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Current state of British democracy: the guy who puts out the resignation lectern in front of No 10 is now so familiar that he has become a meme. On the internet, they call him Hot Podium Guy. William Hague’s old line about the Tory party being “an autocracy moderated by regicide” is now basically true of the country as a whole.
And so out Keir Starmer strides to give a speech that, in the grand tradition of Starmer oratory, occupies the curious liminal space between the instantly forgettable and the barely existent. What might comprise a Davina-style supercut of Starmer’s best bits? The time he described us as an “island of strangers”, or blurted out that Israel had the right to starve Gaza of food and water? When your most memorable quotes were so poorly judged, perhaps it might be best for everyone if you put the microphone down for a while.
Not everyone is a natural public speaker, which on one level, of course, is fine. What Starmer craved above all was a task, a clear set of instructions and a solution. To him the British state was essentially an item of flatpack furniture: insert legislation A into complex social problem B, screw voter demographic C as tightly as possible, and if in doubt, call the handy 24-hour helpline to speak to Morgan.
For all this, in the coming days you will read plenty of partial diagnoses about why Starmer failed. A lack of personality. The absence of a clear vision or ideology. A series of entirely avoidable policy missteps and U-turns. And while there is a kernel of truth in all these, such diagnoses rest on a simple and fatal assumption: that a more skilled politician delivering tangible improvements to people’s lives would otherwise have succeeded.
As a counterfactual, let’s imagine a scenario in which Starmer takes office in 2024 and turns out to be your absolute dreamboy. Abolishing the triple lock. A wealth tax. Rejoining the European Union. Implementing the 10-step “moral case for socialism” on which he so creatively won the Labour leadership in 2020. The death penalty for double parking. Whatever it is that rocks your world.
Now, let’s be honest with ourselves. Does this earn him the eternal gratitude of a sceptical public, restore our faith in politics, placate a hostile press? Do the darts crowds fall silent? Do the summer riots not happen? Or do the screams of the powerful ring so loudly and shrilly, through all conceivable outlets, that he simply gets drummed out of town even faster, perhaps even squashed at source?
One of the main rationales for replacing Starmer with Andy Burnham, we are told, is that Burnham’s greater popularity will earn Labour a “rehearing”. But perhaps we overestimate the extent to which large sections of the public – and an even larger proportion of the media through which the public gets its information – were ever prepared to give them a hearing in the first place.
You can already see these dynamics reassembling under the new presumptive leadership, the determination of the rightwing press and the algorithm to extinguish the new administration before it can even change the letterheads. The onslaught will be vicious, immediate and unashamedly detached from reality. “Whoever the next chancellor is, they are coming for your home,” screams the Telegraph. “A man with no plan and no proper mandate,” scoffs the Sun.
You didn’t have to agree with everything Starmer did to recognise the hostility of the environment he faced. But his great delusion was to imagine that this malignance could be placated, even brought onside. To this end he threw them lots of red meat: the criminalisation of protest and planned cuts to disability benefits. But none of it worked in the face of an establishment that does not merely disdain leftwing voters but barely appears to regard them as human. “Blue-haired city-dwelling Green-adjacent trans-lovers,” went one description by a Sunday Times columnist, who, if pushed, would probably still classify herself as a sensible moderate.
And so it makes no odds to point to the second fastest economic growth in the G7, falling immigration, falling NHS waiting lists. None of this really matters. The average voter will have little idea of what Starmer has actually done, because those with the job of telling them have no interest in doing so. Which may explain why many people still think immigration is rising, the economy shrinking and that Starmer is a posh paedophile who let Jimmy Savile off the hook.
Like the manager of a struggling mid-table football club, the modern British prime minister exists largely as a meat sacrifice: they’re there for the sole purpose of later being sacked as a narrative device. The role itself is less influential than it ever was. You can’t beat the bond markets, you can’t reopen the strait of Hormuz, and there’s no point in crafting a great story if nobody will believe it anyway. Still, have you tried pressing the magic New Prime Minister button? This could be the time it actually works.
This is how you end up with seven prime ministers in just over a decade, none of them remotely alike. You’ve been through the smooth-talker, the smarmy headteacher, the light entertainment personality, the reanimated ghost of Friedrich Hayek, maths boy, the toolmaker’s son. At what point do we conclude that the problem is not simply the person, but the process – an interminable feedback loop generating ever diminishing returns?
Polling consistently shows that voters want the state to tread lightly on their lives, but also think it doesn’t do enough. They demand low taxes and Scandinavian public services, a growing economy and lower immigration. They crave stability but opt for chaos virtually every time they are prompted. And so, in the absence of the kind of change you might actually want, they simply keep mashing the buttons on the controller, ever more furiously, until one day it finally breaks.
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