself from the alleged haughty metropolitan radicalism of the last Arsenal-supporting Labour leader, who was frequently berated not only in the Sun but also, and perhaps much more frequently, in the Guardian for his inability to speak to the ‘left-behind’ of Brexitland. For some, it would seem that a priority of the contemporary left comes down to exposing the spuriousness of the ‘toolmaker’ narrative, in the hope that managing to do so brings about the collapse of the whole project of the Labour right and its centrist adjutants to reclaim, and maintain, control of the party.
It is easy to see the temptation. Part of it, obviously, amounts to rage in the face of British media’s selectiveness and swaggering hypocrisy. Starmer is most of what Corbyn was hung out to dry for, and much, much more, but his positions are so usefully consonant with the post-Thatcher, post-Blair mainstream that he’s given licence to present himself as the epitome of bootstrap-pulling. The truth doesn’t really matter here — the BBC is unlikely to run an exposé on someone who is ideologically completely of a piece with it — and nor should it, because whether Starmer is ‘really working-class’ is far less interesting than what it means to insist so forcefully on him being presented as such.
Authentocracy is an attempt to diagnose and describe a growing tendency within the British political and journalistic establishment — here defined, inexhaustively, as the Labour right and centre, moderate Tories, the BBC, The Times and the Guardian — to leverage claims about class against the left. ‘Authentocracy’ was, when the theory first appeared in 2018, the rearguard action of Blairism, or Blairo-Cameronism, a desperate attempt to fend off an insurgent egalitarian politics by portraying it as out-of-touch with the hopes and needs of those outside the immediate line of sight of a London-based socialist cadre.
There were spiteful op-eds full of snarky remarks such as ‘[If ] Corbyn is to be rebranded as a populist by his inner circle, there has to be a feel for the way people actually speak.’ These were bolstered by narrowly polled data collected by political scientists who were hardly disinterested and by journalists doing a watered-down form of regional reporting on how ‘Labour [is] losing its heartlands.’ Ideologically, the function was to conceal Blairism’s role in widening the economic gulf tbetween the capital and, among others, the post-industrial parts of northern and midland England and Wales and the coastal towns and arable flatlands of the east. For the purposes of the authentocratic narrative, these ‘left-behind’ parts of Britain were homogenised in an image of honest-grafting cultural conservatism with ‘legitimate concerns’ about various forms of social change, but particularly those associated with immigration. What the centre promised to do was to address these anxieties sympathetically on the cultural level; this promise somehow negated the need to confess any culpability for ongoing material disparities.
What authentocracy ended up doing was pre-fabricating a narrative which could be weaponised by the centrists’ other enemies, the Johnsonian Conservatives and those to their right. Indeed, some prominent voices from Labour’s authentocratic wing — think of John Woodcock, Ian Austin and John Mann, once MPs for Barrow and Furness, Dudley North and Bassetlaw respectively — were rewarded for their hamstringing of Corbynism with seats in the House of Lords in the period following the 2019 general election. The version of Brexit the centrists dreaded, or affected to dread, came to pass, and it became entirely unsurprising for the right-wing government to float policy on the basis that the latte-drinkers wouldn’t like it, and that this dislike in fact somehow legitimised a policy.
Furthermore, Johnsonian policy increasingly came to be shaped by forces even further right than the Johnson government itself: Nigel Farage, the increasingly feral gutter press and Tommy Robinson, and online conspiracism inspired by and more or less contiguous with paranoiac pro-Trump Americanisms such as QAnon. With the 2019 defeat of Corbyn’s Labour, and in that moment’s aftermath, these wildcard entities were able to shape the mainstream by invoking what the ‘real’ people of the North and Midlands either did or did not want. In doing so, they pursued a rhetorical path first trodden by so-called moderates in the period of Corbyn’s leadership of Labour. Ironically, the accusations of out-of-touchness levelled by Labour’s centre-right against Corbynism in the 2015–19 period are now what they struggle, vainly, to defend themselves against now those accusations come from the right.
The Gritty and the Startling
After several years of many of those who critiqued the idea of authentocracy suggesting it was merely an over-theorised allegation that continuity Blairites were pretending they lived on a diet of chips and tea, and with a ‘son of a toolmaker’ making himself at home at Number Ten, now feels like a good time to revisit the idea and its explanatory power.
Authentocracy is a medium-term outcome of a perceived lack of realism, seriousness, integrity and, of course, authenticity in the culture and aesthetics predominant at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the succeeding decade. It emerged in part out of attempts to correct this. These were laudable, but came ultimately to represent a debased version of realism insofar as it inverted the fundamental mission of realism to depict the world truthfully by putting up a clichéd idea of reality to fortify another kind of truth claim about how the world should be. Prescription, in other words, was presented as description. Authentocracy styles itself as laying bare the real, but actually does nothing more than serve up what has been conventionalised in advance as ‘realistic’, as evidence of an iconoclasm so heroic it simply must be politically trustworthy. Authentocrats want to seem as if they have news for you, and they want you to be grateful for it.
