The tragedy of Keir Starmer

A graceful and dignified end to a bitterly disappointing premiership.

Sir Keir Starmer MP, Prime Minister (Holborn and St Pancras, Labour) ©House of Commons

There was no joy to be found today. There was no satisfaction. Just frustration, and melancholy, and a profound sense of squandered opportunity.

As Keir Starmer gave his speech outside Downing Street, his voice finally began to break. He’d conducted himself with immense dignity. Instead of ruining his reputation through a long drawn-out battle, he would step down. He promised to provide for whatever timetable the party needed. He did the right thing - for the party, for the country, for himself and his successor.

Toward the end, he spoke warmly of his wife and his children. And in that final moment it was as if he was already retreating from public life back into his private life. The tragedy of it all seemed to bear down upon him and he fought his way through tears.

Then his wife was by his side, embracing him. You could see him fight for control of his features, try to force the emotions back inside. He had never looked more human. It felt like the first time we had ever seen the real him. And I felt a deep well of sadness in me. For him, sure, but more importantly for us. For what this administration might have been. For what he could have been.

Just over two years ago, Starmer was making a very different speech in Downing Street. He had just won the election. He was going to define the new government.

“Public service,” he said, “is a privilege”.

I have a friend - not even that fiercely political - who was surprised to find that they started crying when he said that. It had been so long since they’d seen any seriousness, so long since they’d seen anything but self-interested clowns in government, that the sight of a sober man promising to govern in a responsible manner moved them to tears.

I was asked on a US podcast once what Starmer was like and I quoted Thomas Carlyle on John Taylor: “An innocent dull good man”. This was what we thought we were getting. This is what we needed.

In the end he really wasn’t any of those things. He was scheming and Machiavellian. He was really quite shockingly chaotic. And anything that was good in him seemed to fade away entirely. His morality collapsed alongside his popularity.

People will say that he accomplished nothing. That is false. First, he extracted the poison of Corbynism from the Labour party. This ruinous fever dream stoked hatred against Jews and turned the opposition into an unelectable jumble sale of mad bullshit, thereby allowing the Conservative government to also degenerate into ever more extreme positions. It was a leadership cult for a moron. It had to be killed.

Starmer managed to turn 2019’s historic election defeat into 2024’s historic election victory. It is easy now, in retrospect, for people to insist that anyone could have done it. They couldn’t. Others would have struggled to combine a sense of possibility with a minimisation of threat. Many of the decisions taken in this period would later turn out to be ruinous. But that does not negate Starmer’s victory. He was the man who got rid of the Tories after 14 years of self-harm and decline.

His accomplishments in power are limited but consequential. The new fiscal rules reopened an avenue for government to borrow for infrastructure investment. Plenty of other errors were made in that first Budget, but that core decision was one which defined the government’s growth agenda. Incredibly, it has rarely bothered to state it out loud, but it is there nonetheless: Borrow to invest. This is the correct approach and it is telling that people rarely raise an objection to it.

At certain key moments, especially related to matters of international law, Starmer’s moral reserve was maintained. This is why he refused to get involved in Donald Trump’s insane adventure in Iran. If we had been dragged into that war it would have humiliated us in front of the world, stained our ethical reputation still further, and represented the absolute nadir of British standing. It’s precisely what would have happened under Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage: the explicit transformation of Britain into a US vassal state. They do not get nearly enough criticism for this fact. And we perhaps do not remember that during that week, when all the political and media pressure was for him to join, it was possible to think: Thank god he’s in charge.

Starmer got us where we need to be on Brexit. It has been immensely frustrating watching someone pretend that Brexit was a great idea when they know full well it isn’t, or refusing to cross red lines that they know are damaging the country. But let’s be realistic. It probably wasn’t possible to go any faster than this. Brexit had to be neutralised as an issue at the election. The red lines required to do so could not be reversed once you won a mandate for them. We knew when it happened that we were out for at least a decade. But Starmer has moved us, slowly but surely, towards a much closer position and provided about as good a jumping-on point for his successor.

Starmer has other achievements but they were often achieved despite him. He can take some credit for Ed Miliband’s Net Zero achievements, but it must be countered with the fact that he stripped him of his £28 billion flagship investment plan and his office perpetually briefed against him. He can take some credit for the abolition of the two-child benefit limit, but this move was again forced on him by his MPs. His own reticence eradicated the benefits he might today have seized on as evidence of his accomplishments.

What was the flaw at the heart of the Starmer project? It was that it had no heart. Starmer, in the end, was simply was not interested in politics.

None of us could believe this. Why in god’s name would someone who is fundamentally uninterested in politics end up as prime minister? It’s just too weird. It’s like me becoming a football manager. So instead of accepting this basic explanation we projected all sorts of qualities onto him. But the basic truth was as simple as it was ruinous. He just wasn’t that into it. He simply wasn’t very interested.

Starmer was an absence. He was absent on leadership, absent on policy, absent on values, absent on everything beyond the nuts and bolts of process, which seemed the only level on which he engaged with political debate at all.

On policy, he therefore entered government without any clear idea of what he was going to do on a host of issues. Sure, he had gone from a defeat to a win, but that did not remove the responsibility to establish what he wanted to do once he achieved it. He could have established policy forums when he took over as leader, have something ticking away from when they went into the election. Instead, the party only worked out what it wanted to do once it had won power.

