The boundaries of ordinary life

And, true enough, there was a look of gloom, as the twilight fell silently and sadly out of the sky, its gray or sable flakes intermingling themselves with the fast-descending snow. The storm, in its evening aspect, was decidedly dreary. It seemed to have arisen for our especial behoof, — a symbol of the cold, desolate, distrustful phantoms that invariably haunt the mind, on the eve of adventurous enterprises, to warn us back within the boundaries of ordinary life.

Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Blithedale Romance (1852)

After the forthcoming general election, Keir Starmer will go back within the boundaries of his ordinary life. His social class, friends, Labour party workers, Parliamentary colleagues, circle of contacts and the ordinary life of a prime minister as an annexe to all that. 

But after the electoral battle, Starmer will not venture back within the boundaries his voters’ ordinary lives because he was never there in the first place. He may ignore the boundaries of their ordinary lives for at least five years and that’s what he’ll do without ever needing to acknowledge that he’s doing it.

Yet Labour voters will still vote for a party leader who is not and cannot ever live within their world, because their boundaries are not his. Keir Starmer’s boundaries are Tony Blair’s boundaries.

Of course this is merely a roundabout way of saying the world of governing elites isn’t ours, but the point to be made is that this claim is far more than the rhetoric of disenchantment. Their world isn’t ours and they intend to keep it that way.