How Starmer's blankness undid his premiership

Tuesday, 23 June 2026

Sir Keir Starmer took the first steps towards his resignation on the night before he became prime minister.

On the evening of July 4, 2024, we learnt that Labour had won one of the biggest landslides in modern political history. But we also learnt it had won only 33 per cent of the vote.

In other words its strategy had been a tremendous success, winning power less than five years after a huge defeat. But its strategy had also been a tremendous failure. It had only gained a tiny increase in national vote share, had actually lost votes overall and in many places it had gone backwards in both. The new parliament was full of MPs sitting for marginal seats.

This meant that even a small reduction in the government's popularity would quickly endanger large numbers of MPs. And a reduction in the government's popularity was made almost inevitable by the other strategic failing. Labour had prepared neither itself nor the electorate for the decisions it would need to make in office.

Yet perhaps a more deft politician might have been able to overcome these weaknesses. He would have to create an agenda and build a coalition while in office, somehow linking up the liberal left and socially conservative working-class voters.

Unfortunately Keir Starmer is not a deft politician. He doesn't even believe in being a deft politician.

He had been highly political all his life, yet at the same time he provided a masterclass in political blankness. In decades of activity he had never, really, said anything particularly politically interesting. It was impossible to tell what he stood for. Even as leader he would sit in meetings and everyone would emerge from them none the wiser about what he thought.

He would get irritated when people argued that his government needed a narrative. So in the end circumstances created a narrative for him.

Once upon a time there was an intelligent, highly conscientious, congenial man who proved entirely unsuited to the office he sought. As a result he ended up being hated and laughed at by voters in a way that he did not deserve but could not withstand. The End.