What seems to me to have been overlooked or minimised in discussions about authentocracy was the idea’s interest in how the political currency authenticity seemed to acquire in the mid-2010s mapped onto a prefigurative resurgence of realism in film, television and literature. The shift to ‘grittiness’ can be seen in James Bond films beginning with Casino Royale (2006), in Scandinavian and then British crime shows, and in the fantasy series Game of Thrones. In retrospect, Authentocrats read this swing in favour of the abrasive and unflinching as simply superstructural and ideological, as if directors and screenwriters were being ventriloquised by the needs of a political formation determined to preserve the neoliberal economic settlement by means of forfeiting the social liberalisations of the late 1990s.
In such a view, ‘reality’ is ‘realistically’ portrayed as harsh and unpleasant to service the needs of those who must take ‘difficult economic decisions’. Yet such an analysis now looks too mechanistic, or even, in the old language of intra-Marxist namecalling, ‘vulgar’. A number of the catalytic texts for the realist turn of the 2000s — perhaps most significantly the American police procedural The Wire — were at least conceived at the height of Clinton-Blair anything-goes optimism, too early even to be accused of doing the ideological work Casino Royale performed of offering trauma as a justification for ripping up the human rights rulebook during the War on Terror.
The aesthetic shift I’m thinking about here deserves to be understood as relatively autonomous of political need. Doing so requires an acknowledgement that quirk, self-reflexivity, silliness and the non-sequiturial had saturated Anglo-American culture even before 9/11 to the degree that the scales simply had to tip: ironic fun, largely of the forced kind, was oversupplied, and had come to be perceived as grating flippancy. The problem was that the latter often persisted in the absence of the former, an afterlife which perhaps can have more grossly materialist causes attributed to it. Not all of the new realism could have the networks’ and broadcasters’ faith invested in it in the way The Wire clearly did, and such commercial anxieties meant that realism became a matter of defining certain easily recognisable tropes of ‘the real’: humourlessness, violence, regional accents, grey skies, industrial and post-industrial settings. If high-achieving realism (such as The Wire) lived up to an understanding of the mode as a holistic depiction of a place in a time which grasped its knotty intra-dependencies, the more churned-out kind depended on bullying its audience into feeling surprised that anybody would bother being ‘realistic’ at all after the nominal end of history.
It was Raymond Williams who noted with justified scepticism that:
a common adjective used with ‘realism’ [is] ‘startling’ and … within the mainstream of ‘ordinary, contemporary, everyday reality’, a particular current of attention to the unpleasant, the exposed, the sordid [can] be distinguished.
This was an attempt to separate a cheap and ill-gotten realism which depends upon shock about ‘going there’ from the real thing, which might well be ‘startling’, but which is never defined exclusively by its being so. Genuine realism sits at a busy intersection of the dynamic and the diagrammatic in its desire to capture how capitalist society is simultaneously highly differentiated and more or less coherent. It is a structure which consists not only of entities and their relationships with one another, but of the parallax by which those relationships alter according to where one is standing. Such a realism can only ever be all-seeing to the degree that it represents the limitedness of every other perspective which it encloses and rep- resents. Second-rate realism, on the other hand, positions itself as the legislator of its audience’s naivety, awarding itself the privilege of ‘startling’ its reader or viewer with whatever the public apparently don’t want to think about.
If there is a confusion between these realisms, it is arguably because disenchantment was so often thematised in the 19th-century realist novel. This might be seen on the catastrophic level of Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, who, as most summaries go, dies because life won’t fit her romantic aspirations for it; we might also perceive it in quieter and ultimately compensated form through George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, whose marriage to a man she intellectually idealises collapses on her recognition he is an underachieving bore.
However, both Madame Bovary and Middlemarch situate their characters’ collapsing idealisations (as, for that matter, does The Wire with Jimmy McNulty and Stringer Bell) as contingent outcomes of a series of societal computations which it is the novel’s real job to gauge. It is possible to misinterpret what these narratives are doing as merely rubbing our faces in the mud — ‘startling’ us into a recognition of the gap between the ideal and the real — on a kind of need-to-know basis. Furthermore, this possibility is increased by the fact that the brute force of what Williams calls ‘the exposed’ has become confused for realism itself in the time that has elapsed since the 19th-century novel’s sophisticated efforts to map social complexity.
