[Andy McDandy]

For those of us who don't have Xitter, and don't want to install it, can you reveal the punchline?

It's not that bloody treasury note, is it?

[The Weeping Angel]

For those of us who don't have Xitter, and don't want to install it, can you reveal the punchline?

It's not that bloody treasury note, is it?

No, it's just austerity.

[The Weeping Angel]

Jason Cowley sticks the knife in.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/8e98de ... 47de7d7664

As Sir Keir Starmer enters the endgame of a doomed premiership, cabinet colleagues say he has “retreated into a bunker”. His recent public comments — insisting that he will be prime minister for ten years and that he will offer Andy Burnham a senior role in his government — show how increasingly detached he is from reality.

Starmer’s poor judgment has been the recurrent theme of his premiership and, this weekend, as he considers whether to resign, even close aides cannot predict what he will do. “For Keir right now it must feel like a case of being Tom Sawyer at your own funeral,” one senior adviser said. “The obituaries are being written but he’s still here.”

He has become a simulacrum of a prime minister: attempting to project authority and speaking of a future in power that his own MPs are determined to deny him. Inside the cabinet Shabana Mahmood, Yvette Cooper, his old friend Ed Miliband, from whom he is increasingly estranged, and, on Friday, Heidi Alexander have privately asked him to agree a timeline for his departure.

Bolstered by the support of his wife, Victoria, who was urging him not to resign, Starmer cannot understand why he and his government are so lethally unpopular. The prime minister believes he has a five-year mandate and, in alliance with his former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, he rescued the Labour Party from the internecine conflict and defeatism of the Corbyn years, then led it to a landslide general election victory.

Starmer accepts that his first 100 days in power were marked by a lack of preparation, strategic incoherence and serious unforced errors, from cutting pensioners’ winter fuel allowance to revelations about cronyism and free gifts — especially damaging for a member of what the economist Thomas Piketty calls the “Brahmin left”.

Sue Gray, his first pick as chief of staff, was blamed for what in effect was a collective party failure and promptly fired. She was replaced by McSweeney, who was asked to fill a multiplicity of roles: election strategist, fixer, chief ideologue and policy co-ordinator. It was McSweeney who recommended that Starmer appoint Lord Mandelson as British ambassador to the United States, a catastrophic error of judgment from which the prime minister has never recovered after the release of the tranche of Epstein files in January. But the roots of Starmer’s unpopularity go back to his lack of political sense.

Starmer believes he is governing well and learning how to use the machinery of state to run the country more effectively, but it is too late. His personal approval ratings remain the worst of any leader in the modern era and nothing the prime minister does or says now can alter the fact that he is viscerally loathed in the country, and rapidly losing what little support he had left in the parliamentary party.

“In my focus groups in Makerfield the one thing that united supporters of Reform’s Robert Kenyon and Andy Burnham was mutual loathing of Starmer,” says Luke Tryl, director of More in Common, the polling company.

Labour MPs and activists discovered just how loathed the prime minister was while campaigning before the party’s crushing defeats in the February by-election in Gorton & Denton and the May elections in England, Scotland and Wales. “There have just been too many mistakes,” Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, told me.

In an act of desperation, Sarwar called for Starmer’s resignation in February, but the prime minister survived what aides described then as a “near-death experience” because his opponents in London remained in the shadows.

Now Burnham is coming for Starmer. His gamble of taking on and defeating Reform UK in the Makerfield by-election has given him his sought-after personal mandate to change Labour. As Sarwar did in the Holyrood elections, Burnham was in effect running against his own prime minister. His implicit campaign message was an adaptation of Reform’s from this year’s elections: Vote Burnham, Get Starmer Out.

Starmer entered Downing Street in July 2024 with a modest positive net approval rating, but by the autumn — in the aftermath of the riots that followed the murder of the young girls in Southport, and Rachel Reeves’s tax-raising first budget that penalised employment — he was already deeply unpopular.

“The winter fuel cut was the immediate trigger for his collapse in popularity,” says Tryl. “People thought it showed duplicity and a lack of care. His personal ratings never recovered; every fiscal event since has been a disaster for him in our approval tracking.”

As the U-turns multiplied and dissent inside the parliamentary Labour Party hardened against him, Starmer’s lack of political instinct was exposed. His response to the Southport killings was essentially procedural, asserting the full force of the state while blaming the far right for the riots, rather than responding politically to the rising threat of ethno-sectarian conflict. The mantra “Two-Tier Keir” stuck.

