‘“I’ll be PM this time next year,” Starmer tells BBC.’ Such was the headline on the BBC’s website over the Prime Minister’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg, in a place of some prominence. I feel like I’ve read this one before, don’t you? It is, hilariously yet also, oddly, boringly, the headline that now goes on every interview our useless PM gives. Out he sets, determined, as I expect he sees it, to draw a line under the speculation about his future and talk about the things that really matter to hardworking families, salt-of-the-earth toolmakers, and so on – and the most interesting thing he manages to say is that he’s still going to be in his job a year from now. Which hardly draws a line. Indeed, to adapt Thom Gunn’s squib ‘Jamesian’: ‘His premiership consisted/ In discussing if it existed.’
I am honestly surprised and bewildered by how useless this Prime Minister has turned out to be
It needs little pointing out that he’s not exactly in a position to know. It needs little pointing out, too, that Keir Starmer’s speculation about Keir Starmer’s job security, given what else is going on in the world now, is pretty low down the list of anyone’s news priorities. Would it not have been possible, you wonder, for him to have said one concrete thing forceful and interesting enough to make the headline a different headline? I mean, it’s not as if there aren’t some sitters available to a credentialed expert in international law.
And, yes, we all know that the dice are somewhat loaded against our man; that a ‘narrative’ is being created as he’s invited to deny, over and over again, that he’s toast; that he’s always going to be asked if he’s about to be out of a job and that his nasal bleats of defiance will always be reported with a cheerful ‘Embattled Starmer insists…’ But it’s the job of a Prime Minister in that situation, or at least of his speechwriters and advisers, to find a way of flipping that narrative. If you can’t, better not do the interview at all. Whatever we may say about President Trump, he’s a champ at changing the conversation when his wicket is starting to look sticky.
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Alexander Larman
The inexorable decline of British Airways is a parable for modern Britain
The outstanding beigeness that, in the heady days of his election, looked like Sir Keir’s greatest asset – here’s a dutiful functionary! the grown-ups are back! – has turned into his greatest weakness. We who were minded to give him a chance hoped for someone who would be able to act rather than to talk. We have ended up with someone who can neither talk nor act. ‘We need to be clear,’ he said. ‘I intend to deliver,’ he said. ‘Deliver on the mandate,’ he said. ‘Change that people voted for,’ he said. ‘Turn the corner,’ he said. ‘Stop the drift,’ he said. ‘To be British is to be compassionate and reasonable, live and let live and diverse,’ he said. Bleat, bleat, bleat. Beige, beige, beige.
I am honestly surprised and bewildered by how useless this Prime Minister has turned out to be, and how quickly. (Yes, yes: please don’t all write in to tell me you weren’t.) Remember the unforced errors straight out of the gate – the personal shopper, the free spectacles – and the dither and drift in policy that followed? Overseas aid, winter fuel, benefits cuts, grooming gangs, trans rights, national insurance…Now, when the head of state of a sovereign nation is kidnapped – not, as seems to be the style, ‘captured’ – by the armed forces of another, he doesn’t dare say even that, all things considered, it might set a slightly concerning precedent.
Instead he homes, immediately, to asininities about being judged on his record, and mandates for change, and suchlike. He said something about closer alignment with Europe in that same interview – which, in any other hands could have sounded bold or even incendiary – but so hedged about was it with technocratic whys and wherefores, with ‘case-by-case basis’ mumbling and ‘water under the bridge’ qualifications that he didn’t say much of anything at all. ‘If it’s in our national interest…then we should consider that, we should go that far,’ he said of the prospect of closer alignment with the single market. Go so far as to consider it? Be still my heart: the daring!
And even if the conversation must be about his future, he still can’t hit a quotable phrase. No ‘I’m a fighter not a quitter’. No ‘the Lady’s not for turning’ or ‘I hope to go on and on’. Even Liz Truss – though admittedly it wasn’t her idea – had a lettuce, for Pete’s sake. Where’s the drama? Where’s the life?
Sir Keir may or may not still be Prime Minister as the winter sun glitters on the first frost of 2027. But if he carries on like this, the question won’t so much be whether he’s in power as how anyone is supposed to tell.
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