‘Keir Starmer has handed his first check – even the Nazis must be nicer’

The day after the general election, my 8-year-old asked: “Can I have a stamp?”

Every parent knows the feeling: the innocent question, the rapid calculation, the unfolding of infinite unwelcome possibilities. My head swivelled in her direction, my eyes narrowed, and I said: “Why?”

She brandished a sealed envelope. It was addressed to 10 Downing Street. Seeing as I do sometimes need to speak to these people for work, she let me check what she’d written: a letter of congratulations, informing the new Prime Minister he was damned lucky to have got the job, she and her dog hoped he would be happy, and PS the nuclear test veterans, if you wouldn’t mind.

Praise be, she wasn’t demanding the intervention of social services. A stamp was found, the letter was posted with great ceremony, and yesterday he wrote back.

I do not know how many of these have been sent out, or if it’s a reasonable use of taxpayers’ money. But I do know she has written to the last two monarchs and not had a reply. Perhaps Downing Street has always done this, but it is hard to imagine Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, or Rishi Sunak bothering with thank you cards. Even if they did, they would probably take a different tone.

In the past fortnight it has felt like Britain is an unkind place. The sort of dark, fetid dystopia in which appalling murders happen, violence is pre-planned, and hatred uncoils itself from whatever hole it was hiding in. Nazi salutes in Whitehall, walls torn down with bare hands, and people wearing flags who we feel ashamed of, regardless of how many Olympians do the same.

We didn’t see much of our new Prime Minister. Where his predecessors would have been spluttering all over the airwaves and looking tough, ‘providing leadership’ while doing the square root of bugger all, Keir Starmer has been at his desk. Oh, he’s done press conferences – but five-minute ones. He’s said things any PM would, about crackdowns and tough sentences. But he’s said it calmly, without thumping tables for dramatic effect.

And afterwards, he didn’t go and buy a water cannon off eBay. He went to work. He ordered COBRA meetings, and than actually ATTENDED them. He put a firework up the CPS to get some rapid convictions. He went to the West Midlands to visit a mosque and thank police officers, but only after he’d got the machinery of state started on the clean-up, not in search of a headline.

He did what it said on his card – he put the country first. And in doing so he did more to renew it than you might think.

The people who went out to sweep up after riots might always have done so outside their own homes. But last week they did it for their neighbours too; for the mosque they do not go to; for the corner shop they might frequent a little more, next week.

The crowds who thronged Bristol, Walthamstow, Liverpool, Brighton and Birmingham weren’t protesting anything. They weren’t demanding a change to government policy. They were strangers convening in a public place to make it clear they expected everyone to behave themselves.

A lot was said, in the election and before, of how boring Keir Starmer was. Well, this was boring community cohesion and boring i’m-not-cross-just-very-disappointed-in-you, and for a country that’s had two weeks of horror, eight years of constitutional chaos, 14 years of cutbacks, and decades of those same communities being left behind, it was bloody lovely to see that Britons still expect, and offer, dignity and respect to one another.

The grown-up in charge sets the tone. And when the sheer fell of circumstance delivers a barrelful of manure it is those rules by which everyone deals with it. When the head of an institution is a chaotic, bumbling mess who can’t keep his zipper up or his mouth shut, when it’s someone tearing through fiscal rules like a meth-crazed pigeon, when it’s someone who hasn’t got the foggiest idea of how most people live, think or feel, normalcy keeps its head down. It stays home, it carries on quietly by itself, it rolls its eyes and plods on.

But when the person at the top talks about public service, and appears to believe it, and to do what was promised, then decency is emboldened. It lifts its head, it grabs its broom, it says no-I-don’t-think-so to the rotten irk trying to set light to its wheelie bins.

It takes a lot to get the silent majority onto the streets. But somehow, the fact we now have a Prime Minister who sends thank you cards to small children, who reads the brief, who works rather than frots the nearest TV camera, has changed the tone for everyone.

It’s been horrible seeing the sort of people, and hate, we all thought had gone. But now even Nazis will have to be nicer. They will almost certainly be out again this weekend, overtired and overheated, but there will be fewer of them. The cowards, failures and village idiots who trail in their wake will drift away for fear of reprisal, and even the hard core that is happy to go out and lamp a copper will think twice, once they realise they’re on their own.

Just because a change of tone flushed out the nasties, a squirt of judicial bleach will not be enough to cripple them for good. The clean-up will last for months after the media loses interest, with investigations into the incitement and tax affairs of the grifters who have groomed people, over years, to hate. Hopefully in its wake will come some meaningful improvements in the places where racism is a symptom of decades of political failure.

For now, it is enough that the majority of people have remembered that values require regular exercise. It’s no good just shouting about them, as so many PMs have done. If you don’t display good manners, you won’t get them in return: and that applies as much to neighbours as it does to immigration.

Starmer has passed his first test. He seems a solid PM, the sort who won’t promise you a new hospital unless there is something everyone would consider new, and a hospital, about to appear. And for an unknown number of people who put pen to paper when he took office, there are postcards promising a partnership in the great endeavour of Being A Bit Bloody Nicer About Things. I like that. It’s like a good queue, or tikka masala, or a boiled egg lightly done: it’s just right.

My daughter is as proud as punch to be included in a government policy to do exactly what she ignores when I say it to her. Two neighbours and a passing motorist were informed of her missive this morning, and on her return to school she’s taking it in for show-and-tell. She considers herself penpals with the PM, regardless of how many postcards were sent out, and I am not sure how bad at the job he’d have to be to lose her support. Because of that note, deep inside her the things I’ve nagged her about now burn with a zealous belief: Promises Must Be Kept, Thank You Cards Will Be Sent, Standards Will Be Observed.

He has inspired her to be nice, and I’m grateful to Starmer just for that. He should be warned, though, that she’ll almost certainly be writing to him again. In the meantime, once he’s cleaned up the mess of previous governments, perhaps his next task could be to do something about people putting their feet up on public transport. He can call it Take Back The Seats.