THE RESINGATION OF SIR KEIR STARMER: A STUDY IN MANAGED MEDIOCRITY

It is with the sort of restrained satisfaction one reserves for the removal of a stubbornly persistent stain that one greets the news of Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation. After two brief, blundering years in office—years that felt, to the suffering electorate, rather more like a prolonged hostage situation—he has at last decided to fall on his sword. Or, more accurately, to allow the sword to be gently pressed into his unresisting abdomen by colleagues who had grown tired of watching him fumble with it. The man who arrived promising renewal has departed as the most spectacular confirmation that New Labour’s final mutation was not a renaissance but a quiet surrender. 

Let us be precise about the scale of the under-achievement. Starmer inherited the largest Labour majority in a generation, a historic mandate handed to him not so much by popular enthusiasm as by the exhausted revulsion at fourteen years of the other lot. The country was placed in his hands like a delicate antique. He proceeded to use it as a coaster. Taxes rose, promises dissolved, and the cost-of-living crisis was met with the sort of sympathetic head-tilt one might offer a dying relative one has already written out of the will. Unemployment climbed to historic levels while the Prime Minister maintained the expression of a man who had just remembered he left the gas on. 

His government’s greatest innovations were largely repressive. Crackdowns on protests, particularly those concerning immigration revealed a man uncomfortable with any dissent that might disturb the smoother functioning of the establishment consensus. He backed conflicts with the unblinking loyalty of a junior civil servant who has spotted which way the wind is blowing. Digital IDs rolled out with the quiet inevitability of parking restrictions. Young people were to be shielded from the perils of social media—presumably so they might better concentrate on the approved curriculum of managed disappointment. All the while, leasehold reform, that modest sop to the property-owning aspirations of the middle classes, was abandoned with the alacrity of a man spotting an awkward acquaintance across the room. 

The personal dimension is where the true comedy, if one may call it that, resides. Here was a figure who had spent years presenting himself as the decent, methodical lawyer who would restore competence to government. In practice, he resembled nothing so much as a senior partner in a provincial firm who had been elevated far beyond his natural ceiling and was now quietly terrified that someone might notice. The face—earnest, slightly pouchy, forever arranged in an expression of pained forbearance—suggested a man who had discovered the difference between being trusted with the petty cash and being trusted with the national finances. His speeches achieved the rare feat of sounding both scripted and extemporaneously dull. One imagined him practising them in the mirror, adjusting the tie, and still failing to convince his own reflection.

The electoral verdict was merciless and, in its way, rather beautiful. Labour haemorrhaged nearly 1,500 council seats in a single set of local elections. The net approval rating sank to minus sixty-six, a figure that places him in the exalted company of history’s more enthusiastically disliked prime ministers. Yet the real sting lay in where those votes went. Only a handful defected to Reform. The bulk migrated leftward, to the Greens and Liberal Democrats. Starmer, the great triangulator, the man who had neutered the Corbynite left with the ruthless efficiency of a party apparatchik securing his own advancement, had succeeded only in alienating precisely the constituency he was meant to have pacified. He was never there to represent them. He was there to neutralise them. Mission accomplished, as the post in question so dryly observed. Sort of. 

One searches for mitigating qualities and finds the cupboard embarrassingly bare. There was no grand vision, no memorable phrase, no moment of genuine moral courage that might redeem the record. Instead, there was the careful cultivation of the appearance of seriousness while the substance leaked away. Peter Mandelson’s early elevation—Epstein’s man in Britain, as the sharper tongues had it—set the tone. This was not renewal; it was the restoration of the same old revolving door between power and the more discreet forms of influence. Starmer governed as if the primary duty of office was to avoid frightening the horses. The horses, unimpressed, bolted anyway. 

Nowhere did the pinched soul of the man reveal itself more completely than in his response to the Southport murders, that pitiless slaughter of three little girls—Bebe, Elsie, and Alice—stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift dance class by a known quantity the state had repeatedly declined to restrain. Here was a Prime Minister confronted with raw, unbearable horror, the sort that should have cracked even the most lacquered political carapace. Instead, Starmer offered the nation the spectacle of a man auditing his own decency in real time. While the country reeled, he pivoted with the alacrity of a cornered accountant: swift condemnation not primarily of the killer but of the “far-right” disorder that followed, as though the true outrage were not the butchered children but the inconvenient eruption of public anger. 

No visible flicker of paternal grief disturbed those lawyerly features; one half-expected him to bill the parents by the hour for his condolences. He spoke of “terrorism has changed”—loners, misfits, bedroom radicals—as if the atrocity were a fascinating policy brief rather than the blood-soaked consequence of institutional cowardice and open-borders dogma he had done nothing to challenge. The families received platitudes; the rioters received a violent disorder unit. In that moment, Sir Keir Starmer stood exposed not merely as incompetent but as something colder: a functionary so thoroughly marinated in the preservative fluids of establishment self-preservation that the screams of murdered infants registered only as a threat to narrative control. A smaller, meaner man is difficult to conceive; one who could gaze upon such innocence destroyed and calculate first how best to spin it deserves not the pity of history but its permanent contempt.

