In his later life, travelling on the train home one day, the former Conservative Party leader Alec Douglas-Home was approached by an elderly lady who told him how she and her husband thought it a great tragedy that he had never been prime minister. To this, Douglas-Home is said to have politely replied: “As a matter of fact I was, but only for a very short time.”
Apocryphal or not, Douglas-Home’s life is filled with such tales of self-deprecation. Having served as prime minister for less than a year before losing power to Harold Wilson in 1964, he is now little remembered at all. After a notable life of service and achievement he is reduced to being a piece of trivia; a Pointless answer in a pub quiz.
Even back then, Douglas-Home was an anomaly: the last prime minister plucked from the Lords; the shortest-serving prime minister since Andrew Bonar Law 40 years earlier. Yet, today, it seems as though we have entered into an era of Douglas-Homes – a time defined by politicians who slip from view as quickly as they once held power, leaving little trace of who they were, what they stood for or why they were ever there.
Over the past decade, no prime minister has served more than three years in power. None has left any deep legacy, aside from Boris Johnson who will always be remembered for taking Britain out of the EU, even if that was the consequence of a referendum called by someone else. Keir Starmer is far from the most disastrous of this bunch of prime ministers, nor is he the shortest-serving. But of all of them, it is he who already seems the most non-existent; the most ghostly in his presence, somehow still there and already not.
Here is a man who has been part of our public life for almost 20 years, rising to the top only to be removed in a carefully orchestrated coup that, in normal circumstances, would be a moment of explosive drama and repercussion. And yet, instead, Starmer departs the public stage in a scene of deep, tepid bathos, with no obvious emotional reaction either personally, politically or even nationally. He leaves behind no band of vengeful loyalists or uncontrollable swells of rancour. The country appears to have shrugged and moved on. And so, the Prime Minister departs as he served, removed and distant, a foreigner to politics, forgotten before he has even left.
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant, set in early Saxon England, the novelist paints a story of a country that has become “cursed with a mist of forgetfulness”. The inhabitants, hobbit-dwelling ancient Britons living alongside the newly arrived foreigners, cannot remember who they are or what came before. And so they retreat into themselves and their little hovels, lost and fearful. The main characters of the book, an elderly couple, worry about what their forgetfulness will do to them. “We don’t remember our fierce quarrels or the small moments we enjoyed and treasured,” the woman says to her husband at one point, worried that without such memories their love for each other will fade too.
For some reason, this strange mystical vision has always stayed with me. Perhaps it is because it’s set in a period of our history that is itself lost to the mists of time. Yet, the longer I have dwelled upon it, the more relevant it has felt to today. “It’s queer the way the world’s forgetting people and things from only yesterday and the day before that,” the main character, Axl, says to his wife at one point. “Like a sickness come over us all.”
Watching British politics today as it prepares to say goodbye to its latest prime minister, it certainly feels as though we have fallen prey to some national sickness. Vague memories of the giants who came before still trouble our thoughts: Attlee and Churchill, Macmillan and Thatcher; figures who built things and elicited strong emotions. And yet people and events from our own time barely seem to register, the amnesia only growing more intense the closer we get to the most recent past.
Squinting back through this history, it can be hard to remember what it was that we were fighting about and what it all meant: the backstop and the “meaningful votes” of Theresa May, the parties of Boris Johnson, and the emergency Budget of Liz Truss. Liz Truss herself. Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, has already faded into some imperceptible figure, his five targets and the various debacles of his time in power as incomprehensible as Starmer’s forgotten missions and milestones today. Starmer himself already seems to have disappeared, his premiership hard to recall and harder to define: what was it all for, and what was it that he did wrong again?
What is going on? Are we really to believe that we are simply cursed with forgetful leaders – or perhaps just normal ones trying to meet impossible expectations in a post-Brexit, post-crash world where things we used to take for granted are no longer possible? But surely there is something more profound at play; the smallness of our national life finding expression in the smallness of our leaders. I asked a friend of mine, a historian, what he thought, and he replied that underlying so much of this is the sense that much of the political theatre simply does not matter any more. “The importance of public life has receded so much that nobody cares,” as he put it. And so we don’t remember. After a decade of turmoil and turbulence, bitter fights and division, is this not the most worrying sickness of all?
