Keir Starmer has solved a problem that has plagued humanity for centuries: the acute shortage of places to find his own autobiography. The solution was obvious. Donate it to Downing Street’s library so future generations can marvel at his existence without having to purchase it like common peasants.
Seven of his ministers joined him in this act of institutional self-preservation. Together they have ensured that anyone researching the 2020s will have immediate access to the unfiltered thoughts of people who spent their time in power writing books about their time in power instead of, say, doing other things.
The library’s collection began in 1931. That is nearly a century of prime ministers quietly depositing their memoirs into what amounts to a literary monument to their own importance. Each volume a brick in a wall that says: I existed, I thought important thoughts, and you should know about them.
The absurdity here is not that politicians write memoirs—that is ancient and expected. The absurdity is the ceremonial donation, the implicit suggestion that these books are so vital they must be preserved in the nation’s official residence, as though future historians will desperately need Starmer’s personal account of his own tenure to understand what actually happened.
Historians will not need this. They will have records, policies, voting patterns, and the actual consequences of decisions. What they will have is Starmer’s version of events, which is precisely what every memoir is: a carefully edited narrative designed to make the author look less foolish than he actually was.
The library now contains eight new reasons to visit it or absolutely none, depending on your tolerance for political self-mythology.