That was dreadful on a policy level, but ironically it also helps explains his failure on an electoral level. He promised change. And yet for the first few months, he had no big-ticket changes to unveil for the basic reason that he did not know what they would be.

Even in government, Starmer’s intellectual focus was on electoral strategy rather than policy substance. This was a kind of witless giddiness to the whole endeavour, a lack of ballast, like a balloon floating into the air. It was painfully obvious that conversations in Downing Street concerned how something would play electorally, rather than what they would do for the country.

Take the reforms to indefinite leave to remain. These plans make it almost impossible to integrate immigrants into the community. They exclude people who are here legally, in many cases for well over a decade.

Ignore the moral element. Who does that actually help? What problem does it solve? Which issue is it supposed to address? None. But then that was not the function. The function was to appeal to Reform voters. Decades from now, someone will be suffering as a result of these changes and no-one will really remember why they were even introduced or what the purpose was.

In plenty of areas, there was eventually meaningful policy work. Sometimes - where there was no media attention and no ministerial dispute, in short where there was no requirement for leadership - they went ahead and implemented it. But in vast areas of policy, it was clear that the first and last thought was for electoral strategy rather than policy substance.

It was obscene, really. Labour won the election and then it treated being in government like a temporary interruption to the next election campaign. It was just so utterly feckless and irresponsible.

If this electoral strategy had been successful, it would have been viewed as merely cynical. But in fact it was foolish even on its own terms. A small army of political scientists wrote about why the appeals to Reform voters would not work. People were not simply switching between the reactionary and progressive camps. Labour’s electoral coalition was not based on men marching down to the steelworks or down the pit. It was people in offices, with white collars, draped with a lanyard.

But then, No.10 didn’t listen to social scientists. It read Fleet Street editorials and opinion pieces. And it followed their guidance down an alleyway to an electoral cul-de-sac.

Starmer seemed a decent man, a man of integrity. To this day, I assume that this is an accurate description of him.

I believed him when he spoke about public duty. I just think that this part of his mind shares space with another part, which is concerned exclusively with victory and doing whatever it takes to secure it.

He knew that he did not really have a political mind. He knew he was not particularly interested in policy. So he submitted himself before the vacuous strategic calculations of his administration, and in particular of Morgan McSweeney.

The moral consequences were severe. Suddenly a man who had once proudly said that trans women were women said simply that they were not. A man who once represented Commonwealth citizens on death row now had his team brief journalists that they would confiscate the jewellery of asylum seekers. A man who had once taken the knee could not really bring himself to say that racism was wrong.

The worst moment for me came during the Tommy Robinson march in London last year. As I wrote at the time, my partner and I arrived back in London without knowing it was taking place. We went our separate ways at the station, utterly ignorant of the fact that tens of thousands of fascists were marching just outside. She is brown and I am white. Mercifully, I was the one walking into the street and she was the one going home on the Tube.

As I tried to get past the demonstrators, I thought constantly about what this walk would have been like if she had been with me. Would I have had to protect her? Could I have? How would I do it? Streets which I associate with joy and tranquility I now looked at strategically, in terms of physical safety. How would we escape? Was there a route down there, or was it a dead end? Would the bridge be more or less secure?

This is not the worst thing that has happened to someone in this period. But a line had been crossed. Suddenly, it was possible to be afraid for your safety on the basis of race, by virtue of the ethnicity of those you love, on the streets in which you live.

For a long time the government was silent. Starmer’s fear of upsetting Reform voters meant he was unable to speak up on behalf of immigrants or ethnic minorities. To do so was against the entire operating principle of the government.

The next day, business secretary Peter Kyle went on the BBC and said people like Robinson - Tommy Robinson for heaven’s sake, and out-and-out football thug fascist - “are able to touch into a sense of disquiet”. Far from condemning the march, he argued that we should do what the marchers wanted. Demonstrations like this, he argued, were “klaxon calls” for those in power to do something about immigration. The Starmer government had become so morally empty, so ideologically confused, that it no longer knew if racism was bad. It was no longer even able to condemn a Tommy Robinson march.

Later, this improved. At the party conference, Starmer found his voice on these issues. As his administration continued, and particularly after McSweeney left, he was more robust about far-right politics. But even now, he is unwilling to speak honestly or with any trace of pride about immigration. He is unwilling to challenge X even as it functions to coordinate far-right race riots.

This is perhaps the greatest tragedy of his time in power. More than competence, more than policy. Many of us saw in him a decent, responsible man. But that moral element to his character disappeared, at a moment of political crisis in which race politics returned to Britain. He left this country utterly exposed in the face of a resurgent fascism.

Morality is not just about what you do. It is about what you fail to do. Starmer was culpable by absence rather than endeavour. I’m sure there really is a decent man in there somewhere. I imagine we’ll see more of it in future. He’ll make a better elder statesman than he has a leader. But when it mattered, he wasn’t there. When basic moral norms needed to be protected, he went missing.

There isn’t the slightest satisfaction today. Not the slightest trace of joy. We wanted a dull good innocent man. We needed it. But in the end, he wasn’t any of those things. In the end, there was nothing there.