Sign in Starmer-cards-Opinion Illustration: Guardian Design / Anaïs Mims/GettyView image in fullscreenStarmer-cards-Opinion Illustration: Guardian Design / Anaïs Mims/GettyThe rise and fall of Keir Starmer: where did it all go wrong?PM’s demise after landslide victory two years ago points to an increasingly volatile and impatient electorate
Historians will puzzle over this one. Of the six prime ministers that have led Britain over the last decade, with a seventh now on the way, it will be the fall of Keir Starmer that will most perplex the political analysts of the future.
They will ponder a man who won a landslide victory in July 2024 only to be pushed out less than two years later, having started no illegal wars, having triggered no grave economic crises, having been accused of no scandalous act of corruption.
They will scratch their heads at a PM who paid the ultimate political price, even though few could point to the single, obvious political crime he had committed.
So what did for Starmer – and what legacy, if any – does he leave behind? Perhaps most important, what does the fleeting premiership of the outgoing Labour leader portend for whoever takes his place?
1:17UK prime minister Keir Starmer announces resignation – videoStart with his undoing, which was a function of both the man and his times. Plenty will say, and have said in recent days, that Starmer’s failure was pre-ordained, for the simple reason that he was not a politician and had no aptitude for politics. At face value, that statement is obviously absurd. No one rises to the top of a major political party and then wins a 174-seat parliamentary majority by accident.
Nor will it do to suggest that Starmer’s success came solely from being in the right place at the right time, a lucky player of political pass-the-parcel who had an election victory land in his lap when it was Labour’s turn.
Of course, it’s fair to describe the 2024 result as a national repudiation of the Conservatives rather than an embrace of Labour, but merely to have turned the party into an acceptable receptacle for that deep well of anti-Tory feeling was itself a significant achievement.
Five years earlier, voters had handed Labour their biggest drubbing since 1935. But Starmer’s tacit promise of calm, technocratic competence – after the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss years of florid Tory scandal and chaos – the sense that he was a decent, if unexciting, man, was enough to reassure voters that Labour could be trusted with power.
View image in fullscreenKeir Starmer embraces his wife, Victoria, after making his resignation statement in Downing Street, London, on Monday. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPANo one should fool themselves that such a process is automatic. Recall how few leaders in Labour’s entire history had ever won a parliamentary majority at a general election. Until Starmer, the grand total was three.
And yet, even a biographer as admiring of Starmer as Tom Baldwin was tempted to describe his subject as an “unpolitician”.
Baldwin meant that largely as a compliment, but the word also nodded to the fact that Starmer lacked several of the skills of the top-flight politician – and those deficiencies cost him very dear.
First, and most well-documented, was his weakness as a communicator. It was more than a mere absence of charisma. It was the inability to make a clear, compelling argument. A curious failing in a prosecutor, though perhaps not such a surprise when you recall that Starmer was rarely a courtroom, jury-facing advocate.
1:30‘British PMs don’t last very long’: Londoners react to Starmer’s resignation – videoBut Starmer could not seem to make a case, still less tell a story. He needed to construct a narrative for his government and he never did. Even his resignation speech on the steps of Downing Street felt more like a recitation, a list, than an argument. Perhaps the only moment of connection came when he spoke of his wife and children, and the crack in his voice spoke more eloquently than his words ever had.