Those who have worked or continue to work closely with Starmer in No 10 speak of there being something impenetrable about him, an inner reserve combined with a hard outer shell. He can absorb punishment. He can ignore abuse, which now confronts him wherever he turns, from the home crowd at England football matches chanting against him to relentless hostility on social media.

“Keir was determined not to be bullied out by a briefing war,” one aide said, and there is something dignified in his refusal to submit.

The question of why Starmer is so loathed is complex and is about much more than the policy mistakes and U-turns that have characterised his directionless government. At a deep, fundamental level Starmer does not understand the country he leads — and lacks the political skills to do something about it.

Starmer presents himself as an anti-populist in an age of populism, but he is at heart a cold, legal bureaucrat. He professes to speak for and represent “working people” but there is an essential hollowness behind the performance, a lack of authenticity.

or all the self-mythologising as the self-made son of a toolmaker, a working-class lad made good, Starmer cannot hide what he ultimately became: a progressive north London human rights lawyer committed to a form of liberal legalism for whom international law is a lodestar. Unfairly or otherwise, he is widely perceived as being the personification of a “woke establishment”.

With its rigid climate targets, cult of net zero and pious, hectoring style, Starmer’s government has been an exercise in joylessness. The gloomy state of the nation address he delivered in the Downing Street rose garden in late August 2024 was a masterclass in bad politics. “Frankly, things will get worse before they get better.” Compare and contrast with Burnham’s Clintonesque promise of a new era of hope.

As Jonathan Hinder, the Labour MP for Pendle & Clitheroe, puts it: “The sense you pick up from conversations with voters is that Keir simultaneously doesn’t stand for anything and yet is incredibly sanctimonious, his style embodying the HR proceduralism that people can’t stand from their workplace.”

Senior colleagues often say that Starmer has no politics and entered office lacking both a stress-tested strategic plan for government and a clear animating principle. There were the opaque “missions” that became arbitrary “milestones” (or was it the other way round?), widely mocked by the cabinet in private before being inevitably abandoned.

Instead of seeking to master the art of politics, Starmer remained committed to procedure, rules, process and inquiries. He has avoided making the most difficult decisions, hoping others would make them for him, and he retreats (on his “island of strangers” speech, for instance) after sending others into the line of fire to defend him. He is serially incapable of making hard, unpopular choices and leading from the front.

In my conversations with him when he was leader of the opposition, I was struck by how certain Starmer was that he would lead Labour to victory, even when he was trailing behind Boris Johnson in the polls during the pandemic. He was used to success in his legal career; his move into politics was motivated by high ambition and the belief that it was his destiny to lead Labour and the country. Everything he did thereafter, which included serving in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet until the final defeat in 2019, was motivated by that end goal.

Starmer sees himself as an engine of self-creation. Relentless hard work and dedication have allowed him to claim life’s glittering prizes: director of public prosecutions, a knighthood. Even as power drained away from him in recent days, he was working harder than ever, asking for more ministerial boxes, more consultation papers and responding to the train crash in Bedford, as if he could transform his fortunes through sheer endeavour and force of will.

Politics reveals moral character more starkly perhaps than any other profession in an age of piercing scrutiny and instant judgment on social media. Starmer presides over an unstable, divided government, and yet he remains stubbornly committed to the view that the result of replacing him would be even greater instability.

Because there was no plan to govern and the “project” was bereft of ideas from the beginning, Starmer has no intellectual outriders and, at this moment of heightened peril, even fewer prominent defenders. He has close friendships outside politics but has struggled to cultivate relationships inside Westminster. He alienated influential party donors who helped fund his leadership campaign by failing to thank them, or later ghosting them.

As the sackings have multiplied, the resentment against him has only deepened. Even those cabinet ministers who were once close political allies now speak of him with sorrow and regret.

In his victory speech, delivered at Ashton football club on Friday morning, Burnham did not directly criticise Starmer’s leadership. During the by-election campaign, he said repeatedly that he wanted to “change the story of the country”. But before he can attempt to do that, Starmer must be dislodged.

Whatever the outcome of Starmer’s conversations this weekend, the UK is preparing for its seventh prime minister since the 2016 Brexit referendum. The office has been demeaned by a generation of unserious politicians. Starmer is set to become the latest failed incumbent.

Friends say he will leave office convinced that, given more time, he could have delivered the national renewal he promised. However, this is a delusion, because on welfare, illegal immigration, party management, policies affecting farmers and pubs, energy, net zero and the Mandelson appointment, Starmer repeatedly misjudged the political moment.

Like one of TS Eliot’s hollow men, Starmer is a leader operating in a vacuum of core conviction. “There is no such thing as Starmerism, and there never will be,” he once said. Few would disagree with him.