Keir Starmer or the drama of inadequacy

Sir Keir Starmer is the fifth British Prime Minister in the past decade to leave office not as a result of losing an election, but during his term. However, unlike the four previous ones, it is hard to point to a single event that led to his downfall.

David Cameron stepped down because he lost the referendum on Brexit he organized, convinced that he would finally pacify eurosceptics within his own party. Theresa May was unable to persuade the Conservatives to accept her negotiated Brexit deal with the European Union. Boris Johnson lost his premiership after a scandal involving parties at Downing Street that broke pandemic restrictions imposed by his own government, and Liz Truss – when her mini-budget ended in a market crash of UK government bonds.

Meanwhile, Starmer, without spectacular failures or scandals, was bleeding politically and losing support until his continued tenure began to seem like a highway for Nigel Farage’s entry into Downing Street.

In early June, according to Ipsos polls, only 20% of Britons viewed Starmer positively, while 58% viewed him negatively – which results in a net support level of minus 38 percentage points. Currently, only Rachel Reeves, the Treasury Chancellor responsible for the economy and fiscal policy in his cabinet, has worse support among key figures in British politics.

What caused such a significant decline in support two years after Starmer won the election with the largest majority in the House of Commons ever achieved by the Labour Party outside Tony Blair’s first victory in 1997?

Inappropriate person in the wrong place

Most obituaries of Starmer, even if they do not explicitly use the word, revolve around one concept: inadequacy. Today, the verdict of most commentators is that Starmer was simply the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As Andrew Marr wrote in the “New Statesman” , Starmer resembled a man coming to a fancy dinner dressed in evening wear and a bottle of good wine, convinced he was going to an elegant, invite-only dinner, only to find himself at a drug-fueled orgy. Or someone entering a boxing ring convinced they will fight a boxing match, only to end up in an MMA cage with almost no rules.

Patrick Maguire in “The Times” offers another analogy: Starmer, as a young man, spent years learning to play the flute and was quite good at it. At some point, he gave up music, seeing a gap between himself – someone who could play decently after long hours of practice – and children with real talent, who could improvise and genuinely feel the music. Now, Maguire argues, he has come to the conclusion that politics is similar – no matter how hard he tries, he lacks that something that distinguishes a decent craftsman from genuine political talent. As a fun fact, his schoolmate was Norman Cook, later known as Fatboy Slim.

Starmer has always seemed to be a politician who, despite reaching the highest political office, never really liked politics and did not feel comfortable in it. He lacked the natural political and media talent that, even without fulfilling his promises, would have allowed him to gain public sympathy. He struggled to build narratives and relationships with voters – in summaries of his career, he is often described as perhaps the most stiff British Prime Minister since Clement Attlee.

In favorable narratives about the departing Prime Minister, there are voices claiming he was an honest, principled, hard-working man who simply had bad luck, entering politics at a time when none of those values were appreciated, with figures like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage promoting instead professional political clowns who treat politics as another branch of the entertainment industry.

Unfavorable narratives about Starmer reject his image as an honest, decent politician. These often appear on the radical left, e.g., in the political obituary of the departing Prime Minister by Owen Jones in “The Guardian”.

In this narrative, Starmer is portrayed as a political opportunist who won the Labour leadership election promising largely to continue Corbyn’s line, then began purging the entire party left wing. He is someone who, from kneeling in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and calling for a humanitarian approach to migration, shifted to rhetoric more typical of the radical right, warning that Britain is becoming an “island of strangers” due to migration. A lawyer who built his career defending human rights, then as opposition leader argued that Israel has the right to cut off water to Gaza after Hamas attacks in 2023.

The opportunism of Starmer, the argument continues, has politically hollowed out the party, drained it of internal vitality, and turned it into an ideological and intellectual desert. Starmer’s departure is thus seen by the Jeremy Corbynist left – often outside the Labour Party for some time – as a moment when justice is finally served.

Problem with vision

You don’t have to be a Corbyn supporter to see the problem with the lack of a vision in Starmer’s government. And one might wonder whether this absence was a conscious strategy. Starmer and Morgan McSweeney – head of the think tank Labour Together, supporting Starmer from the beginning as a candidate for the new Labour leader, and later his chief of staff at Downing Street – believed that Corbyn lost in 2019 because he presented a vision considered by most of the electorate to be moonshot.

McSweeney’s diagnosis was: if the party is ever to return to power, it must first regain the image of a responsible party that considers economic realities. Second, it must reconnect with the popular electorate outside the metropolises: supporting Brexit, socially moderate but culturally conservative, with doubts about migration, very patriotic, and perceiving Corbyn’s supporters as a bunch of eccentrics.

What was supposed to distinguish Starmer from the Tories was not so much leftism, but competence and honesty. After years of irresponsible, amateurish, corrupt Tory governments, the Labour Party was finally supposed to return to power as “adults in the room.” After Liz Truss’s budget disaster, this promise began to seem credible, and with the implosion of the Conservative Party, it helped Starmer win the election.

