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When he does go, what will the political death certificate give as the true cause of Keir Starmer’s demise? It won’t be the Peter Mandelson scandal, the policy U-turns or the bleak nights at provincial counting centres. All these are symptoms, not the disease. No, what is turning the guy elected just 19 months ago into an ex-prime minister is the slow realisation among ministers, colleagues and voters of one essential truth about the man: there is less to him than meets the eye.
His promises get shrunk in the wash. A green new deal is jettisoned, an Employment Rights Act has a large watering can poured over it, a bold manifesto pledge to end Britain’s feudal leasehold laws suddenly grows caveats.
The same goes for his claimed achievements, a modest puddle that in sunlight swiftly evaporates. Just listen to his cabinet ministers this week, mouthing hostage-video messages of their boss’s achievements: a roll-call that begins with extended childcare – actually one of the last deeds of Rishi Sunak – and scrapping the two-child benefit cap, forced on No 10 by Labour backbenchers.
In this land of vanished crafts and endangered trades, there did arise recently a nice cottage industry of defining “Starmerism”. Writers and academics tried to plumb its depths and chart its hinterland. Some bravely went as far as Reigate in Surrey to search for clues in the man’s childhood home, but all eventually gave up the task as hopeless, the last surrendering somewhere between his government’s ninth and 11th U-turn.
They could have saved themselves the bother and simply defined it as shrinking ambitions, attainments, electoral base. It’s not a philosophy but a business model, and for years it was taken as a profitable one – even if some of us warned of the dangers long ago. Now it is understood as leading only to bankruptcy.
When Mandelson texted his Westminster apprentice Wes Streeting last March that “the government problems do not stem from comms”, he was spot on. The problem is not communications; it’s that there is so little to pass on. And when No 10 talks about how its resident will now be “unleashed”, it will soon become apparent that there was no big beast to put on a lead.
Starmer began his fightback this week with a solemn vow to purge Westminster lobbyists, a risible claim from a government filled with lobbyists. Jacqui Smith, the frontbencher sent out on Monday to defend her man was, until Starmer gave her a job, a lobbyist. Starmer’s jobs tsar, Alan Milburn, has made more than £8m from lobbying, while another former New Labour minister, Jim Murphy, runs a lobbying firm where two staffers in 2024 became MPs for Starmer. Indeed, according to the journalist Peter Geoghegan, 34 of the most recent intake of Labour MPs worked in lobbying.
Less-ism applies not just to the prime minister, but his circle; not just their policies, but their careers. Consider the man whose shadow looms over this entire week, the just-departed chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. In their career obits, journalists across the press praised the man for three key achievements. First: he was the “hammer of the left” against what was left of Ted Knight’s Trotskyism in the London borough of Lambeth. The dates alone mean this can’t be true: when Knight ran Lambeth back in the 1980s, McSweeney would have been in primary school in County Cork. By the time the Irishman came to London Labour, the party’s big fight was not against “the hard left” but the Lib Dems.
Second: he was the hero of the 2010 Battle for Barking, that mass mobilisation of anti-fascists against the British National party. It was a fight over months that culminated one Saturday in spring when more than 500 people turned out to campaign against Nick Griffin getting into parliament. Of a number of volunteers and witnesses I have spoken to about that campaign, no one remembers McSweeney playing a significant role. The Battle for Barking gets its own chapter in How to Defeat the Far Right by Nick Lowles, one of its organisers and a seasoned anti-fascist. McSweeney is not mentioned once by Lowles, either in the chapter or across the whole book. Among those who do get mentioned is Sam Tarry, a “young but experienced campaigner” from Barking, who even sleeps in the office to guard it from violent racists. Tarry later became a Labour MP, but was blocked from running again by Starmer and McSweeney’s regime.
Finally, there is of course the landslide of 2024: a historic and remarkable turnaround, yet not the triumph that McSweeney and Starmer hoped for. They believed that flags and tanks might win over “hero voters” who had once been red but then turned blue. It didn’t. Labour’s overall vote share only rose by 1.6 percentage points on the great wipeout of 2019. The person who actually won the 2024 election for Starmer is clearly Liz Truss, a disaster in office while splitting the rightwing vote.
The net result is that Starmer has a bigger majority than Clement Attlee in 1945, but a platform closer to Sunak’s. In a forthcoming textual analysis of the manifestos of the two parties down the decades, York University’s Kevin Farnsworth observes that Starmer’s manifesto for “change” was strikingly similar in language and positions to Sunak’s manifesto at the same election. It was, he writes, “a decisive embrace of positions historically closer to Conservative than Labour platforms”.
Politicians and journalists love myth-making, but the danger of preferring legends to history is that you have no guide to take you forward. One of the guiding attitudes of Starmer and McSweeney’s regime has been that grave danger lies in looking even a few millimetres left, which is why he and his team have felt no compunction in taking pops at Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan, and trying to kick out of their party anyone who even looked like a dissenter. Not just Jeremy Corbyn but peaceable figures from the soft left such as Neal Lawson (threatened with expulsion for endorsing a call on Twitter for cross-party cooperation).
I’ve watched every minute of the hour’s worth of footage of the former Labour metro mayor Jamie Driscoll getting browbeaten by party bureaucrats for simply sitting on stage with the legendary leftwing film-maker Ken Loach. I’ve also read the accounts of long-serving councillors and community figures barred from even being considered as a Labour candidate for parliament for such apparent misdemeanours as “liking” a tweet from Nicola Sturgeon saying that she was free of Covid.
This is McCarthyism dressed up as election-winning politics and it has failed. The result is not much of a government, and barely even a party. It’s a faction, a nasty narrow rightwing faction of what was once one of democracy’s great pluralist traditions. In place of real politics, it has office politics. The refrain that Starmer is a “decent” man does not fit his record of deceiving his way to the top of the Labour party, sitting on his hands during the massacre in Gaza or clamping down on protest against it.
This government is already toast, one Labour heavyweight told me this week, but the Labour party – a 125-year-old political project – may not survive Starmer and McSweeney. The diminution of the party’s horizons is clear when one considers the leadership election to come. Fifty years ago, the battle to replace Jim Callaghan drew heavyweights from Tony Benn to Roy Jenkins. In 2015, the range went from Corbyn to Liz Kendall. This year we are likely to have Streeting, a former student politician, versus someone from the soft left. There are no ideas in contest here, little semblance of a plan for change.
Now the shrinking is being done for them by us, the voters. Labour’s polling is disastrous. At each election, leftwing voters ask: who is the candidate to stop Farage’s candidate? In Caerphilly, it was Plaid Cymru. In Gorton and Denton this month it may be the Greens. But it rarely seems to be Starmer.
Voters are actively searching out alternatives. Because why should they settle for less?
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Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
