Keir Starmer will be remembered as a pub quiz question

This is a full stop to a nothing

Photo by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street

Keir Starmer’s impending departure from Downing Street – at time of writing he is clinging like a barnacle to a boat long-beached – raises a question more appropriate to physics or philosophy than politics: can the departure of a vacancy itself create a vacancy?

Or, as Hegel might have said – never in all my days have I seen a negation so thoroughly negated.

It is not the end of an era as much as the theatre bell warning that the intermission is almost over and one should resume one’s seat.

Whatever comes next will be something. This is the full stop to a nothing.

But a “sensible” nothing. A project that offered competent, managerial administration, that had the sober stare and the suits, even if they were freebies.

A project that was also founded on fraud from the outset, draping a policy programme designed to appeal to a punch-drunk Labour membership around a politician who did not believe in it, or in anything very much.

Starmer then spent the years in opposition driving members out of his party, abandoning one meaningful policy commitment after another and ultimately alienating key blocks of voters – on his shameful embrace of Israel above all – to the point where he ended up winning fewer votes for Labour than Jeremy Corbyn at his 2019 low point.

Indeed, it is little remarked that Starmer himself lost half his personal vote in his Camden constituency between 2019 and 2024, those who know him best, evidently preferring him under Corbyn’s leadership than his own.

David Cameron famously said he wanted to be Prime Minister because he thought he would be good at it. Starmer exuded the same assumption, although with more state-prosecutor authority and less noblesse oblige.

And if being a “good Prime Minister” is a values-free judgement, Cameron managed it for a few years. Until 2016 the wheels remained in the correct relationship to the wagon.

Keir Starmer has not been. The free suits and other grifting, the cut to winter fuel benefits, and the response to that summer’s racist riots – all judicial severity, no political leadership – defined his administration within weeks and spoke to a stunning lack of policy preparation or political nous.

There has not been a moment since when Starmer’s government has felt on the front foot. It took the Tories six years to plunge into chaos, which then accelerated dramatically over the succeeding eight. The Morgan McSweeney project managed it in less than two years from the brittle general election landslide. At this rate nemesis will soon be actually arriving before hubris.

This is no coincidence, comrades! The McSweeney-Starmer failure is rooted in the fact that Labour’s right-wing has entirely run out of ideas. At a moment of deep, enduring, and increasingly-complex social, economic and international crises, its ideological cupboard is bare.

New Labour had, in its high days, a plan for governance, predicated on embracing neoliberalism in its core assumptions and then milking the proceeds for the common weal.

That model fell apart in 2008 when the goose not only stopped laying golden eggs but demanded a massive increase in feed merely to continue breathing.

In the 16 years between then and Labour’s eventual return to government, mainstream social democracy has not come up with a single worthwhile idea – no Morrisonian nationalisation or municipal socialism, no Crosslandite revisionism. No Keynes or Beveridge.

Even Peter Mandelson wrote a book about New Labour’s plans for the country.

Corbynism, for all its weaknesses in conception and execution, had an agenda and it has a legacy – splintered today between the Greens, who have the votes, Labour, which has retained most of the leading political exponents, and Your Party, which has Jeremy himself and little else.

In its place Labour’s right have simply a brute sense of entitlement, a burning factional hatred of the left and a visceral commitment to Treasury orthodoxy, Nato, Washington, nuclear weapons and Israel which, whatever their particular merits, are hardly a programme distinct from the Tories, or Reform for that matter.

Where generations of Labour leaders had the Fabian Society, Keir Starmer had Labour Together: often described as a think tank, but one unassociated with any thought at all beyond the idea that it would be a wizard wheeze to snoop on and smear inquisitive journalists.

Nature famously abhors a vacuum, and it turns out voters notice as well.

And so it ends. Keir Starmer will take his place alongside the Earl of Bute or George Canning, premiers now remembered only as pub quiz questions. His place in history will be smaller than that of Spencer Perceval, who is at least famous for being assassinated.

“There is no such thing as Starmerism and never will be” the Prime Minister once avowed. Today, it feels like there is no such thing as Keir Starmer, politician, and there never was.

[Further reading: Keir Starmer’s strategy to save himself? Yet another reset]