I never had any notion that Keir Starmer had such a forgettable fate in store as I got to know him in opposition. I found him earnest, engaging and even gently charismatic, more left-leaning than I had expected and more ambitious: he was for Ed Miliband over David, and openly sceptical of Blair; a man of the mainstream left and obviously on the up, one to watch.
We would meet for coffee in Westminster’s Portcullis House, where we would discuss the latest fashionable Brexit talking points, many of which now seem as meaningless and impenetrable as everything else. What did he think of the Canada model, I would ask, or the Swiss option? And so would begin the latest long discussion about the intricacies of such things. After he became Labour leader in 2020, following Johnson’s “Get Brexit done” victory over Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer developed a harder edge and surrounded himself with people from the Labour right: Morgan McSweeney, Paul Ovenden, Pat McFadden. At times there even appeared to be the beginnings of an ideological coherence to his operation, although one that increasingly appeared less obviously him.
Was this the real Starmer? Shortly before the general election, I had dinner with a senior member of Starmer’s team whose job it was to understand his boss’s instincts: to translate and explain them to the public. Starmer was a hard man to read, they admitted. But surely, once you got to know him, there was a set of obvious instincts underneath, I pressed. “Well, he’s a classic social democrat,” came the reply.
Social democracy is many things, but it is not a guiding moral calling; the core of any man or woman. In an interview with the Sunday Times in 1981, Margaret Thatcher explained the difference between an ideology and a moral purpose. “What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been towards the collectivist society,” she explained. “And therefore, it isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set out really to change the approach… Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”
The person I had quizzed about Starmer’s heart and soul over dinner clearly did not really know him. Few did. Even those who spent every day with him talked mostly in small personal terms: how he played with visiting children, or was most at ease with old friends in front of the football. The politics was always secondary – at best. Like David Cameron, he just thought he’d be good at it.
After he became prime minister, I watched the figures around Starmer – even those who liked and admired him – grow despondent with astonishing speed. His very first speech promised a politics that would “tread more lightly” on people’s lives – a politics that would, in other words, retreat. Ironically, there had been a fierce dispute internally about the speech. Some close to Starmer wanted him to show the opposite: more anger about the injustices he had inherited and declarations about his intent to change them; to channel Lyndon Johnson in promising to use the power he had won – and for a cause at that. But this was not Starmer. Instead, he promised an end to the “noisy performance” of politics and return the country to “calm waters”.
And yet, he never could perform this duty. Without an obvious purpose, No 10 descended into internal feuding. Battles for the ear of the PM – and for office space – began to spill into the press; photographs were leaked from inside the building. Sue Gray was sacked, McSweeney promoted. In 20 years covering British politics, I have never experienced the level of open, contemptuous hostility towards a prime minister from his own side as I have these past two years with Starmer. And this appeared to be a hostility that passed him by. I have come out of dinners with ministers, astonished at the vitriol, only to see that same minister soon after promoted by Starmer. And so the drift continued, the briefings relentless.
And still, he couldn’t say what his premiership was for, or what had gone wrong that needed fixing. When I profiled him for this magazine last year, I spent six weeks trying to get him to fill in the gap, without success. “To clean up the mess,” was the closest he came to explaining his mission, insisting the social, political and economic model he had inherited was not broken, merely neglected. But why was it a mess? What principally had gone wrong? He didn’t really know.
Part of the problem, I came to realise – one of the causes of our national forgetfulness – was the very fact that it was such a mess, a “14-year fever dream of failure” defying easy definition, as the political economist William Davies wrote in the London Review of Books two years ago. What was it that Labour was replacing? Could we even remember? What had Sunak stood for? Or Truss? And what about Johnson or May? Didn’t they all stand for different things? Or not? Who could remember? Was it austerity or Brexit, levelling up or letting rip, sober centrism or populist braggadocio? They were for everything and nothing, a story without a plot, and so quickly forgotten, only to be replaced by a new prime minister who couldn’t recall what he thought either, seeking only safety and solitude.
Looking back on my time with Starmer, I remember being struck by how little he cared about the past; of “the people and things from yesterday and the day before that”, as Ishiguro puts it. In the room on the first floor of No 10 where he liked to work, there were no touches of his presence – no new paintings of his heroes hanging on the wall or busts of old giants he admired on his desk. When I asked whether he worried about his legacy, he said that was for others to care about. When he walked me down the staircase of No 10, past the photographs of his predecessors, I asked him whether he ever stopped to look at them. He did not. What about his hero, Harold Wilson? He was not his hero. He joked that his own portrait would be hung “in the downstairs bog”, out of sight, forgotten. His actual fate, in a sense, will be worse: hung with the others, but ignored even more intensely.
