Keir Starmer must know there are better ways to become prime minister than this

Now that Keir Starmer appears overwhelmingly likely to be the next prime minister, there is significant interest out there regarding who he actually is, and what he might actually do.

So what better way to answer both questions than to attempt to summon the nation’s media to Leeds via a series of cancelled trains, to then get someone else entirely to launch a detailed set of policies, in which all of the detail has been painstakingly inserted to ensure that it doesn’t actually commit to anything at all.

This is not the first time Keir Starmer has launched – or indeed relaunched – himself as something the public might like to vote for, but no worries if not. It just felt like it because the person doing the launching was Gordon Brown, who’s simply a lot better at this stuff than anyone else currently available.

Gordon Brown has spent the last two years coming up with Labour’s plan for a new constitution for Britain. And here it finally was. The top line is that Labour will abolish the House of Lords during its first term, should it get one, but it stops deliberately short of saying exactly how or what abolishing the House of Lords really means, and who or what will replace it.

At various points, Gordon Brown said he was going to launch “an assembly of the nations and regions”, “a council of the nations and regions”, “a council of England” and “a council of the United Kingdom”. Some of these, to mere beginners in the subject, feel like they might already exist, especially the last one, which meets in a room in London with green leather seats, and is the thing that Gordon Brown himself spent three years being in charge of.

The politics of this are pleasingly clear to see. If you promise to devolve power, you can claim to be on the side of the angry anti-establishment, anti-Westminster elite nihilists who we are constantly told are out there, who’ve had enough of everyone and everything yet for some reason must be pandered to, even though they might not actually be real.

If you were a highly prominent remainer, like Keir Starmer was, you can stand up there, as he did, and tell Brexit voters, yet again, that they voted for Brexit to send a message to Westminster. And now Keir Starmer has heard that message, and he’s answered by asking Gordon Brown to write a very long and deliberately obscure document, setting up various councils and reforming the House of Lords.

But mainly, if you’re a party that, even now, is going to struggle to form a government without getting back the dozens of seats it lost in Scotland, you need to come up with a way of convincing Scottish people to just stop voting for the SNP, and apparently some kind of second chamber in which Scottish interests are demographically overrepresented is what will do it (it probably won’t).

It hardly needs repeating that, though it may be fair enough from a democratic perspective, it is Brown and Blair’s devolution, and then Cameron’s referendum, that has quite literally empowered those who want to break the union. It is not necessarily clear why further devolution is therefore the answer.

And therein lies one of so very many problems. More local democracy and more power in local hands always sounds like a great idea, but is it? Is it really? When Alexis de Tocqueville travelled around America 200 years ago, he observed that local democracy was “both the school and the safety valve” of American public life. It kept megalomaniacs in check, and through active participation, it also educated people in the purpose of public institutions.

But life isn’t like that anymore. In this country, in more recent times, more devolution and more local democracy has ended with the people of Hartlepool electing a man dressed as a monkey as their mayor, and then re-electing him on two subsequent occasions.

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We have been directly electing our police and crime commissioners for a decade. Do we think more than 0.00001 per cent of the population have a clue who theirs is? The only candidate of note to ever stand for such a role was almost certainly John Prescott. He held, I believe two public rallies, one of which accidentally took place outside the public toilets in Hull town centre, and involved the following conversation, which I heard with my own ears: “Do you want a leaflet?” “No I want a wee.”

All of which is to say that, if Keir Starmer is serious about becoming the next prime minister, which he should be because it will probably happen, there may be more urgent priorities than deliberately choosing to be upstaged by Gordon Brown on a policy almost no one outside or arguably even inside Westminster cares about.

The House of Lords is obviously an aberration. There are clear examples of how it can be reformed. Canada and Australia have both copied wholesale the Westminster system, but obviously have not bothered with the mad, corrupt, fur-wearing bit, quite possibly the world’s only retirement home where they pay you to be there. One is appointed, the other is elected, both are about 1/10th of the size of our one. So if you want to actually do something about it, the time for actual specific details has been yesterday for well over 100 years.

Otherwise, it’s just meaningless noise, the more of which Starmer puts out, the harder it will be for him to eventually try and cut through.