How on earth did a guy who tells more mistruths than a bad AI hallucination, ever manage to become Prime Minister?
Banseka Kayembe
“It can’t go on like this?” Blackpool manager Mick McCarthy, whose team had been on a sensational losing streak blithely replied: “It can!” The lesson from this viral football meme is: never be surprised by how long disasters can continue for. In the neat narratives we like to write in our heads, disasters must be followed by a quick remedy but life often proves that the floor can always descend lower.
Keir Starmer however, has finally hit his limit, having now confirmed he will be resigning. Despite a year already engulfed in scandals, alleged lies and a disastrous set of local elections it's now finally over for Starmer. For all the SW1 Westminster chat about his ability to be forensic, competent, serious, or just a “decent” person it feels obvious that most of that was a simulation - a fuzzy mirage on the horizon that much of our media never felt the need to take a closer inspection of.
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Despite evidence to the contrary, he claimed in his resignation speech that every decision he made was about "putting the country I love first”. I think his aversion to decent public standards and a willingness to tell lies like an AI platform spouting hallucinations, should have been exposed to the public well before the last general election. On the rare occasion this was pointed out by anyone, that person was treated as a lefty crank with deep tinfoil hat energy. So, with the alarm bells ringing about Starmer from the late 2010s, how on earth did this guy ever become our Prime Minister?
The leadership deception
Keir Starmer becoming Prime Minister has remarkably little to do with Keir Starmer. Morgan McSweeny, his former Chief of Staff and the former director of Labour Together (the shadowy Labour association that worked to derail Corbyn’s Labour party) cut his political teeth at Lambeth council, where he would form a politics deeply oppositional to the left. Later he would install Starmer as leader. Labour Together pretended to be an outfit to repair the party’s factional wounds, but it actually operated as a deeply factional vehicle for the right wing of the party.
It’s difficult to pin down any real ideological grounding or principles in Starmer - something journalist and author of “The Fraud” Paul Holden frequently points out as being very atypical of former Labour leaders. Tony Blair had a set of guiding principles however we may feel about them. Starmer is uniquely empty when it comes to ideology, a perfect hollow vessel for McSweeny to pour his own anti-left, Blue Labour views into.
Former Makerfield MP Josh Simons - who had to resign from cabinet after it was reported that Labour Together paid a firm to investigate journalists whilst he was running the organisation - said as late as last week that he “had no idea what Starmerism is”, presumably knowing that Starmer’s vacuousness is precisely what made him such a useful Prime Minister for Simon’s faction of the party.
McSweeny knew his politics was not popular with the Labour Party membership, so Keir Starmer became his Trojan horse in the 2020 leadership race, out-lefting the other candidates, only to bait and switch on the membership once he won the leadership.
Promises to scrap tuition fees, increase tax for the top 5%, defend migrants rights, and nationalise water and energy were all chucked out. It was an egregious form of electoral deception, to run on a series of continuity-Corbyn policies and then abandon them to move sharply rightwards. Starmer’s time as Labour leader starts with lies and betrayal, a marker of how he and the Labour Together structure would behave. Starmer was a factional tool in McSweeny’s toolbox, ready to be told exactly what to do - a dynamic the media seemed totally uninterested in until it was too late.
Dirty cash
“Well politicians lie all the time, there’s nothing new about that!” I suppose you could argue that Starmer’s capacity to lie isn’t totally ground breaking, but the deception goes significantly further than that. Labour Together reportedly failed to declare around £740,000 of donations from primarily two wealthy donors in 2020 and consequently were found guilty of violating electoral law in 2021. In British politics this is not chump change, it's a significant amount of money. Labour Together have stated that this failure to declare the funds was an administrative error; but it also clearly benefited Starmer’s political strategists for these huge donations to not be public knowledge.
These funds being collected in the shadows made it harder to tie them to the wider disruptive, deeply factional politics happening in the party during the Corbyn years. The ecosystem that propelled Stamer to power appeared to care about little else beyond winning and smashing the left. Keir Starmer’s decision to align himself with such a culture, to agree to a toxic faustian pact shows an egregious lack of ethics and moral judgement- a context which makes the Peter Mandelson scandal that blew up this year totally unsurprising.
Playing on easy mode
Keir Starmer made a good bet that McSweeny and Labour Together could get rid of the left in the party, but he was grossly naive to believe the outfit knew anything about actually governing. That’s the trouble with getting too easy a time in opposition; you’ve not really been tested till you’re actually making the hard day to day decisions in government, and by then you’re woefully ill-equipped. Playing politics “on easy mode” with little to no challenge from the media about exactly why Starmer was expelling the left and lying to the membership, meant no skills were built to deal with scrutiny in government.
