Keir Starmer is bland, stable, staid – or any other euphemism you can summon for “boring”. His personality is devoid of imagination, wit, flair or “authenticity”. And what about that grating voice? Thanks to Starmer, the British public has learned what “adenoidal” means. These are just some of the nicer things the Westminster media has to say about its sad, downtrodden, beleaguered, put-upon, useless (ouch) prime minister.
I prefer the assessment of one Financial Times commentator: isn’t it nice for Britain to have a leader who doesn’t “behave like a gibbon” on the world stage? That is nice, actually, but evidently insufficient for the Labour parliamentary party, and more importantly, the public.
After a predicted wash out in the local elections – an insurgent Green Party encroaches from the left, as Nigel Farage continues to march in from the right – Starmer is, and we must be bored with hearing this by now, more precarious than ever. (I remember when the winter fuel payment debacle of August 2024 made the recently elected PM “more precarious than ever”.)
I am sceptical, however, that Starmer deserves all this blame, laid so squarely at his feet and his feet only. We can lay out the superficial facts: he has polled since last year as the least popular leader since records began. In this week of manoeuvring, positioning and jockeying, the cabinet was hardly full-throated in its defence. Not many were willing to stick their head above the parapet to ask if everyone could just lay off the man for a minute. Better to sit this maelstrom out, were you to have an eye to a future cabinet position, I suppose.
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Not great, we might say in the grand British tradition of understatement, especially when Starmer arrived in Number 10, triumphant on his historic landslide and victory ready to see to fruition his wonderfully non-specific manifesto catchphrase: “change.” So how did he end up here? Is it really his nasal voice?
At this point in the column, it is customary to point to Starmer’s personal foibles – and they are legion. His powers of communication are weak. He reads off an autocue, he is stiff as a board, and he once went on a football podcast and told the hosts his favourite thing about his favourite sport was “the goals”. Second (related to first), he has no higher sense of what he wants Britain to be. He believed that steering the ship towards the status quo – pre-Brexit and pre-Tory psychodrama – would be sufficient. And that really is the crux. There is no point being able to articulate a vision when you don’t have one in the first instance.
He also has a well-documented habit of finger-pointing. Take, for example, the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington DC. His chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, resigned in a flurry of bad press, and then Starmer sacked foreign office chief, Olly Robbins, weeks later. “As the bodies pile up” one damning Guardian column goes, he “continues to blame everyone but himself”. Remember this one for later.
Okay, with that out of the way – and it’s all basically true – might we search for a deeper explanation behind the cataclysm? Liz Truss set off a bomb under the British economy and managed to poll higher than Starmer (though time was on her side in this popularity contest – how long was she there for, again? 20 minutes?). Was Theresa May, the plodder in chief, hostage to her own MPs, really better suited to office than this Labour leader?
[ Wes Streeting to step down and challenge Starmer for leadership, say reportsOpens in new window ]
Every new leader blames their inheritance but Starmer’s was rather bad. He was not just handed the economic legacy of the pandemic – not fair to blame that one on anyone, really – but also the political instability introduced by Brexit. It is easy to underprice in Ireland exactly the extent to which that 2016 referendum result is still shaping British politics. It’s been 10 years – but look where it has left Starmer. Locked in an awkward dalliance with a hostile Trump in supine hope of continued defence guarantees. And, presiding over a low-growth economy that is locked out of a giant and lucrative market on its doorstep.
If the British prime minister is so good at pointing fingers then he has a some easy targets: Nigel Farage, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and June 23rd, 2016. He had the option to make this case on Monday but never quite took it: in a speech he spoke of closer ties to the European Union, of putting Britain back into the heart of the Continent. But with typical Starmer caution, he stopped far short of where he needed to be.
May was undone by Brexit, and Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were all destabilised in some way by the project (which was of their own making,). None, however, were dealing with that albatross at the same time as Donald Trump was enjoying the freedom of being an old, mad second term president, threatening the safety of Europe with his random whims.
Starmer may not be entirely up to the moment – but as moments go, who would be?
