THERE is a common understanding inside the Westminster media bubble that Keir Starmer won the Labour leadership on a deliberately false manifesto. 

But they don’t think it’s worth reporting — they think deception for that election was all good and normal.

Democracy means more than just having votes every now and then. It needs a democratic spirit in key institutions, including the media and political parties, which is absent on this point. 

This looks like a state where voters’ choices are deliberately limited, which is sometimes called “managed democracy.” 

I’d say the term fits, except “managed” makes it sound way to efficient, when the people doing the managing have all the leadership skills of David Brent.

Starmer won Labour’s leadership with his video emphasising his support for striking printers, dockers, poll tax protesters and the like. 

His campaign relied on left-sounding “10 pledges.” However, very soon after getting elected he handed power to key “New Labour” figures. 

Starmer’s latest head of comms, Matthew Doyle, helped to run Liz Kendall’s 2015 leadership campaign, before that working for Tony Blair’s post-Parliament private office. 

Starmer has purged the shadow cabinet of leftwingers, suspended Jeremy Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour Party and abandoned pledged policies about taxing corporations and the rich. 

It’s hard to imagine he would have won the Labour leadership if he had promised to bring back Peter Mandelson as a top adviser, but that is what he has done.

Journalists for liberal and conservative papers occasionally admit Starmer won the Labour leadership with deliberately false promises.  

Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff told her newspaper’s podcast in April that a “large part of Labour’s membership liked Corbyn’s policies and voted for Starmer thinking ‘what we want is a better Jeremy, we want someone who can front those policies in a more convincing way that sells them to people who didn’t get it beforehand.’ 

“And he never said anything during the leadership campaign that would have shaken that faith” or “made you think that wasn’t what he intended.” 

However, once he was elected it “suddenly” became clear that this was not happening, that Starmer is someone “who is going to move away, in policy terms, from the Corbyn legacy.” 

Hinsliff acknowledges this is a “problem,” but doesn’t think it could be solved by Starmer being the “leftish” Labour leader his campaign promised, rather than the cack-handed New Labour tribute act he has become. 

Instead Hinsliff thinks this should be fixed by a “fair bit of head-on confrontation” with the party — presumably because, for example, suspending Corbyn and banning members from discussing it, isn’t “head-on” enough.

For the Tory press, Daily Mail columnist Dan Hodges said Starmer adopting a totally different strategy from the one promised — described by another journalist as “the 2017 manifesto in a suit” — which he adopted to win the Labour leadership election is simply natural. 

In May Hodges said Starmer’s pledges were “a strategy designed to win a Labour leadership election. And he’s not so stupid that he thinks a strategy that appeals to Momentum supporters will appeal to the rest of the British people.”

Hodges and Hinsliff said it out loud, but many of their fellow pundits also believe it.  

Their underlying assumptions — that Labour’s membership are just wrong, and should not get what they voted for, while Starmer is nearer to the correct, default Labour position — is very common in the press. 

While the media complains about “fake news” and “dishonesty” by the government and people’s “distrust” of politicians, they just don’t think it counts for the Labour Party members. 

They think those members should be tricked into voting for something they don’t believe in.  

It’s democracy, managed by crude deception, that is accepted and aided by the supposedly independent, inquisitive, facts-matter media.

Except you can’t quite call it “managed democracy” when it is so badly managed. 

The assumption that Starmer’s reheated New Labour approach, his unimaginative attempts to “triangulate “ by randomly grabbing bits of Tory policy, his technocratic banality, his beige policies, his repeated support for the government over Covid-19, badly applied patriotic symbols, and so on are “popular” is being tested to destruction.  

A crude lunge to supposed “red wall” voters by going on about how he’s met the Queen has failed to win them back, while the endless trimming of principles and policies has lost him existing voters. 

Not only is Starmer not doing better than Corbyn at his best, he is doing worse than Corbyn at his lowest ebb. 

Starmer hasn’t got near Labour’s 2017 result and is even losing seats that Labour hung onto in the tougher 2019 election. Labour is losing on all sides.

Had Starmer actually been anything like the leader he promised in the leadership election, Labour would be in a better position now. 

Even supportive pundits admit “Starmer has nothing memorable to say.” 

He chose not to consistently press the government for better support for the less well-off, for the health service, for local government over Covid-19 because he wanted to cosplay like he was a junior minister in a coalition or get lost in supposed “cultural” appeals to voters, and it’s made him and Labour less relevant.

The Labour members were right, while what another pundit described as the “shrewd” campaign to bamboozle them into believing Starmer was someone he isn’t was wrong. 

If you look at past policies that rightward drifting Labour leaders have forced on reluctant Labour members — PFI, NHS privatisation, not building more council houses, not renationalising rail, the Iraq war — it’s very often the members who are right while the leaders’ “clever” plans end up falling apart in repeated embarrassing disasters. 

More democracy would have worked better. But instead we have a sort of “managed democracy,” but it is managed by people with the management skill of Peep Show’s Mark Corrigan. 

They are looking for inspiration in half-understood New Labour instruction manuals with the same excitement Corrigan looks at his draft manuscript of Business Secrets of the Pharoahs. Unfortunately it looks like the joke is on us.