Keir Starmer was an appalling prime minister, and he never realised

His roller-coaster journey to the top of the party was relatively swift and unhindered; by the time Corbyn resigned in the aftermath of Labour’s defeat at the 2019 general election, Starmer was already seen as the frontrunner, a position he was never in danger of losing.

As the new leader, he had a shaky start, having to address the nation and the party in the midst of a Covid lockdown, with onlookers forgiving his stilted, uncertain, robotic delivery because it was via Zoom. But his first in-person conference speech, more than a year later, was hardly better: plodding and uninspiring, his hesitant delivery provoking so many bursts of audience applause that he took 90 minutes to deliver it.

That was only a few months after his first major leadership crisis, when Labour lost the Hartlepool by-election to the governing Conservatives, an almost unheard-of event. It is known that Starmer seriously considered resigning and was only dissuaded by Morgan McSweeney, who went on to reshape his entire leadership and became his chief of staff in government.

From the moment he became Prime Minister, in July 2024, there were complaints from his (suddenly vastly increased number of) backbenchers that they never got to meet him or talk with him. He started his tenure in Downing Street as he meant to go on: depending on a small number of advisers and senior ministers. As a new prime minister, it felt to him like the best way to handle the workload; to his MPs it bred resentment.

And so it proved.

Throughout his leadership, four years in opposition and less than two in office, he never achieved the level of oratory that many more experienced MPs manage to achieve through regular exposure to party conference and even party branch meetings, as well as the Commons. As Prime Minister, he would respond to criticisms in the chamber with a loss of temper and, occasionally, personal insults. His ability to avoid answering direct questions from the Leader of the Opposition, to an extent rarely achieved by his predecessors, became a defining characteristic and led him into conflict with the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle.

Another defining characteristic of his premiership was his inability to take an unpopular stand – an unenviable but inevitable part of national leadership in these straitened times – and stick to it, too often marching his backbenchers to the top of the nearest hill, ordering them to defend the latest cuts to pensioners’ heating allowance or prospective benefit cuts, then marching them back down and retreating.

This, more than any other aspect of Starmer’s leadership, even more than his misjudgment in accepting gifts in the first few months of his time as prime minister, was what quickly eroded any trust or loyalty his MPs might have otherwise shown in him.

But it was his gross misjudgment over Peter Mandelson that provided the second-to-last nail in Starmer’s political coffin. There were many who could not understand why the Prime Minister would make such an effort to promote such a divisive and unpopular figure – even before his past associations with the late paedophile and financier Jeffrey Epstein were well known – to the prime diplomatic post of British ambassador to Washington.

Perhaps he was desperate to sprinkle a little New Labour stardust over his administration. Whatever his motives, it was a judgment he came to regret.

By the time Starmer landed upon a policy position that seemed at least notionally popular – his opposition to President Trump’s war against Iran – the rot had set in too deeply to save Starmer’s job. May’s local and devolved elections confirmed Labour’s extreme vulnerability to the new political kids on the block – the Greens on the Left and Reform UK on the Right – taking large chunks of Labour’s support.

It was Starmer’s cack-handed response to that crisis that sparked the end. Starmer trumpeted his recruitment of Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman as government advisers as if it were an ingenious move, even as the vast majority of MPs and ministers looked on completely bewildered. It was an answer to a question no one was asking.

His tin-eared response to Reform’s electoral advance – to reheat an old commitment to put Britain at the heart of the European Union – was seen by a large number of backbenchers as irrelevant, politically inept or even provoking to former Labour voters who had switched to Reform.

And, in the face of the increasing certainty that Andy Burnham would return to Parliament in the Makerfield by-election, Starmer had nothing to say beyond a hollow claim that he was hoping the then Manchester mayor would triumph. Triumph he did, resoundingly.

It was the scale of that victory that definitively convinced wavering MPs, ministers and – eventually – Starmer himself that he could not continue as PM.

The tragedy of Starmer’s premiership is that the man himself might never understand why he was ditched by his MPs because he is simply unaware of the political talents a party leader and prime minister needs. Even his resignation speech was a lesson in delusion, reeling off a list of achievements that almost nobody will believe to be real.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]