Since authentocracy was first theorised, the ‘startling’ has become even more entrenched, both culturally and politically. Take, for example, the wild success of the West Yorkshire-set detective show Happy Valley, which is full of unlikely plot events and is as procedurally implausible as any other work in the genre, but which is nevertheless praised for its ‘poignant realness’. Its ‘realness’, I would argue, leans very heavily on signs of the real such as rain- battered council housing, flat vowels and violent crime. While all of these things exist, none of them are more real – or, for that matter, more authentic – than, say, the tea-drinking vicars, clipped accents and elaborate, greedy killings in a cosy and ‘unrealistic’ programme such as Midsummer Murders. They are merely more startling.
Likewise, in the political sphere, it is ubiquitous that an interview with an up-and-coming MP will make clear which football team they support, the implicit commandment being that we should be both surprised and grateful to have representatives who are ‘like us’ even if our concrete personal preferences are for cricket, or opera, or stamp-collecting. Were it not so universal, this would be nothing new, but the point is that authentocracy, having emerged out of a more or less ideologically neutral aesthetic 25 years ago, is now simply how the nation talks to itself.
Structures of Feeling and the Single Entendre
Raymond Williams’ discussions of what he called ‘structures of feeling’ are helpful here for considering how particular artistic and narrative practices are not, or at least not always, directly ideological at first, but become so over time. New structures of feeling are unmoored affective responses to historical change which are unsettled and ambiguous, and involve the emergence of aesthetics that are — at least briefly — promiscuous, although a hegemonic ideology will typically press them into service in the end. In the specific case of the turn-of-the-millennium move towards grittiness, a motive cause in the form of anxieties about the very desirability of a future com- mitted entirely to post-historical leisure, to unseriousness, perhaps, might be detected.
A pre-emptive version of this troubled, guilty notion that a comfort characterised by limitless no-stakes irony is in fact no comfort at all can be found in the American novelist David Foster Wallace’s influential 1993 essay ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction’, which wondered whether the writers of the near future might once again gamble on ‘single-entendre values’ in a reinvigorated search for unrefracted and precise truth. Similarly, the late 1990s in Britain were not just the age of riotous irony — often wielded for deniability’s sake, as in the case of lad mags such as Loaded — but of complaining about the pernicious ubiquity of irony and looking for alternatives to it. One example of this can be found in the painters Billy Childish and Charles Thomson’s Stuckist Manifesto of 1999, which had as its first principle ‘Stuckism is the quest for authentic- ity […]. By removing the mask of cleverness and admitting where we are, the Stuckist allows him/herself uncensored expression.’ A year later came the manifesto of the New Puritans in fiction-writing, which declared a commitment to ‘textual simplicity’ and foreswore ‘all devices of voice: rhetoric, authorial asides’. Though less declarative, it is interesting to remember how the cartoonish zaniness of Britpop gave way to the heartfelt expressivism of The Verve’s 1997 album Urban Hymns or even Blur’s eponymous release of the same year.
A belief in authenticity and simplicity, or the rejection of irony in favour of acoustic guitars or single entendres, do not necessarily lead us towards realism, but realism obviously offered one of the most well-signposted routes out of the endlessly proliferating self-reference of 1990s media. The Wire was a natural counterpoint to Quentin Tarantino: for all its multifacetedness and narrative layering, it was ultimately a depiction of Baltimore, a real place, rather than a knowing depiction of already-existing depictions.
Likewise, the succession of Daniel Craig’s Bond from Pierce Brosnan’s centred the portrayal of a traumatised character after Brosnan’s winking theatricalisation of the franchise’s essential pointlessness in the post-Cold War era. Come the early 2000s, the pop-cultural tone in both the UK and the United States was a confusion of 90s ironies, which still remains in the form of so-bad-it’s-good music and gameshows, authenticity-seeking portrayals of the unfettered human such as Big Brother, and the re-emergence of dramatic realism, whether laudable or clichéd.
The point at which growing hostility to irony and a tentative embrace of realism became harnessed properly by ideology — the convergence of an emergent aesthetics with hegemonic imperatives — was the War on Terror, with its attendant rhetoric of realpolitik and ‘difficult choices’. In Britain, Blairism had initially mapped itself onto the festivity of the End of History, meaning that the new prime minister was differentiated from the rock stars he socialised with, Oasis in particular, only by a job title: often, he was presented as little more than a legislator of the inevitable and infinite fun he would release by his removal of the usefully grey, cartoonishly suburban John Major.