Starmer had been unable to define the recent past and so struggled to offer a coherent vision of what he was trying to do. “It is a noteworthy fact about our country that those with designs on its present have generally been inspired to adopt a vision of its past,” Roger Scruton observed in a reflection on the Brexit wars shortly before he died. Starmer never could. But in this, is he any different from the country he leads, a country that no longer knows what it thinks of what came before, the mist having long since descended over us?
In Scruton’s view, Britain now lives with two “rival conceptions” of its history. “On one side there is the proud people, who defended their ‘sceptred isle’ for a millennium, during the last centuries of which, in a burst of self-confidence, they carried trade, self-government and law around the world. On the other side there is the race of grasping imperialists, who spread chaos abroad and conflict at home, in pursuit of world domination.” Perhaps, though this description itself now feels rather antiquated. For much of the 21st century, Tony Blair simply ignored this divide by presenting the country as “new” and therefore unconcerned by trivial interpretations of the past, irrelevant to its future. In one sense, then, Starmer is the natural inheritor of this wilful amnesia, the last great defender of the Blairite state and its ideology.
But perhaps the point here is not that we are becoming more forgetful – purposefully or not – but that we are starting to understand the shallowness of our recent history. From 1990 to 2016, we convinced ourselves that we understood the future, that our soft power mattered, that what we believed in was important and true and that we were, fundamentally, still a rich and important country. We thought we were OK and now our short-sighted naivety is too traumatic to comprehend. We got so much so wrong. It is embarrassing now to look back and see our previous selves walking towards the tsunamis about to wash over us: the financial collapse, austerity, Brexit and all the rest. Everywhere we look, the enormity of the challenge we face appears overwhelming. We are poor and we don’t know how to recover. Our worries are so much darker: of mass deportations and ethnic conflict, Russian invasions and long-term economic decline. Perhaps we needed these past few years in the mist in order to cope with the realisation of our condition, but today – it seems – we have reached the limits of our tolerance. Perhaps we simply cannot accept our leaders carrying on as if nothing much has changed.
If anything, today’s disputes over Britain’s recent past are even more potent than that which Scruton set out a decade ago: sharper-edged and angrier. What is the source of all of our woes? Are they economic or social, the result of political corruption or avarice? Was Enoch right, the online right asks? Or does it all start with Thatcher, as the left replies: the postwar decades our golden age, our Trente Glorieuses? Or is it not so easy to wipe away real memories of a “consensus” politics that ultimately led Britain into an era of social fracture much like our own? “When did the rot set in?” is now the defining question of our political life. In 1979 or 1997, 2008 or 2016? Take your pick, though few argue we are not rotting at all.
Andy Burnham’s return to Westminster is understandable as part of this relitigation of history. The child of 1970s Lancashire, who came of age at the end of history, has staked his bid for power on the argument that he will overturn a failed 40-year consensus stretching back to Thatcher. As he said to me last year: “I’ve described what we’ve been doing here as rolling back the 1980s.” It is no surprise that it is these remarks which most incensed Tony Blair about this latest changing of the guard in Downing Street. Did this mean, Blair asked incredulously, that Burnham wanted to unwind New Labour itself?
Given his record as mayor in Greater Manchester, celebrating the global capital which has flooded into the city, it is reasonable to question whether this is really what Burnham believes. From my own time with Burnham, it strikes me that the real source of his irritation is more the national imbalance that has grown since the 1970s; not the method of producing wealth in the country, but the approach which concentrated so much of it in the south. As well as the competing stories about our history that Scruton picked out, we have competing historiographies explaining our postwar trauma: one northern, one southern. Burnham’s strength is that he believes in – and mobilises – the northern account of Thatcherite destruction and abandonment. This is the core of Andy Burnham and where he differs, fundamentally, from Starmer. His weakness is that this risks, inevitably, antagonising the south that benefited most from the dividends of Thatcherism and generally remembers her as a necessary figure.
