Two tear Keir

Emotional Starmer bends knee to King of the North

It appears that the King of the North has no challengers and we could see a coronation within weeks. The Iron Throne will soon be his.

It’s more like an electric chair these days. These are febrile, unstable times. The last prime mister to gain power at an election then lose it at an election, the way it is supposed to happen, was Ted Heath, voted out back in 1974, 52 years ago. Since then prime ministers have either come to power when another leader leaves mid-term (Callaghan, Major, Brown, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Burnham) or have lost power as a result of a resignation, often at gunpoint (Wilson, Thatcher, Blair, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Starmer). Though of these only the hapless Liz Truss came and went without any election at all.

Is Britain “ungovernable”? No, of course not. We are just deluded. There is a huge mismatch between Britain’s perception of itself and the reality. Politicians tell us what we want to hear, because we like that and we vote for them accordingly. We want western European public services and free healthcare and American levels of taxation. In a slow-growing economy.

It’s not possible. Starmer’s big mistake was pretending to us that he could improve the country without raising core taxation. He pinned his hopes on the UK achieving unexpectedly high growth, despite doing virtually nothing to stimulate it. Instead, raising taxes on business dampened it. It was a Hail Mary, really. He had no realistic chance of success.

He ran a dull and cautious election campaign in 2024, focused on criticising the Tory record and letting people project onto him their hopes for a better future. He did not tell them anything they did not want to hear. So he got elected in a “loveless landslide”, but with fewer votes than Corbyn got when he got trounced by Johnson in 2019.

Expectations were low, but he still failed to achieve them. He has no charisma and no skills of oratory. His speeches are just long lists, recited with a faint air of impatience and irritation, like that physics teacher at school who made you feel like crying with boredom.

Worse, perhaps, he appeared to have virtually no ideas. This is a man who literally does not dream. Fourteen years in opposition should at least give you time to come up with some pretty good plans, but it seemed all Labour had done was focus on winning the election. So now what? It was as if Starmer assumed his managerial skills would be an adequate substitute for having no ideas, vision or principles.

As it turned out even those managerial skills were vastly overrated - he proved incapable of governing Number 10, with a succession of advisers quitting or being fired, and was mortally wounded by his mis-handling of the Mandelson appointment and fall-out. And his lack of political skills proved fatal - he was forced to U-turn multiple times because he had made no attempt to “roll the pitch” ahead of difficult decisions, failing to bring his party (or indeed anyone else) with him on the few occasions he tried to enact a policy to save money.

On the positive side, he felt like a grown-up. When there was a crisis, you felt you could trust him to make the right call. It’s not something you could say about Johnson, Truss, Corbyn, Badenoch, Farage or Polanski. He did well on foreign policy, and I’d like to see him stay on as foreign secretary under Burnham, though maybe male egos don’t allow for that sort of thing.

He lied a lot, and got some free gear, but he seems a fundamentally decent bloke, in the job for the right reasons and not just wealth accumulation or sociopathy. There was no scandal, no disasters. Britain is jogging along in sullen mediocrity. The widespread hatred for him is mystifying. Exasperation and disappointment absolutely, but not hatred.

But he was not good enough.

Andy will definitely be a better communicator and a better political operator, and he almost certainly has a clearer vision of what he wants to achieve and how to get there - he could hardly be worse than Starmer in that respect. But does he have the guts to tell us the hard truths we need to hear and to push through difficult measures that may make us worse off, at least initially? Welfare reform, social care provision, pension and healthcare reform? Possible tax increases? Nothing in his past suggests that he has, though at least our buses will probably improve.