One has to hand it to Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister and, by coincidence, Britain’s Chief Postponer-in-Ordinary. When the great dictators of history wished to cancel an inconvenient election, they at least had the conscience to do it with panache. Stalin staged a show trial first, then shot the defendants; Hitler burned the Reichstag and blamed the Bulgarians; even Nicolae Ceaușescu waited until the crowds were chanting before he had them machine-gunned from helicopters. Crude, certainly, but one respected the forthrightness. One knew where one stood—usually against a wall, blindfolded, listening to the click of reloading.
Sir Keir, by contrast, cancels elections the way a nervous suburbanite cancels a dinner party: with a politely worded memo about “ongoing local government reorganisation” and the faint suggestion that everyone will have a much nicer time in 2028 once the canapés have been properly consulted upon. Four new mayoral elections—Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, Hampshire and the Solent, Sussex and Brighton—were meant to occur in 2026. They will now occur, we are reassured, “when the time is right,” which in Starmerese translates roughly as “once Reform has been declared an illegal organisation and its voters safely re-educated in tasteful community gulags located in former Premier Inn conference suites.”
The excuse, delivered with all the solemnity of a man discovering a new species of damp in his downstairs loo, is that local councils need more time to merge, split, re-brand and generally faff about with new logos before they can be trusted to hold a vote. One pictures the Minister for Levelling Up, Ms Angela Rayner, standing atop a cardboard box in a village hall, earnestly explaining to the peasantry that democracy must be postponed until the new unitary authorities have agreed on a typeface. The peasants, being British, nod politely and go home to put the kettle on, which is precisely how the Starmer revolution works: not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with the soft rustle of yet another consultation document.
Compare this to the classics. When Pol Pot wanted to abolish elections, he abolished the electorate along with them—radical, yes, but at least he committed to the bit. When Kim Jong-un postpones a vote, he does so by promoting the ballot box to the rank of three-star general and then executing it for treason. Sir Keir merely sends it on gardening leave for two years while a task force of highly paid consultants decides whether 'devolution' is still inclusive enough for people who identify as spreadsheets.
And yet, in its bloodless, beige way, the Starmer method is more sinister than any of the old monsters. Dictators of yore were at least embarrassed by their own authoritarianism; they draped it in red flags, gigantic portraits—something, anything, to hide the naked power-grab. Starmer does it in broad daylight, wearing a [donated] suit that cost more than most people’s cars, and with the serene confidence of a man who knows the BBC will describe any criticism as 'populist noise.' The postponement is not announced by goose-stepping stormtroopers but by a press release quoting something called the English Devolution White Paper, which sounds less like a policy document and more like the title of a particularly depressing Morrissey album.
One remembers that this is the same Sir Keir Starmer who, as Director of Public Prosecutions, once pondered aloud whether jury trials might be a bit too much bother for complex fraud cases. Nothing to see here, merely the quiet euthanising of eight hundred years of common law because some accountants in the City found 12 citizens from the Clapham omnibus a touch déclassé. One trial at a time, one election at a time, one ancient liberty at a time, the whole edifice is put on hold “until the conditions are right,” which is Starmer-speak for “until I am certain of winning.” The beauty of it—the sheer, dazzling, North Korean brilliance—is that he believes he will never be caught in a lie. There will be no tanks in the streets, no midnight knock on the door. There will only be another delay, another review, another urgent need to 'build capacity.' The British people will wake up in 2030 to discover that elections have been postponed indefinitely because the climate emergency requires a permanent technocratic stewardship, whereupon they will shrug and ask whether the postponement qualifies them for a council-tax rebate.
Mussolini made the trains run on time. Starmer can’t even manage that, but he has ensured that democracy itself will arrive precisely two years late, and only after it has filled in the correct equality-impact assessment in triplicate. History will record that Britain’s first truly post-democratic leader was not a ranting corporal or a psychopathic peasant general, but a mild-mannered knight of the realm who cancelled elections the way other people cancel Amazon Prime—quietly, bureaucratically, and with the vague promise that the new season will definitely drop eventually. There is, of course, a pattern here, and it is the pattern of a frightened little boy who has been told he is in charge of the sweet shop and must on no account let the bigger children have any. Every time a jury acquits a climate protester or a pro-Palestine activist (as juries, being composed of human beings rather than party whips, have a tendency to do), Keir experiences the political equivalent of a bed-wetting incident. The solution, in his fevered imagination, is not to examine why ordinary people keep refusing to convict other ordinary people for crimes of conscience, but to abolish the ordinary people from the process altogether. It is the legislative equivalent of a child stuffing his ears and screaming “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” whenever reality threatens to intrude.
