Keir Starmer exits the British political stage as he entered it: doing the exact opposite of the thing he said he was going to do. It’s only 10 weeks since he pledged to remain as MP for Holborn and St Pancras until the next election, despite stepping down as prime minister. That’s plainly the decent course of action: a dedicated Labour man wouldn’t want to force a byelection. Even if it’s a slam dunk for the party, it inevitably draws focus and resources from more important matters. Someone who takes the business of representing constituents even a 10th as seriously as all MPs say they do would feel that the honour of those votes should be repaid.
It’s a pretty boring life for an ex-PM turned backbencher. You have to keep your counsel as a large amount of blame is tacitly shovelled your way, while keeping your opinions to yourself. But that second requirement was the one thing Starmer was really good at. Once it transpired that the opinions he said out loud were open to endless revision and denial, I was never able to figure out what the real ones were.
The Tories are crying U-turn at this resignation, and technically it is – but the category needs more subdivisions to properly describe all the different ways Starmer found to break a pledge. There were the grand statements with which he came armed when he was initially seeking the Labour leadership: economic justice, social justice, climate justice, migrants’ rights, putting human rights at the heart of foreign policy. It would be tedious and a little depressing to track the moment at which each aim was jettisoned. Suffice it to say, these did not describe the politician he was. In fact, to be a Starmerite Version 2020 – Corbyn in a tie, basically – was enough to get you kicked out of the Labour party by 2024, and to vote in favour of policies he had once championed (ending the two-child benefit limit, for instance) was enough to have the whip suspended. “U-turn” doesn’t really cover a deception so kaleidoscopic.
There were specific reversals on policy, of course, forced by backbench rebellion (on welfare) or the first disastrous local election results (winter fuel allowance). But those didn’t feel like Starmer’s decisions so much as his having been backed into a corner. Then there were statements he made that he later claimed not to have meant. In October 2023 he told Nick Ferrari that Israel had a right to defend itself – even, when pressed, if that meant cutting off power and water to Gaza – then a few days later said: “I was saying Israel had the right to self-defence and when I said ‘that right’, it was that right to self-defence. I was not saying that Israel had the right to cut off water, food, fuel or medicines.” Not really a volte-face, more of a squirm.
Starmer, in short, was bad at politics in so many ways, and in ways that oughtn’t to coexist within the same politician. He wasn’t a communicator, but nor was he a meticulous or far-sighted planner. He had no backbone, and yet was incredibly rigid. He was extremely tribal in his determination to extinguish the left of his party, and yet he didn’t seem to have his own loyal tribe. None of that really matters, since he’s unlikely to trouble parliament again, but it matters what we thought we saw in him, and why.
Sorry, scratch that: I have lately come to abhor the journalistic formulation “we made the following mistakes”, which I hope isn’t the start of any deeper self-reflection. These are simply mistakes I made on my own.
I always claim to want Labour to be truly pluralistic; to discuss its project and purpose meaningfully between the constituency and parliamentary levels; to vote at party conference as if it matters, rather than have its values handed to it on the last day in a carefully manicured, ultimately meaningless speech. When it came to it, though, the promise of a candidate who obviated the messiness of pluralism by satisfying every wing just enough was too appealing.
There was also an internalised patriarchalism. I dismissed way too readily the voices that said it was ridiculous, in the year 2020, for the party of equality to have never had a female leader. That absurdity wasn’t really about whether any woman in the party was better suited to the job. It was about a failure, over decades, to reflect on where that preference for a middle-class white guy was actually coming from. What qualities of steadiness, credibility and intelligence was I projecting on to him? What cosplayed status quo-ism was I hoping would be sold to the rest of the voting public?
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It’s funny to be returning to the saying that George W Bush famously mangled in a very different political age: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”. The Keir Starmer who fought the general election had already fooled his original supporters more times than they could count. It was obvious by the time he had his core team in place, with Morgan McSweeney at their helm, that it wasn’t even technocracy he was promising, it was a Blairite/Mandelsonian project much further to the right of what those politicians were flogging in the 90s. Perhaps I was hoping it was all just a feint to get into power, after which he’d rediscover his radicalism, or perhaps “hope” is just a pretty word for “I would prefer to believe than to participate”. So I’ll go along with Andy Burnham’s “hope in every heart” – it would be churlish not to – but it will be as well as, not instead of, comparing his actions with his promises.
