It’s all too late for Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer’s big survival speech could never be big enough to save him as Prime Minister. Whether he ends up getting the push now or later in the year has very little to do with what Starmer said today – he has been cooked for a while. But if this really had been the make-or-break speech that it has been billed as, it wouldn’t have worked, either. It largely served to highlight Starmer’s weaknesses further.

It wasn’t just that he filled the speech with meaningless phrases such as ‘delivery is of course essential, but it’s not sufficient on its own to address the frustration voters feel’. Or ‘incremental change won’t cut it’. Or the worst: ‘strength through fairness: that is my compass in this world’. It was also that Starmer really didn’t have much analysis bearing out his claim he had ‘learned a lot in the first two years in the job’ of Prime Minister.

He told the audience that ‘on growth, defence, Europe, energy, we need a bigger response than we anticipated in 2024’. Those things are true: the world has got even more dangerous and uncertain. But one of his fundamental failings – and something a new Labour leader will not be able to fully overcome either – is that in 2024 it was clear that a big response was needed on many domestic issues including welfare, the NHS, and the planning system. Starmer had the majority to offer that big response and he squandered it. It is now too late to try to go for big reforms, and the Labour party in parliament now doesn’t have the stomach for it either.

There was an irony, too, in the Prime Minister pontificating about delivery alone not being sufficient. He also claims that he spent too much time talking about what he was doing and not about ‘why or who I stand for’ – which is unlikely to be an analysis shared by anyone who has spent much time listening to him either as leader of the opposition or as Prime Minister over the past few years. He’s not managed a great deal of delivery either, having spent those first two years of his premiership wandering around like someone lost in a supermarket without a shopping list. One of the things that does frustrate voters is that nothing seems to change, and that big promises are made in the run-up to an election without any tangible effects afterwards. Few in Britain were expecting public services to be magically running beautifully by now, but there was a reasonable hope that the government might be making more progress than this.

If there was a reset, it didn’t feel like anything close to Starmer being turned off and on again and running differently. Instead, he said the government would nationalise British Steel and deliver a ‘youth experience scheme’. He attacked Nigel Farage as ‘not just a grifter: he is a chancer’. And insisted that he was not going to walk away.