Opinion-commentate enough and you get a sense (and an appetite) for a good contrarian headline. “In defense of Keir Starmer” is an absolute corker—understated but intensely provocative. It’s the sort of headline that would do well on X, by which I mean that a lot of people would absolutely hate it.
Who could defend Keir Starmer? The British prime minister has gone from winning a gigantic majority in the 2024 general election to becoming one of the least popular PMs in history. His approval ratings have hit record lows.
How to defend him, then? One could argue that the prime minister has had neglected political accomplishments—a quiet record of unassuming success that a hostile and incurious media has ignored.
Sadly, he hasn’t. Back to the drawing board.
The undeterred contrarian could argue on the grounds of personality. He could claim, for example, that the prime minister is a fundamentally decent man doing his best in a tough position. Alas, Starmer doesn’t seem to have much of a personality. He’s the sort of man who thinks that watching football is a hobby and that having a pint of beer is a guilty pleasure. Shabby treatment of his former colleagues—like calling the ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn his friend before saying that he wouldn’t wave at him across the street—doesn’t make him seem especially decent. To be fair, Starmer doesn’t seem to have the maniacal self-importance of a Tony Blair or the total shamelessness of a Boris Johnson. (You wouldn’t want to have beer with Sir Keir because it would be boring, rather than because you fear the corporeal presence of evil.) He has had some sympathetic moments as a long-suffering go-between in the strained relationship between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. But you know you’re reaching when the best adjectives you can come up with to describe a leader include “polite.”
Perhaps one fruitful avenue of opportunity when it comes to defending Starmer is pointing out what a dreadful set of circumstances he inherited. Starmer did not upend Britain’s demographics, for example. Most of the fault for that lies with governments like those of Blair (’97–’07) and Johnson (’19–’22). Starmer just happened to enter 10 Downing Street when the British public had well and truly had enough. Starmer and his colleagues inherited a grim economy with low growth, crumbling infrastructure, the highest tax burden in decades, and millions of people economically inactive. It would have been impossible to turn this around in 18 months. Some of Starmer’s Labour government’s justly unpopular decisions, like releasing thousands of criminals early, had a lot to do with Conservative irresponsibility—the Tories simply had not built much-needed prisons.
The problem is that Starmer has made no real attempt to be different. He has been more critical of mass migration than his predecessors, yes, but his words have not been backed up by his deeds. When it comes to the “small boats” crisis, for example, his government—as Luca Watson has argued for the Critic—has behaved as if the British people are concerned about where migrants will be staying and not the fact that they are staying at all. On economics, as Chris Bayliss has explained, there has been no real attempt to boost productivity. Britain is still being stifled by the web of legislation Tony Blair and his fellow New Labour managerialists spun around it. As a teacher, I can’t blame a student’s former school if I have the same methods.
Without big ideas, or any real principles, Starmer has been occupied by marginal projects ranging from the malicious, like the abandonment of the Chagos Islands, to the merely depressing, like banning 16-year-olds from buying energy drinks. When I say “depressing” I don’t mean the policy—which I suppose is defensible—as much as its presentation. “I won’t shy away from decisions to protect kids,” Starmer announced last week. How courageous! No longer need parents lie awake worrying that their sons and daughters might drink a Red Bull! (This sort of petty prohibitionism was also a major feature of Conservative rule.)
Starmer is comfortable with rules and not with opinions. He supported Jeremy Corbyn until he didn’t. He thought that women could have penises until he didn’t. His announcement that Britain was at risk of becoming an “island of strangers” could have heralded a serious attempt at left-leaning restrictionism. Within months, though, he was announcing that he regretted his remarks. Can this man make an order in a restaurant without calling the waitress back to ask for a different meal?
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At this point, the prime minister is rearranging the furniture in a house at risk of collapse. The resignation of Angela Rayner, deputy prime minister and secretary of state for housing, led to a bafflingly pointless reshuffle last week—a reshuffle that was all the more baffling when the dangerously dimwitted and disingenuous Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy and net zero, was one of the few survivors. “This is not chaos,” Starmer’s new chief secretary insisted. To use an online meme: Starmer’s “this is not chaos” T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by his shirt.
Can Starmer hang on? It is difficult to see him lasting when the British state is in a doom loop of reshuffles, cack-handed authoritarianism, and marginal opinion poll-chasing. He seems to have thought that his vibe of competence and moderation would carry him along for five serene years after the confusion and corruption of Tory rule. What he missed was that Britain had huge structural problems—not just bad politicians. Being a smoother manager of a dysfunctional system doesn’t stop the system from being dysfunctional. He should have learned that from the bright, hard-working, and doomed Rishi Sunak.
There is talk that Andy Burnham, the jovial mayor of Greater Manchester, could replace Starmer. Sadly, I suspect that Burnham feels jovial because he escaped Westminster. I can’t defend Keir Starmer, who has made no serious attempt to change the course of British life, but one thing I will admit is that Britain’s problems go far beyond one man or woman. His successor, whoever that may be, should bear that in mind.
