It was forty-odd years ago that Mario Cuomo, the governor of New York, advised that politicians should campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Sir Keir Starmer opted instead to campaign in prose and govern in parody.
Starmer was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2020. Among all the comments that followed, perhaps the most insightful was that of a Labour peer who said that when Starmer was a barrister, he ‘was always better with judges than juries’. The general feeling was that this was true also of him as a politician: he might not be an orator or a crowd-pleaser, but he was all over the detail.
If he was a bit boring, then that was fine, since he was intended as the antidote to Flash Boris, just as Flash Boris had been the antidote to Boring Theresa; the pendulum would surely swing back.* By the end of 2021, a nation scarred by covid, and smarting from massive rises in energy prices, was ready to be bored. Competence – that was what was needed now. In his first leader’s speech at conference, Starmer said that he took a pragmatic approach: ‘Working out what’s wrong. Fixing it.’
Then came 2022, an extraordinary year even by recent standards, a year of scandals, shenanigans and disruption, of two monarchs, three prime ministers and four chancellors. By contrast, Starmer looked like a beacon of stability in a land of chaos. It was no surprise that Labour emerged from fourteen years in opposition to win a decisive victory in the general election of July 2024, gaining more than 200 seats to emerge with a majority of 174.
Decisive, but not convincing, as Starmer’s detractors were quick to point out. Labour took just 33.7 per cent of the vote, the worst result for any incoming government; on a low turnout, only one in five of the electorate cast their vote for Labour. This was not a declaration of hope on the part of the people, as it had been when Labour ended an even longer period in opposition in 1997. Back then, Tony Blair secured 43.2 per cent of the vote on a much higher turnout, 3.8 million more votes than Starmer achieved.
There was no depth of support here, as became apparent when voters began to melt away in every direction, particularly towards Reform and the Greens. The collapse was astonishing. When Rishi Sunak called the election – barely two years ago – Labour stood at 45 per cent in Politico’s poll of polls; by May this year, they were down to 17 per cent. Personally, Starmer had seen an even more precipitous fall.
Some of this is undoubtedly our fault. As an electorate, we’ve become impatient – expecting instant solutions to longstanding problems – and unrealistic, demanding that politicians deliver spending without raising taxes, expecting them to make bricks without straw. But it’s also the fault of Starmer himself, a man who never seemed to get the hang of politics and who showed no aptitude for the trade. Though maybe that’s ultimately our fault as well: for years we criticised career politicians, and when we had a prime minister who didn’t serve an apprenticeship in the craft, it turned out we didn’t like him either.
As is traditional with Labour premiers, Starmer consistently promised that he would make tough choices. He didn’t do so. His was a government that shied at every gate when it came to economic policy, from taxation to welfare reform. It pinned its hopes on growth, while having no plan for how to encourage this, no coherence to its actions. Self-evidently, there had been insufficient planning in opposition for what to do when in government. As Wes Streeting said to Peter Mandelson, there was ‘no growth strategy at all’. And now there’s not a single economic indicator that offers any cause for optimism.
Where there was a clear policy direction, it seemed intended to reduce diversity, and to increase the power of the state. This was seen most notably in education, with attacks on fee-paying schools, academies and home teaching – anything that might challenge orthodoxy. The one genuine achievement of the Conservative government had been in improving the country’s educational standards; this is now being thrown away.
Other ‘tough choices’ – on issues such as immigration, say, or public displays of Jew-hate – were apparently too difficult to be definite about. So Starmer resorted to calling ‘bigot’ at anyone who voiced an opinion, and chorusing that ‘there’s no room for hatred in Britain’.
Lacking any navigational ability, he paddled in the rock pools of New Labour, not noticing that the tide had long since gone out. Tony Blair went into the 1997 election promising not to put up taxes, so Starmer did as well, even though the economy was in a very different state. His attempt at recreating Blair’s Clause IV revisionism was the expulsion of Jeremy Corbyn and others, personalising the attack on the Left and leaving a legacy of real bitterness.
In desperation, he even tried to get the old band together again. Whatever message the electorate were trying to send in the disastrous local elections this May, it surely wasn’t that they wanted Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman – each of them aged seventy-five – restored to the heart of government. And, of course, there was the return yet again of Peter Mandelson. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
What can be said in Starmer’s favour? From a Labour perspective, he increased taxes and spending, the former hitting business, the latter favouring public employees and recipients of benefits. His handling of foreign issues was not a complete disaster. His attempts to deal with the capricious egotism of Donald Trump were as good (though ultimately as unsuccessful) as those of most other leaders in the free world. There was the tokenistic gesture of recognising Palestine as a state in September 2025 – the contemporary equivalent to naming a student-union bar after Nelson Mandela – but mostly Starmer resisted the anti-Israel lobby, and he was unwavering on Ukraine. On the other hand, he rolled over for China. And anyway the country’s armed forces are so run down that Britain’s word doesn’t count for very much.
None of this, though, is particularly exceptional. The economy has been becalmed for nearly two decades now, and politically there has been confusion ever since the Brexit referendum. Starmer being ineffectual as prime minister doesn’t exactly mark him out from his immediate predecessors. Nor does his inability to understand the country he was supposed to be governing.
The fact that I disagreed with most of his policies is par for the course as well. That’s in the nature of democracy.
And yet there was more than this.
Starmer’s delusions about ‘international law’ meant he was prepared to pay another country to take a strategic military base off our hands, while opening the way to still more prosecutions of ex-service personnel. He led a government that sought to cancel elections and to curb trial by jury, failed to address the politically awkward question of child-rape gangs, proposed the reintroduction of blasphemy laws (but only for Islam), and backed a botched attempt at state-assisted suicide.
These are things that go beyond policy to philosophy. To me (and I understand that this is subjective), they stink. They are anti-British and anti-Labour. On these grounds, I think Starmer has been a thoroughly disreputable, even disgraceful prime minister.
But others – far too many others – saw him overstep their own red lines. For some, it was the betrayal of his pledges when seeking the party leadership. Or his refusal to denounce a ‘genocide’. Or his response to the Southport murders. Or his backing of a multi-tier policing and judicial system. Or the endless U-turns. Or his voice and his utter lack of humour. Or, and this was probably the most damaging of all, the abolition of winter-fuel payments for pensioners.
He’s an honourable, decent man, we were repeatedly told. Perhaps this is true on a human level. It’s hard to tell, since he has kept such a rigid separation between his personal and political lives. But as a prime minister, he has displayed neither honour nor decency, only weakness.
I’d be inclined to celebrate the end of this dismal, wretched, unloved premiership, were it not for the likelihood that things, in all probability, can only get worse.
* Post-war British prime ministers have tended to alternate between the two templates of Flash and Boring. Starting with Flash Winston, they were: Churchill, Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Hume, Wilson, Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson. Then the Tories ruined it by getting Truss and Sunak in the wrong order.
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