Let us be clear: this is not the behaviour of a Prime Minister. It is the behaviour of a prefect who has been given a whistle and a clipboard and told to keep the lower fourth in line while the headmasters are at lunch. Starmer does not stride the stage like a Caesar; he scuttles across it like a supply teacher who has just realised the little darlings have discovered he can be made to cry. His terror of the public (real, grubby, unpredictable Britain) is so palpable that one half expects him to govern from inside a fortified crate labelled “Handle With Care: Contents Fragile Ego”. And the tragedy, the exquisite, almost Greek tragedy of it all, is that he actually believes this makes him tough. In his mind’s eye he is Churchill, brooding over the maps while lesser men quail. In reality he is Miss Trunchbull, swinging the judiciary like a shot-putter whenever a child dares to suggest that cake might belong to everyone. The difference being that even Roald Dahl’s monstrous headmistress had the courage of her cruelties. Starmer cannot even muster that. He outsources the cruelty to civil servants and then affects sorrowful puzzlement when the public objects. “Why are they so angry?” he asks the mirror, adjusting the knot of a tie that has never known the stain of honest sweat. “I only wanted to be loved.”
Well, Keir, here is a newsflash from the world you have spent your life avoiding: love is not something you extract by removing ancient rights and replacing them with efficiency reviews. It is not secured by declaring paint-wielding idealists to be the moral equivalent of people who fly planes into buildings. And it is most certainly not achieved by a man whose every political instinct is to run, trembling, for the nearest bunker the moment twelve citizens threaten to think for themselves.
History, which you affect to respect while busily dynamiting its foundations, will not remember you as the stern but necessary realist who modernised Britain. It will remember you as the timid little technocrat who, when faced with the first moral test of his premiership, reached for the statute book and began frantically crossing out centuries of liberty in the margin. A man so paralysed by the possibility of being disliked that he preferred to be feared (and even then, only by proxy, through the police baton and the magistrate’s gavel). One almost wants to pat him on the head and send him back to the comfortable obscurity of North London dinner parties, where the greatest threat to civil liberties is the host running out of quinoa. Almost. But the damage is real, and the hour is late, and there comes a point when sympathy for the architect of one’s own imprisonment must give way to something colder.
So let us say it plainly, in the calm, surgical language you pretend to admire: Keir Starmer is unfit for any office higher than assistant under-secretary for paper clips. He is a small man presiding over the shrinkage of a large country, a moral vacuum in a suit so expensive it has to be dry-cleaned of any residual principle. If Britain still possessed the self-respect of a serious nation, the resignation letter would already be written (not in the usual oily prose of political departure, but in the blunt terms a weary people might finally force from his trembling hand): “I discover, to my surprise and sorrow, that I am simply not brave enough for this job.”
Until that happy day, we are left with the spectacle of a prime minister who governs like a man perpetually checking under the bed for the bogeyman. It would be funny, if only the bed were not our own. Compared to the vulgar theatrics of the old tyrants, Sir Keir’s bloodless little coup is a masterpiece of the genre: the first dictatorship to be run entirely on Microsoft Teams, where dissent is dealt with not by firing squad but by muting the participant and pretending the connection dropped.
Bravo, Sir Keir. Even Lenin would have been forced to admit: that’s style.
Compare this to the classics. When Pol Pot wanted to abolish elections, he abolished the electorate along with them—radical, yes, but at least he committed to the bit. When Kim Jong-un postpones a vote, he does so by promoting the ballot box to the rank of three-star general and then executing it for treason. Sir Keir merely sends it on gardening leave for two years while a task force of highly paid consultants decides whether 'devolution' is still inclusive enough for people who identify as spreadsheets.
And yet, in its bloodless, beige way, the Starmer method is more sinister than any of the old monsters. Dictators of yore were at least embarrassed by their own authoritarianism; they draped it in red flags, gigantic portraits—something, anything, to hide the naked power-grab. Starmer does it in broad daylight, wearing a [donated] suit that cost more than most people’s cars, and with the serene confidence of a man who knows the BBC will describe any criticism as 'populist noise.' The postponement is not announced by goose-stepping stormtroopers but by a press release quoting something called the English Devolution White Paper, which sounds less like a policy document and more like the title of a particularly depressing Morrissey album.
One remembers that this is the same Sir Keir Starmer who, as Director of Public Prosecutions, once pondered aloud whether jury trials might be a bit too much bother for complex fraud cases. Nothing to see here, merely the quiet euthanising of eight hundred years of common law because some accountants in the City found 12 citizens from the Clapham omnibus a touch déclassé. One trial at a time, one election at a time, one ancient liberty at a time, the whole edifice is put on hold “until the conditions are right,” which is Starmer-speak for “until I am certain of winning.” The beauty of it—the sheer, dazzling, North Korean brilliance—is that he believes he will never be caught in a lie. There will be no tanks in the streets, no midnight knock on the door. There will only be another delay, another review, another urgent need to 'build capacity.' The British people will wake up in 2030 to discover that elections have been postponed indefinitely because the climate emergency requires a permanent technocratic stewardship, whereupon they will shrug and ask whether the postponement qualifies them for a council-tax rebate.