Scruton argued that conservatism was the doomed attempt to resurrect a lost past, a toil rewarded not with success but the creation of something new altogether. In his speeches about “neoliberalism”, Burnham is leaning on a reiteration of the nostalgia that also mobilised Corbynism. But Burnham’s chances of success will not rest on his actual ability to unpick Thatcherism – ending the Right to Buy, renationalising the water board and returning to the economics of Tony Benn – but to create something new and memorable from our fevered, amnestic past decade.
To do so, he must remember that history matters and use the power he is about to inherit to impose his own account of our national life. He must show the public that public life still has power and purpose; that it still matters. “Are you glad of the mist’s fading?” Axl asks his wife at the end of The Buried Giant as the pain of their memories begins to return. “It may bring horrors to this land.” Far better to remember the horror than to lose ourselves in the aimless fog that has descended over our recent history.
[Further reading: The twilight of our European dream]
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This article appears in the 15 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, After Keir Starmer
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Subscribe here to commentUK politicians have very little power because they gave most of it away to the private sector.
“Hobbit-dwelling”?
Prime Ministers and governments don’t last long because they appear to achieve nothing. They are ineffective and ineffectual. While this continues the risk of further instability remains, along with the risk of electing those more at the extremes of politics.
Having a narrative, a standpoint, an ideology, a moral purpose, whatever you wish to call it is important, but if nothing comes of it then it is a waste of time. Radical action is needed to restore the capacity of government to be effective and affect lives – as Atlee, Churchill, Macmillan, and Thatcher were able to do.
I’m impressed by your noting that the four “giants” of the past century in terms of “figures who built things” were Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan and Thatcher. Three of these were Conservative Prime Ministers, and the fourth worked in a coalition war-time government with Conservatives.
This begs a question, or more than one question.
“post-Brexit, post-crash” Across the World, it is post-industrial and post-commercial. We are in the midst of power hungry administrative states running our towns, regions, countries and the world and defending to the death their growth against any and all enemies, real and imagined. All else is lip service.
We are all left to wonder how Starmer was chosen or why he disappears. He was just another propaganda outlet (and better than our Joe Biden), now jettisoned for the inconvenient failure to quell the growing dissent from people on the street.
Tom,
Sharp historical piece on the legacies of former PM’s, but you’re much too soft on Johnson. Surely the Covid Report has exposed the utter failure by Johnson to take a national crisis seriously.
A more apt legacy should be the PM who turned Care Homes into Death Camps.
“this risks, inevitably, antagonising the south that benefited most from the dividends of Thatcherism and generally remembers her as a necessary figure.” I don’t believe this is the issue. Thatcherism had three tenets that particularly emphasised the north-south divide.One was that Britain did not need old, heavy industries, so it did not matter if they went out of business. Their demise particularly affected the midlands and the north.
Secondly, the trade union movement could be considerably weakened if those industries went, thus freeing up capitalism to work in a more untrammelled way.
Thirdly, high unemployment would convince the general populace that they had better conform in order to avoid becoming unemployed themselves; wages could be suppressed because there would always be an unemployed person to take your place if you objected to your pay rate.
I am not sure southerners necessarily bought into all this or supported it. I seem to remember that those things affected southerners less than they did midlanders and northerners because there were fewer traditional industries and fewer people (men) to be put onto the scrap heap as a result of these policies. Southerners were not / are not antagonised by the idea that the north might be “levelled up”. They were and are simply relieved it did not happen to them to such a huge degree.
For me, as a person who worked in urban regeneration and neighbourhood renewal for most of my working life, the problem has been lack of substantial investment since the 1980s in the economic redevelopment of the areas of the country most affected by Thatcherism. Her government started the process of starving out local authorities so they could not put money into rebuilding their areas. What funds there were (for development corporations, then City Challenge areas, then Single Regeneration Budget areas) were time limited, generally too small to make a real lasting difference and geographically constrained. It takes years and sustained effort really to turn an area around. Birmingham did reinvent itself. Manchester and Liverpool did find new ways of life. But there were and are huge swathes of the north and the midlands which are still deprived in relative and absolute terms. Meanwhile the economy of the south east is over-inflated (I generalise), which brings a completely different set of issues, such as house prices.
The problem now is that it will need a huge amount of reflation of local resources to make a real difference. The general opinion seems to be that the country is really poor and these resources simply cannot be found. Real change, though, won’t happen without significant investment. Taking control of local bus services might be necessary, but it will not be sufficient. Neither will it achieve the kinds of overnight revolution for which people are so impatient.