In the end, Sir Keir Starmer will be remembered not as a tragic figure but as something smaller and more contemptible: a technician who mistook caution for wisdom and obedience for leadership. He entered Downing Street with every advantage and left it having proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that the centre cannot hold when it has nothing at its core but the polished vacancy of ambition. Britain, poorer, angrier, and rather more cynical, waves him off without affection. The establishment, one suspects, will find a suitable sinecure. There is always the Lords for those who have served it faithfully, however incompetently.

Good riddance to a man who was, in the final analysis, one of the most thoroughgoing disappointments in modern British political history. Not evil, perhaps—just irredeemably small. And in politics, smallness, when dressed up in the robes of high office, is its own special form of insult to the public. One awaits the next with suitably lowered expectations.

AND ON THAT BOMBSHELL …

One learned the news of Jeremy Clarkson’s prostate cancer diagnosis with the sort of resigned amusement that greets any minor reversal in the fortunes of a man who has spent decades reversing expensive German saloons into ditches for our entertainment. Here was the human equivalent of a V8 engine—loud, inefficient, gloriously unnecessary—being told by his own plumbing that it might, after all, have limits. The prostate, that most undignified of organs, had apparently decided to stage its own farmers’ protest. One pictures the offending gland, red-faced and tweed-clad, waving a placard that reads “No to Woke Waterworks.”

For years Clarkson has been the last unapologetic roar in a culture that prefers the polite electric hum of virtue. He has offended vegetarians, cyclists, Germans, the Welsh, the Scots, civil servants, Remainers, climate activists, and anyone who has ever uttered the phrase 'sustainable development goals' without laughing. Now his own body has joined the protestors. It is the ultimate Clarkson moment: even his internal organs have turned out to be reactionary.

The response from the usual quarters has been predictably exquisite. There were the ritual expressions of sympathy from people who have spent the previous decade wishing him dead in interestingly detailed ways on social media. One can almost hear the grinding of teeth behind the Hallmark-card condolences: “Thoughts with Jeremy and his family at this difficult time,” typed by hands that only yesterday were composing threads about how Clarkson’s very existence was a form of violence. Cancer, it seems, is the one thing capable of briefly silencing the baying of the online hounds—though not for long. Already one senses the hedged bets: yes, cancer is bad, but has he considered the carbon footprint of chemotherapy? Perhaps the NHS could treat him with thoughts and prayers generated by wind power.

This is where one must declare an interest, or at least an affection. I have always enjoyed Clarkson in the way one enjoys a particularly belligerent old pub bore who happens to be right about most things. He is not subtle. Subtlety is for people who write think-pieces about the semiotics of the flat white. Clarkson is the man who looks at an Alpine road and sees not an opportunity for quiet reflection on climate change but a chance to discover whether a Lamborghini can achieve flight. His genius—and it is a genius, however unfashionable—lies in understanding that most people secretly want to drive too fast, eat too much, and say the unsayable without first checking with Human Resources.

His farming programmes, those gentle masterpieces of curmudgeonry, revealed the man more truly than any of the motoring shows. Here was Clarkson discovering that agriculture is not a moral failing but an actual job performed by actual people who must contend with weather, bureaucracy, and the fact that half the population thinks food grows in Waitrose. One watched him struggle with sheep and subsidies and felt the warm glow of recognition: at last, a television personality prepared to admit that expertise might occasionally reside outside Islington.

The cancer diagnosis, like everything else in Clarkson’s life, will no doubt be turned to account. One awaits the inevitable Clarkson’s Cancer special with something approaching glee. There will be a track day at some unsuitable location involving chemotherapy patients in high-performance wheelchairs. There will be a monologue about how the NHS waiting list is longer than the M25 on a bank holiday. There will be an expensive bottle of something unsuitable drunk in defiance of medical advice, followed by a segment in which he attempts to race a prostate cancer awareness ribbon against a Bugatti. The man is incapable of solemnity, which is precisely why we need him.

Modern Britain has developed an almost erotic relationship with solemnity. We have solemnity about the climate, solemnity about identity, solemnity about pronouns, solemnity about everything except the things that actually matter. Into this festival of earnestness strode Clarkson, all six-foot-five of him, complaining that the coffee was cold and the car was German. He was never going to win awards from the Broadcasting Standards people. He was too busy winning the affection of people who still remember that entertainment should sometimes be entertaining.

There is a peculiar English pleasure in watching a man refuse to be improved. The therapeutic culture demands that we all become better versions of ourselves—more mindful, more sustainable, more in touch with our feelings. Clarkson’s response has always been to buy another Aston Martin and drive it through a river. Now the river has come to him, in the form of rogue cells with ideas above their station. One suspects he will treat the disease with the same mixture of irritation and dark humour he applies to everything else. “Not now, I’m trying to harvest beetroot,” he will mutter, before writing another column about how the NHS has all the organisational efficiency of a Top Gear production meeting.

