I have little interest in what Keir Starmer will say in the Commons later today. I’ve only been in political journalism for four years, and I’m already onto the fall of my fourth prime minister. The death drawls of a premiership have a familiar and tedious air; whatever Starmer says about l’affaire Mandelson, the original sin was appointing an old chum of the world’s most famous nonce as our man in Washington. The exact details of who knew what when are secondary to that mistake.
The Prime Minister’s speech will allow for various itches to be scratched. Tory MPs who made it through Partygate will enjoy Boris Johnson’s chief inquisitor being hoist by his own petard; Labour MPs who have spent the last year and a half being disillusioned by their hated chief will grit their teeth and think about which charity, blog or think-tank they’ll work for after losing their seats. Starmer will huff and puff, protest his honesty and innocence, and go puce as Kemi Badenoch questions his precious integrity. So it goes. It’s all so predictable.
As with Partygate for Johnson, this scandal is only of interest in how it reveals the fundamental flaws of Starmer’s character. A late middle-aged man of conventional soft-left opinions who decided he wanted to be prime minister at an age when more exciting men buy a Porsche or shag the au pair; a product of the Blob at war with it, trapped by the very process he has long fetishised; an apolitical, accidental politician, unable to explain why he should continue in highest office in the land, whose head is filled only with Adolescence and Arsenal as advisers and officials scurry around him.
Starmer is a sphinx without a riddle, a man palpably not up to being prime minister, the most unpopular occupant of that office on record precisely because of his all-consuming inadequacy. Should he go? For those of us with eyes to see, he wasn’t up to the job when he was elected. If he should go now, he shouldn’t have been appointed in the first place. Forcing him out of Downing Street now would only be a brief moment of national rejoicing, an opportunity for an unhappy country to wave goodbye to our adenoidal bogeyman.
But the more I think about it, the more I want Starmer to stay. Not only because the alternatives are all so awful – Ed Miliband with his net zero zealotry, Angela Rayner and her unvarnished class warfare, Andy Burnham’s tedious and unconvincing resurrection as a promoter of municipal bus ownership, Wes Streeting with a shallowness that makes a child’s plastic paddling pool look like the Mariana Trench – but as a punishment. The voters chose this dud. They deserve to have to endure their folly, a final and salutary lesson in why one should never vote Labour.
In three and a half years or so, the electorate that stuck Starmer in Downing Street will have the opportunity to turf him out of it. Until then, they should put up with a prime minister they loathe, a daily reminder of our decline as a nation and their mistake back in 2024. They must endure every relaunch, every hollow-eyed social media video, every punishment Budget, every backbench revolt, every U-turn. Only once they have endured five years of stagnation, scandal and stupidity with Starmer will they realise just how radical a change Britain needs.
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