The outsourcing Prime Minister
Voters were expecting some material change after nearly a decade and a half of Conservative rule. Rather than grasping some low hanging more optimistic fruit to buoy the public’s living standards, the narrative immediately became about more suffering. Labour MPs were draconially whipped into supporting the two child benefit cap and the winter fuel allowance - dissent was rewarded with the unusual response of being suspended from the party. That’s right, MPs were suspended from the Labour party if they *didn’t* vote to make children poorer.
Nationalising rail, a policy which should have been a crowd pleaser across much of the political spectrum, hasn't created noticeably lower fares or better connectivity between communities. Public ownership under Starmer is a hollowed out administrative move, a change of management rather than a commitment to changing how the rail system actually functions so consumers and taxpayers feel a benefit in their pockets. Likewise the free breakfasts programme rolled out in primary schools was deemed by many head teachers as not viable, and it was revealed schools were being given as little as 60 pence per pupil to give them a decent breakfast. Commentators are right to say there were some on paper left wing policies driven by Starmer, but a closer inspection of the details showed they were often hollow, poorly resourced projects.
Starmer’s Chancellor Rachel Reeves rigidly stuck to her “fiscal rules” but none of that seemed to demonstrate Starmer had any actual strategy to create social and economic change. It is all very well saying a government needs credibility and stability, but if it never extends to materially raising people’s living standards enough then what is the point? So called “economic responsibility” alone hasn’t lowered energy bills or the price of food.
Equally the drive to get migration numbers down whilst indulging in cruel right wing rhetoric like claiming we are becoming “an island of strangers” has not actually delivered any dividends for this government. It’s almost irrelevant to the public that the numbers are going down because there’s no material benefits being felt; it just pours more fuel onto Reform’s fire.
Outsourcing much of the hard political and economic thinking to someone who’s main character trait was settling old scores against the left and little else, meant Starmer had a totally unserious plan in government to turn this country around.
The Gaza disaster
The number one leading reason why Labour voters have abandoned the party is its position on Gaza. 53% said the government’s position on Gaza influenced their decision to switch their vote from Labour, with 21% saying it influenced them a great deal and 31% saying it influenced them somewhat.
Keir Starmer infamously mumbled “Israel does have that right to cut off food, water and electricity” to Gaza on LBC in October 2023, an action which is recognised in international law as a war crime. In government they’ve proved no better, with Britain overseeing over 500 spy flights to Gaza since October 2023 and reducing licenses for Israeli arms parts by only 30 out of roughly 300.
This has unleashed further havoc on our freedoms here too, with the proscribing of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, despite the organisation engaging in less dangerous civil disobedience than the now lauded Suffragrettes. You can be arrested for holding up a placard that says “I support Palestine Action”. A politician who made much of his “human rights lawyer” credentials when it suited him, seemed happy to shelve that archetype when it has come to aiding and abetting a genocide in Gaza and narrowing our rights here in the UK.
Starmer’s inability not only to do what is morally right, but also what would cater to his voter base, has been disastrous for the Party. It shows a total lack of long term thinking to not understand that a pro-Israel position would chip away at progressive support, and would likely win over few Conservative or Reform voters. A morally repugnant and politically disastrous calculation for the so-called "forensic" Starmer to have made.
SW1-brained takes
“I can’t really understand why he is so hated???” many a liberal pundit has exclaimed over a podcast mic. To them, someone in a suit with a nice haircut who posed no threat whatsoever to the status quo simply must have been a good person. The deep bias our media has towards politicians like him, gets right to the heart of how someone so ill-equipped to be Prime Minister ruled over us for two years. Through gritted teeth he agreed to u-turn on maintaining the two child benefit cap and tried to introduce a tax on multimillion pound home owners last year, but it was too late. He’d simply not delivered enough policy wins that improve people’s lives.
When I spoke to Peter Geoghegan earlier this year- a journalist who’s done significant investigative work into Labour Together- he did admit to me that he’d been slow off the mark in identifying just how unethical Starmer and his posse were. It was easy to dismiss the factionalist weapons (including many spurious claims of antisemitism) wielded by Starmer’s team as just infighting; and deep down I suspect many Westminster journalists felt it was just the natural order of things to have the right wing in charge of Labour. To them it didn’t matter if it was achieved through unethical means.
The Starmer legacy
Starmer spent years insisting he was repairing a broken party and restoring its credibility. “I inherited a morally bankrupt party” he claimed on the steps of Number 10 in his resignation speech. His final words are an inversion of the truth; the party has never looked more in the gutter and it is facing the prospect of losing hundreds of seats at the next general election, plummeting to potentially unprecedented levels.
Starmer was a simulation, a projection of competence and managerial skill masking a weak, directionless man prepared to behave deeply unethically if he thought it would further his path to power. Eventually reality caught up, and we may end up concluding Starmer was pivotal to the death of Labour. You may be glad to see the back of him, but the disturbing forces that brought him there are still lurking. Surely it can’t go on like this? Well, we may not have reached the end just yet.
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