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.