The wider point, which the solemn ones will miss, is that Clarkson represents something increasingly rare: the right to be wrong in public. Not wrong in the sense of being mistaken about facts—though he has been that too, gloriously—but wrong in the sense of holding opinions that offend the prevailing consensus. In an age when deviation from the script can end careers, here was a man who treated the script as something to be used for kindling. That he did so while becoming enormously successful only compounded the offence. The chattering classes could forgive poverty; they could not forgive popularity achieved without their permission.

Cancer, of course, doesn’t care about any of this. It is the great equaliser, the ultimate reminder that biology has not read the Guardian. Even the mighty Clarkson, conqueror of caravans and critic of cycle lanes, must now contend with the frailty of meat. One hopes—fervently, if not solemnly—that he beats the bastard thing. Not because he is a saint (he isn’t) or because his views are correct on every point (they aren’t), but because a world without him would be marginally more boring, marginally more frightened of its own shadow.

In the meantime, one raises a glass—something full-blooded and inappropriate—to the man himself. May his prostate prove as stubborn as its owner. May his recovery be swift, his complaints loud, and his subsequent television output even more politically catastrophic than before. The forces of dullness have enough on their side already. They don’t need to claim this scalp too. Godspeed, you magnificent, impossible sod.

MAKERFIELD DRAGS BRITAIN INTO BURNHAM'S BODY BAG

In the damp, dispirited terraces of Makerfield, where the ghosts of pitheads still murmur grievances to the wind, one beheld last night a spectacle as quintessentially British as warm beer and cold feet: a by-election. 

Andy Burnham, that genial Mancunian mayor who styles himself the King of the North (a title one suspects he awarded after a particularly successful session with the focus groups), sauntered into Parliament with 24,927 votes—54.8% of the turnout, no less. Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon trailed some 9,231 votes behind, a result greeted in certain quarters with the sort of hollow cheer usually reserved for a football team that has avoided relegation by the skin of its teeth. Turnout, at a giddy 58.8%, represented the highest by-election participation since the days when Maggie was still terrifying the unions. One almost expected bunting. 

Yet beneath the modest statistical uplift lurks the true story of our benighted polity: voter apathy so profound it makes a Trappist monk look like a gossip. Thousands of of eligible souls simply could not be roused from their sofas, even with the prospect of sending a message to the Westminster circus. They stayed home, these noble abstainers, presumably to binge-watch box sets or contemplate the rising cost of central heating while muttering that “they’re all the same.” One feels a certain dry admiration for their consistency. At least they are reliably useless. 

This, dear reader, is where the Australian model beckons like a stern but fair-minded relative. Compulsory voting. Yes, the very notion sends shudders through the libertarian wing—those delicate flowers who prize their 'freedom' to do nothing above all else. But imagine it: every citizen frog-marched to the polling station under pain of a modest fine. The ballot boxes would overflow not merely with ticked boxes but with the glorious effluvia of a truly engaged electorate. Millions of comedic cocks and balls, exquisitely rendered in biro. Crude caricatures of party leaders. Shopping lists. The occasional heartfelt poem about the price of bread. Democracy, in short, laid gloriously bare. Far better this riot of vulgar self-expression than the silent, sullen void we currently endure. At least the nation would be heard, even if in the language of the urinal wall. 

The centre-right, meanwhile, continues its time-honoured tradition of self-immolation. Conservatives scraped a pitiful 997 votes. The right-wing vote, such as it is, splinters like a cheap wine glass at a wake: Reform here, some Restorationist splinter there, a few lonely Lib Dems wandering in the wilderness. One pictures a dozen well-meaning chaps in tweed arguing over doctrinal purity while Labour’s machine simply hoovers up the disaffected. It is less a political strategy than performance art for masochists. If the right wishes to win again, it might consider ceasing to treat electoral politics as an exercise in purist fragmentation. But old habits, like bad hangovers, die hard. 

And what of the victor? Burnham, the change candidate who promises—oh, how he promises—to be the final chance for Labour to alter course. The irony is thicker than a Wigan pie crust. Here is a man who has long positioned himself as the authentic voice of the North, the antidote to metropolitan slickness, the fellow who actually gets the post-industrial heartlands. Yet one suspects the change he delivers will be largely cosmetic: fresh slogans, perhaps a more northern accent in the dispatch box, but the same creaking machinery of high taxes, open borders, net zero zealotry, and cultural lectures from people who have never changed a fuse. No fundamental reckoning with the failures that produced Reform’s strong showing. No serious course correction. Just more of the same, served with a side order of regional pride. 

One watches the prospect of Prime Minister Burnham with the queasy fascination of a man observing an oncoming bus. The country, already wearied by one set of managerial progressives, may soon exchange them for another who knows the words to “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” The blind Labour voters—those tribal loyalists who would support a lamp-post if it carried the rose—will cheer. The apathetic will continue not voting. And the rest of us will be left pondering whether compulsory voting, cock-and-ball doodles and all, might at least force the polity into something resembling honest confrontation with itself. 

Makerfield has spoken, after a fashion. The question is whether anyone in Westminster is capable of listening through the fog of their own complacency. One rather doubts it. The circus rolls on.