After 2001 and 9/11, however, Blair was reimagined as a maker of difficult decisions, the Iraq War in particular, and as the person who took responsibility on the basis of a heightened sense of what was and was not ‘realistic’ when nobody else would or could. Realism in an aesthetic sense need not correlate with an ideologically defined notion of what political realism is. Indeed, one can find very many historical cases in which it occupies a critical and counter-hegemonic stance: Dickens’ Hard Times or Emile Zola’s 1885 mining novel Germinal or indeed Raymond Williams’ own fiction. But in the ‘startling’ mode Williams identifies, it has at least formal similarities with the idea of the ‘hard choice’. Nobody likes to be told that it’s a shitty world out there, but somebody’s got to do it
Keir Starmer as Intermediate Realist
How does Keir Starmer slot into the authentocracy thesis? How does he symptomise it? For starters, he fits the profile of the kind of culture supplement-reading Gen-X urban professional we might imagine at some point in the mid-2000s reading with interest in the Guardian about the refreshing grittiness of a new crime drama. Before he was focus-grouped into a corner, Starmer was happy to declare that his favourite novel was A Disaffection by the Glaswegian author James Kelman, a realist so startling that one of the judges walked off the panel when he won the Booker Prize in 1994 for another novel, How Late It Was, How Late. Much of Starmer’s rhetoric is about responsibility and duty, about what he wishes he didn’t have to do but in fact must, about the stark fact of the nation’s emptied pockets and a rising tide of geopolitical threat. These are the urgent and difficult choices Starmer will make us confront despite our understandable reluctance: we are not to be cosseted.
And this, surely, is where the toolmaking and the Happy Valley-esque pebbledash semi and the evenings watching the Gooners and playing five-a-side come in. How could somebody with this catalogue of earthy experience be any less than well fitted to discern the knock of reality from the cooing of idealism? When he talks about his toolmaking father, it is designed, in precisely Williams’ use of the word, to startle us: we are meant to react with some shock, not only that someone at the apex of British professional life might come from such callused beginnings, but that toolmakers exist at all!
It’s often taken for granted that the audience for Starmer’s recollections are the working-class voters of Austin’s Dudley and Woodcock’s Barrow and Mann’s Bassetlaw constituencies, those lost to the Tories in the cataclysm of the 2019 general election. But the team around the now- prime minister are not psephologically idiotic, and will have been able privately to anticipate what did in fact happen in July 2024, which is that many to most of these enthused-about ‘hero’ voters either stayed with the Tories or shifted even further rightwards to Farage and Reform UK. Where 2024 Labour acquired votes was among the more-or-less liberal middle classes who, in 2019, had either indulged Johnson with one more chance to be a one-nation conservative or rejected Corbyn’s project for its perceived Euroscepticism or Euroapathy. This constituency was surely perceived as vital behind the scenes, so what explains a rhetoric apparently designed specifically to appeal to the so-called ‘left behind’ or, even more euphemistically, the ‘traditional working class’?
The answer must surely be that the ‘toolmaker’ talk was aimed at the voters who Starmer actually was able to impress. Authentocracy is not a pitch for recognition from the working class, but a strategy which seeks consent from the middle classes who want to be assured that a prospective leader is serious about the task facing them. This consent is won not through promises — Labour’s 2024 manifesto is utterly bereft of specific strategies resembling anything like betterment — but through a shock effect which embarrasses its audience into submission. Few want to be the person seen to be idealistic or out-of-touch, which is what ‘startling’ realism — whether that’s a detective drama set on a windswept housing estate or a senior politician brandishing their proletarian credentials — is designed to induce in those it confronts.
This realism is so dependent on formulated effects that it shouldn’t really be considered realism at all. In an essay on The Wire, Frederic Jameson demonstrates how that show threw its own complex realism or thick description into relief by depicting what he calls the ‘intermediate’ realism of the detectives it depicts. The detectives, Jameson writes, cannot apprehend the ‘ultimate structure’ of the reality of drug-dealing in Baltimore — its all-encompassing ‘source, refinement, transportation, sales network, and bulk or wholesale distribution’ — because they encounter it only narrowly in the form of street dealing, thus confusing the part for the whole. We can borrow this coinage to think about how authentocracy uses the part (the toolmaker father, the football fandom) not as a way of getting back to the whole (class as a social relation within a complicated series of social relations), but as the ultimate confirmation which somehow proves beyond doubt that Starmer is as ‘realistic’ as a politician and Knight of the Realm can be.
Thus, instead of being used as the starting point for an approach to politics, class is reduced to a cipher for suitability. We might ask why it is that being the son of a toolmaker should have the power to startle in the 21st century, and also about the role of Labour in this failure of egalitarian politics that Starmerism looks likely to perpetuate. Against this, we might also listen out for any rustles of a structure of feeling which can help serve to expose and oppose this increasingly decrepit aesthetic of authenticity our son of a toolmaker has come to represent.