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There have been far too few defences of Keir Starmer in the British press of late. Time for a modest redress. As the last rites are muttered over his premiership, his colleagues want you to know that this is all his fault. The humiliation is complete: even Labour Together – the outfit that quietly plotted Starmer’s leadership bid – is now sharpening its knives. It is polling members on who should replace him, indulging the comforting fantasy that swapping captains will somehow stop the ship from sinking.
The Tory experience of regicide should offer a caution: do not depose a king unless you have already settled on a prince who understands why the kingdom is in crisis. The Tories toppled Boris Johnson and installed Liz Truss, whose zeal to slash taxes for the wealthy detonated the markets and sealed her party’s fate. Why? Because they convinced themselves that Johnson had failed for being insufficiently rightwing.
In Starmer’s case, the Blairites – including Blair himself – whisper that a supposed leftward lurch is to blame. Starmer, they insist, was never a true believer in the Labour right. Combine that with his lack of vision and shortage of charisma, and the autopsy is complete. Their answer is the health secretary, Wes Streeting: a Blairite ultra who seems to have coveted the premiership since roughly the moment he learned to walk.
Streeting has tried in recent months to burnish progressive credentials on Gaza and anti-racism, but don’t be fooled. A couple of years ago, he openly sketched out his leadership bid strategy: “I’d tack left. You win the Labour leadership from the left, as I reminded Tony Blair from time to time.” His true instincts were laid bare in 2021, when he was reported to have told the shadow cabinet: “Every day, we should drag a sacred cow of our party to the town market place and slaughter it until we are up to our knees in blood.” New Labour zealotry married to (alleged) charisma: the perfect antidote, they say, to the doomed Starmer project.
His charm is lost on the British public. Despite being Labour’s favoured media performer for years, his net approval rating sits at -21. As shadow health secretary during the NHS’s collapse under the Tories, he had the easiest gig in British politics – stand up for a beloved, ailing national institution – and still his ratings were negative. Admirers tout his backstory, from childhood poverty to Cabinet Office, but being the son of a toolmaker does not appear to have saved Starmer.
The latter is now dismissed as wooden. It wasn’t always thus. Commentators once cooed that “he looks the part”. Labour MPs who today might shudder at his name once boasted, upon his election, “for the first time in 10 years we’ve got a leader who looks like a prime minister”.
After posing as a leftwing candidate to win the leadership of the Labour party in 2020, Starmer made a pact with the Labour right, effectively saying, I will do whatever you ask. Those same ideologues bragged that Starmer was merely their frontman – that he “thinks he’s driving the train” when they’d placed him at the front of a driverless DLR, as an anonymous member of his inner circle is reported to have said. He duly packed his operation with Blairite torchbearers. The current government is littered with New Labour retreads, such as Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell, and former advisers Tim Allan and Liz Lloyd.
No Labour leader has ever enacted such a ruthless purge of the left. As for the “sacred cows” attributed to Streeting, the slaughterhouse has been busy indeed. Starmer has repeatedly attacked the welfare state – from winter fuel payments to disability benefits – though the latter was too extreme even for a supine parliamentary Labour party. Anti-migrant rhetoric has culminated with plans to introduce one of the harshest asylum systems in Europe. The international aid budget has been gutted. He genuflects before Donald Trump. And he has resurrected Blair’s great obsession: ID cards. By the sacred cow metric, Labour are up to their necks in blood. If bashing migrants and the welfare state were truly popular, this administration would be flying high. Instead, it is the least popular government in polling history.
My defence of Starmer is a limited one, admittedly, but it is clear enough: this is not all his fault. Yes, he is responsible for surrendering to the very faction Streeting embodies. But Starmer’s central failing – a total absence of vision – is not uniquely his. It is the defining weakness of the Labour right, the faction to whom he outsourced his politics. Their worldview, which positions them as the credible managers of British capitalism against a supposedly juvenile left, effectively expired with the 2008 financial crash, which destroyed the strategy of pumping money into public services without challenging the Thatcherite economic model beneath. Starmer is simply a convenient scapegoat for a faction that offers no serious analysis of Britain’s predicament.
There has been no “leftward lurch”. Belatedly ending the two-child benefit cap was welcome, but should have been instinctive for any Labour government. The budget was designed primarily to soothe the bond markets. If Labour has veered left, its voters have not noticed. The Greens, running on an explicitly leftwing platform, are surging. Polling suggests that far more 2024 Labour voters would switch to the Greens or the Liberal Democrats than Reform or the Tories. Blairites have long insisted that leftwing views were marginal and that progressive voters had nowhere else to go. They were wrong on both counts.
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The likely leadership choice for Labour members will be Wes Streeting or Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister brought down by a stamp duty scandal. Anyone hoping Rayner will offer salvation should prepare for disappointment. Someone who moved from being a Jeremy Corbyn loyalist to one of the faces of Starmer’s government will inevitably face accusations of being a shapeshifter. For now, she certainly looks like someone without a clear, robust and coherent vision or the kind of support base needed to support a premiership that breaks from Britain’s failed economic model.
Labour should make Streeting’s lifelong dream come true. No one can claim he is not a true Blairite believer. When he fails, no excuses will remain for Labour’s right. It is they, not Starmer, who have sunk the party. Let it sink – and board another ship.
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Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
