Sir Keir Starmer used his final appearance at the despatch box to claim that he is leaving the country in a better state than that in which he found it. It is also demonstrably and painfully the case that his unexpectedly brief premiership was a disappointment.
There is a decency about the man who is departing, and we should applaud him for his achievements, particularly to restore Britain’s reputation on the international stage. It is unfortunate that he was undone by the politics of the party, and a chancellor who oversaw rising joblessness and a wave of business closures, and who is consistently ranked by polls as the most unpopular on record.
His personal diplomacy brought dramatic improvement in relations with the European Union, and his leadership role in supporting Ukraine saw him this week become the first UK PM to receive France’s Légion d’honneur, a fitting tribute to the “reset” he promised. He did reference the continuity of policy on Ukraine, and was rightly proud of how he embraced Volodymyr Zelesnky after that infamous episode in the Oval Office.
While America has retreated from Europe, Britain, with France and Germany has led the “coalition of the willing” which has done so much to sustain Ukrainian resistance and perhaps begun to turn the tide. That the prime minister couldn’t maintain his early and unlikely bromance with Donald Trump is hardly his fault, and even there he somehow managed to secure a (relatively) favourable tariff deal.
The great blunder in foreign affairs Sir Keir made was appointing Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington. Given what was known about his record at the time, Lord Mandelson should never have been considered in the first place, and it is difficult to avoid concluding that his historic links to the party unduly influenced Sir Keir’s thinking.
But it was some profoundly misjudged decisions on the economy that really did for him. As is now universally accepted, in his first weeks in office his administration squandered vast amounts of political capital on abolishing the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, for little actual benefit to the public finances. Even when it was later partially reversed – a U-turn which added confusion to injury – it remains the one thing people most often volunteer to the opinion pollsters when asked about the government’s record.
It may be that the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who proved an even worse communicator than Sir Keir, was responsible for driving this through, but the prime minister must accept his share of the blame. He kept Ms Reeves on even as she turned her party into the enemy of business. Loading extra costs on companies through successive hikes in employers’ national insurance contributions, business rates and the minimum wage made it even more difficult for them to deal with soaring energy costs and the effects on inflation of President Trump’s tariffs and the war in Iran.
Thus, while the international pressures on the economy were out of their control, the prime minister and chancellor did not do enough to ameliorate their impact, and made the wrong choices on taxes and public spending.
It was in the summer of 2025 that the welfare reform bill was defeated by the government’s own MPs, and Sir Keir lost control of his party and his future. That was the beginning of the end. Extending child benefit and lifting as many as 400,000 children out of poverty was not enough to save Sir Keir’s premiership when public opinion had turned so badly against him.
Some of what went wrong can be put down to Sir Keir’s lawyerly, technocratic personality – colleagues were surprised at how “unpolitical” he was, almost a civil servant manque. Much more of it may be ironically ascribed to Sir Keir’s most unlikely accomplishment, and which he is rightly deeply proud of: taking the broken party of 2019, soundly defeated and infected with antisemitism, and leading it to a landslide win in 2024. He and those closest to him bent everything to the imperative of electoral success.
One casualty, however, was a lack of planning for government and a too-tightly drawn set of promises on personal taxation, which didn’t stand the test of time and ended up being broken in spirit anyway. From that flowed all the misguided fiscal tactics required to balance the books, which were admittedly necessary.
The public services may be getting better, immigration falling and the underlying trend on growth more encouraging, but the evidence has yet to be felt by the public. Sir Keir and his party pledged to “end the chaos and confusion”, but brought fresh political psychodramas and new varieties of sleaze. Whatever the stats may say, Labour left the country feeling about as disillusioned and divided as it was when Sir Keir took over from Rishi Sunak just over two years ago.
The Starmer “decade of renewal” turned into a mere interregnum before a takeover by the soft left. It’s immediately not obvious why this time it’s going to be different.
