Starmer’s King’s Speech response bore little resemblance to reality

Like the rest of the King’s Speech, Keir Starmer’s address on the government’s legislative agenda had been prepared long before the turmoil in his party, and therefore bore little resemblance to reality. The Prime Minister did make a few joking references in his opening lines about the list of people endorsing Naz Shah’s book – adding that it was finally a list that everyone could get behind. But he largely spoke as though he were not hours away from a potential leadership challenge – or as though there were sections even of this speech that his own party wasn’t fully on board with.

Starmer also had to respond to the speech immediately before Kemi Badenoch, who accused him of being ‘in office but not in power’. The Leader of the Opposition opened her speech by pointing out that it had not been clear whether there was actually going to be a prime minister in place for this King’s Speech and then went on to argue that Labour had failed because it had not thought deeply in opposition about the issues it would encounter in government. She was trying also to offer a counter to the growing narrative that the latest chaos in Labour suggests that Britain is ungovernable, arguing instead that Starmer and his colleagues have merely ducked difficult decisions that they really could have taken. 

The Prime Minister sarcastically thanked Badenoch for her warm remarks before claiming that the speech was ‘a strike against the status quo that has failed working people’. He added, ludicrously, that: ‘It is an agenda of radical reform across our major public services, an urgent activist Labour government that tilts power back to workers.’ There is barely any reform across the public services – but even if there was, Starmer wouldn’t be the one delivering it anyway.