The cruel cost of political failure: why we must spare a thought for the families

How must it feel, these turbulent days, to be the family of a politician under pressure? What kind of distress must they endure, witnessing the venom and public contempt directed at the person they love?

Do their tormentors, from the media shock jocks right down to the blowhard in the local pub, ever pause to consider how their own wives and children might feel if someone was saying the same about them?

I think we know the answer to that. I feel so sorry for the Starmer family right now, and for Andy Burnham’s and Angela Rayner’s, just as I did for the families of Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, Liz Truss and David Cameron during their defenestrations.

They’re human. They suffer like the rest of us. Non-combatants, they were, are, or will be forced to watch their loved one be humiliated on the national news, eviscerated online by strangers. Imagine just how upset Keir Starmer’s teenage children – at least one of them said to be sitting big exams – must be, watching their father facing the loss of job, house, car and status. While they go to school facing sideways glances and sniggers.

The family’s ordeal may be protracted. Whether Starmer survives a week or six months, he will be publicly mocked as a lame duck while his family, victims of brutal political sport, must conceal embarrassment, shame, anger, disappointment and pride, all mixed up together.

“Hey, that’s my dad you’re talking about!” Read the comments in rightwing newspapers and you reel at the hatred: “A conceited, stubborn little man”; “mediocre, cunning, out for himself”; “untrustworthy, disgraceful, free-loading liar”. Or watch (I hadn’t up until now; I was appalled) the foam-flecked abuse on rightwing media channels: “There’s a question mark over his mental stability… the only way he’ll be removed from Downing Street is in a straitjacket”; “he’s destroyed the country”; “he and his pals…really repulsive creatures playing out their fantasies”.

Victoria Starmer gets it too: “A Stepford wife”; “I pray that sleazy couple quit soon”; “Word is she and the kids left 18 months ago”; “fake marriage”.

Even if half is churned out by bots, it is still sickening. (The broadcasting stuff is all too authentic). For sure, abusing prime ministers has been a national pastime for centuries, but this is different: unmistakably personal and crushing. And who helps the crushed?

The writer Malcolm Gladwell has a fascinating series on his podcast Revisionist History about epic failures, inviting the big beasts who made them to tell the backstory of their humiliation. One was Michael Lynton, former head of Sony Pictures Entertainment, who in 2013 approved a film which provoked North Korean hackers. They paralysed entire sections of the Sony Corporation. Lynton, multinational CEO but plain old dad at home, described himself sitting with his head in his hands, trying desperately to hide his distress from his children.

Another interviewee was Jim Balsillie from BlackBerry, a slow motion commercial disaster with lessons for Starmer. The BlackBerry messenger service might well have been on every smartphone in the world today had Balsillie possessed the political nous or soft skills to take his board with him. Instead, he assumed they’d just follow him – and BlackBerry became history. Around the same time, his marriage of more than 20 years broke down.

For politicians, paid far less and exposed far more than corporate CEOs to opprobrium, the job is becoming impossible. Research suggests public harassment is increasingly an element in dissuading candidates from standing. Why would anyone put a supportive, loving family through that? Why be a sacrifice? It’s a dispiriting truth.

Photograph by Christopher Furlong/Getty Image