OXFORD, 1986. The editorial board of Socialist Alternatives, a tiny magazine that follows the revolutionary ideas of Michel Pablo, an obscure Greek Trotskyist, meets under the guidance of a willowy figure known as “the Frenchman”. Its members include a law student called Keir Starmer. His articles are hard to decipher; his main contribution is to take the magazine to the printers and distribute it to bookshops. “Keir was the backroom guy, the one who did the hard work,” a comrade tells Tom Baldwin, author of a penetrating new biography of the Labour Party’s leader. “The rest sat around and talked.”

It was the start of a career of dissolving human dramas in bureaucratic procedure. As a police adviser in Northern Ireland, Sir Keir is caught in a hail of rioters’ rocks. Petrol bombs fly. The experience begets a dense report on procedural reform. As Britain’s chief public prosecutor, he brings cases against bent MPs, newspaper bosses and al-Qaeda cells; he cites as one of his proudest achievements the digitisation of old paper files.

Prime ministers govern in the spirit of their old job. Boris Johnson was a newspaper columnist; Rishi Sunak a finance guy. Mr Baldwin, who spoke to his subject dozens of times over several years, portrays a reformist public servant taking on his biggest basket-case yet. He hates the House of Commons and doesn’t understand Labour’s factions. He rejects “visions” (too abstract), “pledges” (too binding) and spending money (there is none). Instead he believes in “good solid governance” and “doing the basics better—the mundane stuff, the bureaucratic stuff”. Asked what Starmerism means, he hesitates. “I just want to get things done.”

A Labour government would bring three cultural shifts. Since 2010, Conservative administrations have regarded Whitehall as bloated, inert or overtly hostile. But Sir Keir places a rather old-fashioned faith in better administration to fix most of Britain’s problems. Policy churn is the “single most important reason” for Britain’s economic malaise, he says. To cure it, he wants to yoke government activity to five long-term “missions”. The sidelining of Treasury wonks by Liz Truss has become a morality tale. He will place great emphasis on government ethics; Sue Gray, his chief of staff and an ex-mandarin, has told Labour staffers to stop making policy by WhatsApp.

The second concerns what Tories called the “blob”: a self-interested nexus of public-sector panjandrums, charities and think-tanks who ministers think smother reforms. (In the late 2000s, as New Labour waned, treating mid-ranking officials such as Sharon Shoesmith, a social-work boss at a London council, as hate figures became a national sport.) By contrast, Starmerism owes a bit to the corporatism of the 1960s and a lot to New Labour’s embrace of the “third sector”. Sir Keir wants the leaders of businesses, unions and charities to sit on “mission boards” at the heart of government.

“Keir basically believes most problems are solved if you get people who know their stuff in a room, and listen to the evidence and reach a decision,” says an aide. In a speech last month Sir Keir declared a truce with the blob. Government attacks on the National Trust, a charity, were “war on the proud spirit of service,” he said. “We will welcome anyone who wants to make our national life better to take their place at the table.”

The third trend is a shift of power from ministers towards a panoply of new or strengthened institutions. The Office for Budget Responsibility, a fiscal watchdog, will be given oversight of specific tax and spending decisions. The Board of Trade, a policy talking-shop, will become an independent agency. New bodies include an Office for Value for Money, an Industrial Strategy Council, a British Infrastructure Council and a Flood Resilience Taskforce.

It works as a pitch: government has been so erratic that the banal promise of consistency and listening to advice would amount to a paradigm shift. (On February 20th James Cleverly, the home secretary, fired the head of the immigration inspectorate after a series of critical reports.) Britain is lucky that its most pressing problems—backlogs in health care and construction—have obvious fixes. Mr Baldwin argues that Sir Keir’s brick-by-brick approach could prove more satisfying to voters than vaulting “-isms”.

Mr Blobby

Yet institutions should be the instrument, not a displacement, of politics. Labour wields them as a shield rather than a sword. Promising to be handcuffed by wonks is a bid for reassurance by an opposition that is not yet trusted with power. (Similarly, the Labour manifesto of 1997 pledged that technocrats would set the minimum wage and promised to keep the monarchy.) Advisory committees suck in businesses that would otherwise be critics.

Getting the best from the civil service will require more politics, not less. Sir Keir wants it to be less siloed and more long-termist, but that will require bold political choices over accounting lines and budget cycles. (Ms Gray will “cleave towards conventional ways of doing government”, predicts Mr Baldwin.) Sir Keir has a touch of David Cameron, who wanted to be prime minister “because I think I’d be rather good at it.”

Starmerites understand that they will have at their disposal sweeping powers of appointment, which the Tories have failed to exploit. But institutions are not policies. A proposed Regulatory Innovation Office, to “support a beefed-up Regulatory Horizons Council”, does not resolve the political question of whether to embrace gene-edited crops or weight-loss drugs. A reformed Migration Advisory Committee (“that can advise on the impact of all policies to ensure that the details are right”) cannot decide how many people should come. Policy papers bristle with “pathways”, “hotspots”, “hubs” and “landscapes”, but the question of how much money they will get goes unmentioned. Mr Baldwin’s Sir Keir seems to regard politics as the unfortunate prelude to the grown-up business of governing. But it is the very essence of it. ■