Keir Starmer exits the British political stage as he entered it: doing the exact opposite of the thing he said he was going to do. It’s only 10 weeks since he pledged to remain as MP for Holborn and St Pancras until the next election, despite stepping down as prime minister. That’s plainly the decent course of action: a dedicated Labour man wouldn’t want to force a byelection.
Even if it’s a slam dunk for the party, it inevitably draws focus and resources from more important matters. Someone who takes the business of representing constituents even a 10th as seriously as all MPs say they do would feel that the honour of those votes should be repaid. It’s a pretty boring life for an ex-PM turned backbencher.
You have to keep your counsel as a large amount of blame is tacitly shovelled your way, while keeping your opinions to yourself. But that second requirement was the one thing Starmer was really good at. Once it transpired that the opinions he said out loud were open to endless revision and denial, I was never able to figure out what the real ones were.
The Tories are crying U-turn at this resignation, and technically it is – but the category needs more subdivisions to properly describe all the different ways Starmer found to break a pledge. There were the grand statements with which he came armed when he was initially seeking the Labour leadership: economic justice, social justice, climate justice, migrants’ rights, putting human rights at the heart of foreign policy. It would be tedious and a little depressing to track the moment at which each aim was jettisoned.
Suffice it to say, these did not describe the politician he was. In fact, to be a Starmerite Version 2020 – Corbyn in a tie, basically – was enough to get you kicked out of the Labour party by 2024, and to vote in favour of policies he had once championed (ending the two-child benefit limit, for instance) was enough to have the whip suspended. There were specific reversals on policy, of course, forced by backbench rebellion (on welfare) or the first disastrous local election results (winter fuel allowance).
But those didn’t feel like Starmer’s decisions so much as his having been backed into a corner. Then there were statements he made that he later claimed not to have meant. In October 2023 he told Nick Ferrari that Israel had a right to defend itself – even, when pressed, if that meant cutting off power and water to Gaza – then a few days later said: “I was saying Israel had the right to self-defence and when I said ‘that right’, it was that right to self-defence.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