Mussolini made the trains run on time. Starmer can’t even manage that, but he has ensured that democracy itself will arrive precisely two years late, and only after it has filled in the correct equality-impact assessment in triplicate. History will record that Britain’s first truly post-democratic leader was not a ranting corporal or a psychopathic peasant general, but a mild-mannered knight of the realm who cancelled elections the way other people cancel Amazon Prime—quietly, bureaucratically, and with the vague promise that the new season will definitely drop eventually. There is, of course, a pattern here, and it is the pattern of a frightened little boy who has been told he is in charge of the sweet shop and must on no account let the bigger children have any. Every time a jury acquits a climate protester or a pro-Palestine activist (as juries, being composed of human beings rather than party whips, have a tendency to do), Keir experiences the political equivalent of a bed-wetting incident. The solution, in his fevered imagination, is not to examine why ordinary people keep refusing to convict other ordinary people for crimes of conscience, but to abolish the ordinary people from the process altogether. It is the legislative equivalent of a child stuffing his ears and screaming “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” whenever reality threatens to intrude.
Let us be clear: this is not the behaviour of a Prime Minister. It is the behaviour of a prefect who has been given a whistle and a clipboard and told to keep the lower fourth in line while the headmasters are at lunch. Starmer does not stride the stage like a Caesar; he scuttles across it like a supply teacher who has just realised the little darlings have discovered he can be made to cry. His terror of the public (real, grubby, unpredictable Britain) is so palpable that one half expects him to govern from inside a fortified crate labelled “Handle With Care: Contents Fragile Ego”. And the tragedy, the exquisite, almost Greek tragedy of it all, is that he actually believes this makes him tough. In his mind’s eye he is Churchill, brooding over the maps while lesser men quail. In reality he is Miss Trunchbull, swinging the judiciary like a shot-putter whenever a child dares to suggest that cake might belong to everyone. The difference being that even Roald Dahl’s monstrous headmistress had the courage of her cruelties. Starmer cannot even muster that. He outsources the cruelty to civil servants and then affects sorrowful puzzlement when the public objects. “Why are they so angry?” he asks the mirror, adjusting the knot of a tie that has never known the stain of honest sweat. “I only wanted to be loved.”
Well, Keir, here is a newsflash from the world you have spent your life avoiding: love is not something you extract by removing ancient rights and replacing them with efficiency reviews. It is not secured by declaring paint-wielding idealists to be the moral equivalent of people who fly planes into buildings. And it is most certainly not achieved by a man whose every political instinct is to run, trembling, for the nearest bunker the moment twelve citizens threaten to think for themselves.
History, which you affect to respect while busily dynamiting its foundations, will not remember you as the stern but necessary realist who modernised Britain. It will remember you as the timid little technocrat who, when faced with the first moral test of his premiership, reached for the statute book and began frantically crossing out centuries of liberty in the margin. A man so paralysed by the possibility of being disliked that he preferred to be feared (and even then, only by proxy, through the police baton and the magistrate’s gavel). One almost wants to pat him on the head and send him back to the comfortable obscurity of North London dinner parties, where the greatest threat to civil liberties is the host running out of quinoa. Almost. But the damage is real, and the hour is late, and there comes a point when sympathy for the architect of one’s own imprisonment must give way to something colder.
So let us say it plainly, in the calm, surgical language you pretend to admire: Keir Starmer is unfit for any office higher than assistant under-secretary for paper clips. He is a small man presiding over the shrinkage of a large country, a moral vacuum in a suit so expensive it has to be dry-cleaned of any residual principle. If Britain still possessed the self-respect of a serious nation, the resignation letter would already be written (not in the usual oily prose of political departure, but in the blunt terms a weary people might finally force from his trembling hand): “I discover, to my surprise and sorrow, that I am simply not brave enough for this job.”
Until that happy day, we are left with the spectacle of a prime minister who governs like a man perpetually checking under the bed for the bogeyman. It would be funny, if only the bed were not our own. Compared to the vulgar theatrics of the old tyrants, Sir Keir’s bloodless little coup is a masterpiece of the genre: the first dictatorship to be run entirely on Microsoft Teams, where dissent is dealt with not by firing squad but by muting the participant and pretending the connection dropped.
Bravo, Sir Keir. Even Lenin would have been forced to admit: that’s style.