Keir Starmer, stripped bare: neither charisma nor political acumen

The argument for Keir Starmer was never romantic. It was pragmatic.

No one ever claimed that he was a charisma powerhouse. He came across, at best, like a barrister from North London and, at worst, like a bank manager in a medium-sized provincial town. Nor was he a great storyteller. He avoided sweeping narratives or big soaring rhetoric.

For a while, that didn’t seem so bad. Britain had had its fill of charismatic leaders with sweeping narratives. Boris Johnson was considered so attractive to his core supporters that the usual rules of political life did not apply to him. They doted on his every word and found his shambolic, all-over-the-place presentation amusing. He had big ideas about Britain’s future outside of the EU — setting its own rules, plotting its own course, beginning a glorious future.

That story turned out to be a work of speculative fiction. Instead, Brexit left Britain poorer, lonelier, and structurally unstable. We became like Italy with bad weather, churning through prime ministers every couple of years. One of them was Liz Truss, a semi-literate right-winger who has now transitioned into a fully insane MAGA conspiracist. She claimed that she could trigger a new era of national transcendence through laissez-faire changes to the tax system. Instead, she triggered a financial calamity and became the shortest-lived prime minister in British history.

Starmer therefore seemed like the right man at the right time. Sure, he wasn’t charismatic. Sure, he had no story to tell. But Brits were tired of charisma and suspicious of stories. They wanted serious, sober, adult government. They wanted competence and policy delivery. Someone dutiful and ethical, who would improve health services and transport networks and generally not cause too much trouble.

In fact, they got neither. Starmer somehow managed to combine a lack of charisma with a complete absence of serious-minded policy work. He seemed either unwilling or unable to govern, refusing to make the kind of basic operational decisions that allow administrations to function.

He was very active in the frothy, vacuous tribal warfare which so often typifies Westminster. With his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney beside him, he waged war against his enemies in the Labour Party — turning his fire first on the party’s left flank, then its soft left, then its centrists, until finally he had no allies left except for a handful of eccentric Labour Party right-wingers.

But when it came to day-to-day government, he was simply absent. There is currently a debate between the Ministry of Defense, which is demanding more money for the armed forces, and the Treasury, which is trying to prevent big spending commitments. This is the kind of problem a prime minister is meant to resolve, by backing one department over the other. Instead, Starmer hangs back, expecting them to sort it out between them. He is an absence where a leader should be, a pile of clothes with no body to animate them.

This dynamic takes place across the policy portfolios. In a resignation letter on Tuesday, safeguarding minister Jess Phillips said she had told the prime minister to take action against online child sex abuse, only for him to resist action for months on end. “Decency is vital,” she wrote. “Calm curiosity is also needed, but so too are fight and drive required.”

Starmer is basically uninterested in policy. He is reluctant to take decisions between two opposing camps, and he is incapable of taking necessary action where it will be politically painful. He has, therefore, proved to be almost entirely devoid of political qualities. He fails at the showmanship of politics and also at the backroom engine work.

This week, he found himself almost completely alone. Ahead of the local elections, he had tried to maintain an electoral coalition by stitching together a left-wing economic policy and a right-wing immigration policy. This made him no friends and plenty of enemies. The immigration policy in particular alienated the young, cosmopolitan, university-educated voters who make up much of Labour’s support but did not win over any of the older school-educated voters tempted by the hard right.

The results were devastating to Labour. It hemorrhaged votes to left-wing parties, splitting the progressive vote and allowing the hard-right Reform party to slip through the middle. It experienced some of its worst results on record.

The results were a spasm of pain for Labour MPs. They made it as clear as possible that the party would be thrown out of power in 2029, the expected date of the general election, unless it replaced Starmer as leader.

Last Monday, in a last-gasp attempt to save himself, Starmer organized a speech. It was his final chance to convince people that he had a vision for the country and the qualities to deliver it. He took off his jacket and tie, rolled up his sleeves, approached the podium, and spoke as passionately as he could.

There was nothing there. It was an empty play, a script composed of blank pages. He never had charisma or storytelling ability, so he could not deploy them now. But worse than that, there was no policy agenda to boast of. There was no plan which would improve the country because he had never implemented one. There was no vision for the future because he had never contemplated one.

In so far as there were any ideas, they were tepid and uninspiring. He simply could not bring himself to take the risk of making a decision, so he ended up with modest, nebulous promises.

He knows that the one policy that unites Labour’s right and left is a belief in the European Union, so he spoke enthusiastically about placing Britain back “in the heart of Europe.” What did this mean? Really very little. Starmer was too cautious to actually contemplate membership of the EU or even the single market, because it would involve a return to freedom of movement, which outrages the right. He wouldn’t even contemplate membership of the customs union because Britain would lose the ability to sign its own trade deals.

So instead there was simply an absence. It wasn’t even a vague commitment. It was somehow less than that: a promise that he might one day in the future suggest a closer policy, which he could not presently describe. When you scratched away at the European announcement, there was no policy there at all. Just warm words, signifying nothing.

He had intended to launch a fightback. Instead, he merely confirmed all the worst suspicions people had of him.

Later that day, the number of MPs demanding he step down soared. The next morning, ministers began to resign. It was clear now, if it wasn’t before, that he would never be able to provide proper leadership.

Voters never expected a charisma powerhouse. They expected serious, competent leadership. In fact, they got neither.