However, problems began to pile up from that moment. Immediately after his victorious election, a scandal erupted involving free gifts – it turned out that Starmer and his family received gifts worth over 100,000 pounds. These included clothing, tickets to matches and concerts, and eyeglass frames. Johnson probably wouldn’t have been harmed by this, but for Starmer, who presented himself as a model of honesty shining against Tory corruption, the scandal caused significant damage. Also, the image of a competent new government quickly eroded in everyday governance.

At the same time, Starmer and McSweeney, distancing themselves from Corbyn, underestimated that disappointed progressive voters have alternatives – they might vote Green or stay home – and perhaps Britain is not as far right as it might seem. One can agree with Tom Clark’s opinion from the left-wing magazine “Prospect,” that Starmer was “a social democrat who believed that the British public is so unreformably reactionary that any decent social policy cannot be combined with electoral success.”

Because of these assumptions, Starmer was unable to present two of his government’s biggest achievements as successes: reducing waiting times in the NHS and decreasing child poverty. To achieve the first, he had to backtrack on his earlier promise of “not raising taxes on workers,” and in reducing poverty, he benefited from abandoning the commitment to keep child benefit limits introduced by Cameron’s government.

In July 2024, Starmer suspended six MPs from the parliamentary party for demanding the removal of the benefit cap; less than a year later, he changed his mind. This was not the only case where Starmer mobilized the party to defend unpopular decisions within its ranks, burned political capital, suppressed rebellions, and then withdrew from his initial positions. This was the case with proposals to cut certain benefits or introduce income criteria for winter heating allowances for seniors. As a result, Starmer’s policies alienated all possible sides.

The same was true of his migration policy. There were many good arguments for the new government to adopt a more decisive stance on migration and reduce its numbers in the UK. However, Starmer did so in a way that alienated the progressive electorate and part of his parliamentary support, while failing to stop the rise of Reform UK.

All these reversals might perhaps not be so politically costly if the government had from the start a clear vision: in which direction it wants to transform Britain, how it plans to do so, and what the next step should be. Unfortunately, that, as we repeat, was lacking.

How Trump and Biden influenced Starmer

Even before the elections, it might have seemed that such a vision could be “British Bidenomics”: a policy using green transformation to build a new industrial policy, to kick-start the UK’s growth engine, which has been stalled since the 2008 crisis, by removing barriers to growth and investment while ensuring social justice.

However, this vision was lost in the noise of daily governance.

It was also dealt a blow by the failure of Biden’s project in the US and Trump’s second victory. British journalist Ben Judah even argued that it was Trump that cost Starmer his premiership. Trump’s victory initially gave new momentum to the radical right worldwide, including Reform in the UK. MAGA’s success radicalized the British right and emboldened Elon Musk to launch algorithmically amplified attacks on Starmer and the UK – which had significant influence on inspiring the wave of racial unrest in 2023 and 2024. Trump’s retreat from net zero policies and green transformation, along with his trade policies and the Iran war, severely undermined the legitimacy of one of Starmer’s key government programs. Finally, Trump’s trade policies and the Iran war also undermined the modest economic successes of the government observed in the first year and a half of his term.

According to BBC, between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2026, the UK economy grew the fastest among G7 countries outside the US. This year, mainly due to turbulence in the energy market, this growth will slow significantly, with IMF forecasts indicating a 0.8% increase, lower not only than the US but also Canada and France.

Post-Brexit spiral

However, even without Trump, Starmer would face problems. The new Prime Minister took office at a time when the bill for a series of mistakes by British elites was starting to come due: from privatization and financialization of the economy during Thatcher’s era, continued under New Labour, through the austerity policies of Cameron’s government, to Brexit.

Instead of revitalizing the British economy by “freeing” it from EU bureaucracy, Brexit created a series of barriers between the UK and its largest trading partner, further limiting growth. It’s difficult to estimate how much Britain has impoverished as a result of Brexit – especially considering the pandemic in the meantime – but most economists agree that without the divorce from the EU, the economy would be 4 to even 8 percent larger than it is now.

The country faces problems with an underfunded public sector, whose many functions are provided – at much higher costs and less efficiency – by private providers, with significant regional disparities, an economic model dependent on migration, and low-paid jobs. Moreover, the electorate demands public services at European and American tax levels.

Added to this are tensions related to multiculturalism, fueled by the radical right supported from across the Atlantic. To escape this turmoil, much greater political talent than Keir Starmer was needed. A politician not only with a vision but also ready to change the rules of the game and build a majority for new policies.

Starmer was not – especially compared to his predecessors over the last decade – a bad Prime Minister. In several areas, he introduced positive changes. His stance on Ukraine and Russia deserves praise. But at the same time, as of the third decade of the 21st century, it proved completely insufficient.

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