In the lead-up to the election that swept Labour to power with what one wit dubbed “a loveless landslide” (due to the element of punishment-voting against the surreally incompetent Conservative government) many commentators wondered whether Sir Keir Starmer’s rule would be boring (his vocal delivery is a cross between a robot and a substitute geography teacher who’s not angry with the class — just disappointed) or fanatical.

The Labour Party has been effectively captured by extreme ideology to the extent that the new minister for Women and Equalities, Anneliese Dodds, when asked the question “What is a woman?”, replied “There are different definitions…I think it does depend what the context is.” Surely it couldn’t be both boring and fanatical? So whichever one it was, at least there would be the ensuing relief of it not being the other.

Now comes the news that this government plans to overturn the Tories’ refusal to go along with the International Criminal Court’s luxuriously crackpot plan for warrants of arrest against Prime Minister Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

Mr. Sunak, for all his faults, was a good ally of Israel — like many Hindus around the world, who in their country of origin have experienced the dubious pleasures of living cheek-by-jowl with an Islamist state. He had pointed out that the International Criminal Court had no jurisdiction over Israeli nationals, making a nonsense of the double-arrest  fantasy. This was partly because he didn’t need to cater to the sizeable Muslim vote in the UK as few of them would have voted for a Hindu Tory anyway.

Not so Labour, which saw a handful of Islamist ‘independents’ win on a pro-Hamas ticket in previously safe Labour seats. A campaigner for one of them, who took the seat  of a Shadow Cabinet member, has just been charged with terrorism offenses. One of the strangest and really quite sinister images of the election campaign was the now deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner (a red-haired fire-brand and the most untraditional, non-demure  female politician imaginable) wearing an ankle-length dress in a roomful of Muslim men, apologizing for Labour’s position on a ceasefire and  basically begging for their votes.

Because of his stodginess, Sir Keir appears to have been around for a long time (no one ever thinks of him as snaking meteor-like across the night-sky) but he has actually moved fast; sometimes in a somewhat slippery manner, according to his detractors. 

Until relatively recently he was a high-flying lawyer — that’s how he got his knighthood — and might have continued in the highly remunerative law career which made him Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013. Instead he became a member of parliament in 2015 and leader of the Labour Party — staggering under its greatest ever defeat under the Left-wing Israel-hater Jeremy Corbyn — in 2020.

Sir Keir’s critics like to point out that, while he is hostile to Mr. Corbyn now, he happily campaigned for him; as recently as 2020, he described himself as a socialist motivated by a “burning desire to tackle inequality and injustice.” By 2021, when asked if he was a socialist, he replied “What does that mean?” In 2022, Sir Keir proudly boasted that he’d seen off the ten socialist pledges he made in the 2020 party leadership contest. In 2023, he set out five goals for his government, targeting economic growth, health, clean energy, crime, and education. 

The prime minister’s performative U-turn on the ICC will give those of his critics who find him something of a slippery customer first blood; once again, there is that feeling that he “runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds,” an English saying which expresses a greedy need to have one’s cake and eat it, too.

One of Sir Keir’s greatest advantages during the campaign was his wife Victoria, a stunningly attractive Jewish woman who might have been sent as a blessing from Central Casting to the ambitious young barrister who would go on to make his name by cleansing the Augean stables — or rather, the Labour Party — of the anti-Semitism which had rendered it unelectable.

If, though, he starts cosying up to the Hamas vote — “Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza” the ex-Labour MP, George Galloway, who lost last week, cried as he romped to a February byelection victory in a former Labour safe seat — even the beauteous “Lady Vic” might not be able to draw the electoral eye from the first sign that, yes, it might well be possible for a Starmer government to be both fanatical and boring. Lucky us.