‘You’ll miss him when he’s gone!’ Lots of people have said this to me. It’s true I have had the dubious privilege of sketching Sir Keir Starmer for almost the whole of his career as leader of the opposition and Prime Minister. He has grown to be a constant feature of my life, a sort of perma-presence in the background, the person round which my week necessarily has to gravitate. And now, the moment for his departure has finally arrived: today was the final PMQs for Sir Keir Rodney Starmer. It was the final gentle squeal of that good Knight. Starmergeddon. Good afternoon, good evening and Meep Meep.
It managed to be both mawkish and schizophrenic
As for the performance itself it was, perhaps appropriately for the dire state of British politics in 2026, a little like watching The One Show. Starmer would flip from a gag – including one in which he basically admitted that he never did answer questions correctly – to a ‘sad voice cutaway’ about someone in the gallery with cancer. He did this in basically every answer to Mrs Badenoch’s – it has to be said, polite and dignified – set of questions. He had a whole array of people who ‘were the ones he was doing it for’.
It was a bit like when people claim they’re taking part in The X Factor for their sister or nan or gerbil. It managed to be both mawkish and schizophrenic as he had to shoe-horn some of these into completely unrelated Tory questions. Still, given how he’d been treated by them, it was hardly surprising that he didn’t spend his session thanking his Parliamentary colleagues.
Mrs Badenoch managed to make some hay out of Starmer’s Make a Wish List; pointing out that one of the people he’d helped most was her. On the whole though she and other Tory MPs decided to praise Starmer not bury him. She did point out that for all his tone-policing, he had in fact been vastly rude to Boris Johnson at his final PMQs but she promised not to follow his example. Most of her gibes were directed elsewhere; Mrs Badenoch talked about everyone getting behind the England team, “especially the SNP”. Pete Wishart did some especially OTT demurring/fishwifing at this, like a panto dame on speed. But for Starmer, there came mostly queries for advice and best wishes for the future. The last ride at the despatch box is always the easiest.
Yet the thought world – if one can describe the left-out, slightly furry underside of a yoghurt lid that is Labour’s current intellectual life – that begat Starmer was still very much in evidence. A Labour MP stood up and, without a trace of irony, allowed the phrase, ‘A round table of stakeholders in my constituency to explore joined up solutions’ to pass her lips. Starmer may now be gone but he was only ever a symptom of the lanyardista class.
One thing which can be said for Starmer is that he was, until recently, lucky with his opponents. Nobody makes Labour look better than the Lib Dems. Ed Davey made an excruciating, laboured joke about Toy Story. Even his deputy, Daisy Cooper, looked away, as if she were witnessing the removal of an ingrowing toenail. Starmer had a genuinely funny reply in that he ignored all of Davey’s lame bluster and instead reminded him that due to Labour’s summer holiday cash splash he could save nearly £20 going to Chessington World of Adventures.
Enjoyably, two of Starmer’s most effective opponents from the world of committees, Labour’s Rachel Maskell and the Lib Dems’ Alistair Carmichael were both called. Even Richard Tice asked a softball football question. It was a bit like the final episode of a sitcom when all the old adversaries are brought back to slap each other on the back – though the calibre of the House of Commons today makes the final episode of ‘Allo ‘Allo! look like an Ibsen play.
The session culminated in Carolyn Harris doing a ‘Don’t Cry for Me Holborn and St Pancras’ moment. ‘His courage and his decency shines through’ she yelled through tears. Ominously, behind her lurked a sceptical looking Al Carns. Starmer did the by-now-familiar Love Actually moment and that was it. Labour and Lib Dem MPs clapped him out. By the end, the tweeness of it all had got too much for Sir Lindsay who told MPs off for clapping when they should have been waving their order papers. It does seem odd that the 400 people who had so brutally dispatched the Prime Minister should want to give him a whopping standing ovation.
So, back to the original question. Will I miss Sir Keir? I will miss Starmer’s easy to puncture pomposity. I will miss his fleshy clucking and his nasal tics. I will miss ‘meep, meep’ and ‘the sausages’. I will miss watching the weekly unfolding reality flash across his face that the job isn’t as easy as he said it was and that he wasn’t as qualified as he thought. And I will say this – I will miss the moments like today when he appeared relaxed and human. When he did so he could genuinely be quite funny.
And yet, while he wasn’t up to doing what the country actually needed, part of the problem with Starmer is that he did achieve things; they were just universally petty, small minded and destructive. What I won’t miss is what Starmer presided over. The trashing of the ancient constitution, the undermining of the principle of trial by jury, the treachery over the Chagos, the relentless pursuit of an unsafe assisted suicide bill, the carelessness about pubs and small businesses, the vindictive targeting of schoolchildren, farmers, veterans etc.
Yet only so much of this can actually be laid at Starmer’s door. There was a sense, lurking in the background of many of the questions today, that the problem was never Keir – or Starmer or Sir Oinky or Two Tier or Never Here or whatever nickname you like best – the problem is the legion of nameless goons behind him at whose reality-phobic behests he inflicted much of his damage. They, sadly, aren’t going anywhere.
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