The end of Starmer?

Today’s local elections may finally force Labour to accept that the Prime Minister has to go.

Few political leaders have the good sense to retire before they are pushed. The lure of power and status may be an innate human instinct, but it is surprising that more politicians don’t keep a keener eye on their legacy. ‘All political lives,’ wrote Enoch Powell, ‘unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs’. The smarter leaders should always aim to bow out at that happy juncture.

Keir Starmer is the latest in an endless line of politicians whose hubris has overwhelmed their capacity for objectivity. Back in February, when the Prime Minister’s prospects seemed at their lowest and Ed Miliband was saying that Labour was looking ‘over the precipice’, Starmer was boasting: ‘Every fight I have ever been in, I’ve won.’ In a post on X, he (or his minions) wrote: ‘I will never walk away from the mandate I was given. I will never walk away from the people I’m fighting for. I will never walk away from the country I love.’

Perhaps soon he will have no choice. Today’s local elections will see over five thousand councillors elected and, if the polls are anywhere near accurate, Starmer is in for a brutal drubbing. Britain Elects has predicted that Labour could lose two thirds of its councillors, while Reform UK are set for impressive gains. What might happen to the Greens is anyone’s guess, given that the approval rating of their leader Zack Polanski – according to a poll by More In Common – has fallen 14 points in this last week alone. (This follows Polanski’s sharing of an online post that claimed the Golders Green stabbing suspect was subjected to excessive force by police.)

It seems likely that if the outcome of today’s elections is as bad as predicted, Starmer will finally be forced out. He certainly won’t give up of his own volition. He reminds me of King Edward II in Christopher Marlowe’s play who, for all his ineptitude and weakness, rages against his rebels: ‘shall the crowning of these cockerels affright a lion?’ Starmer’s self-perceptions are no less deluded, but with any luck he will avoid Edward’s fate. (If you haven’t read the play, it involves a red-hot poker and a particularly sensitive area of his anatomy.)

Polls have repeatedly shown that Starmer is one of the least popular Prime Ministers in history. Even the unions have now turned on him. His appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, in spite of his continued friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, obliterated what remained of Starmer’s credibility. He denied knowing that Mandelson failed the vetting procedure and claimed that the Foreign Office overruled him without his knowledge. If he is lying, that’s bad enough. But if he is telling the truth it is even worse, because it suggests that he has no control over his own government.

So whether we put this down to mendacity or incompetence, the nagging question remains: why on earth has he not yet resigned? Oh, to be a telepath with the capacity to rummage around in Starmer’s mind. What a jumble of motivated reasoning one might uncover in that desolate labyrinth. Is he perhaps thinking that in clinging on to power he might accomplish some crowning feat that would redeem him from all his past failures? Or like the losing gambler at the table, perhaps he believes that if he persists a little longer he might turn his fortunes around.

More likely it is simply the usual case of the lust for power skewing all rational thought. It was a tellingly Machiavellian move for Starmer to block Andy Burnham from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election in January, knowing that he represented the most probable challenge to his leadership. It’s the same undemocratic impulse that led him to attempt a postponement of local elections after polls revealed that Labour would have been trounced by Reform. It was only when the government’s lawyers pointed out that the strategy was illegal that Starmer was forced to back down.

The problem is that our Prime Minister is a lawyer first and a politician second. His disregard for democracy has seen his government seeking to abolish juries for certain trials (ostensibly to clear a backlog), intensify censorship of the internet, and even threaten to ban X entirely. Remember also that Starmer was the architect of Labour’s plans to overturn Brexit back in 2016. He is currently repeating these efforts by stealth, pledging to hand lawmaking powers back to Brussels. It was galling to hear Starmer congratulate the people of Hungary for voting out Viktor Orbán last month, calling it a ‘historic moment, not only for Hungary, but for European democracy’. He doesn’t know what democracy means.

Today’s elections should change everything. Already the contenders for his crown are whetting their knives. Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner are said to be on manoeuvres, and we should not rule out the possibility that Andy Burnham might find a way back into parliament. All it would take is one MP in a safe Labour seat – probably somebody nearing the end of his or her career – to stand aside and force a by-election.

In any case, a new Prime Minister in the imminent future is all but guaranteed. Starmer has his loyalists, but even they must know that his time is up.

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