Desperate to please but pleasing no one, Starmer’s latest reset could be his last
Monday’s ‘make or break’ speech was one of the PM’s best but the signs are that most Labour MPs have already seen enough
Was that it? Reset number … I forget where we’re up to now. Much the same as the last reset. And probably much the same as the next reset. That’s if there is one. The signs are that most Labour MPs think they’ve seen enough. That Keir Starmer has run out of road. He certainly seems to be running out of friends. Down to a few ultra-loyalists. And he can’t even trust those who want him to stay, as they are probably only biding their time until Andy Burnham is in Westminster and can launch a leadership challenge.
There’s a sadness here. Because Monday’s “make or break” speech was one of Starmer’s best. But it was always going to end in heartbreak, because Starmer can’t roll back the last two years. He can’t stop a leadership race that has in effect already started.
Nor can he do anything about the visceral dislike for him that Labour campaigners encountered from voters on the doorstep. Quite why the hatred is so profound is something of a mystery. Labour has done some good things in office. Keir isn’t venal, like Boris Johnson. He’s not deranged, like Liz Truss. And yet many voters can’t stand him. It’s personal. He gets the blame for everything. Even the things for which he is not responsible. Sometimes politics is just not fair. But then, life is often unfair.
2:35Starmer had come to Coin Street in central London determined to give it his best shot. He wasn’t going to die wondering. No jacket, no tie; A look that hoped to say he was both relaxed and up for the fight. His speech came with loads of prompts in the Autocue: “strong emotion here”, “show that you care”, “pause for emphasis”, “try to look the audience in the eye”. And he just about managed all that. Certainly far better than in past speeches that have meandered into nothingness.
But you can’t fight the raw materials. Keir will always be Keir. You can’t expect him to have a personality transplant just because you think a personality transplant is what’s required. He is never going to be a visionary, someone who can take the country with him in a cute turn of phrase. No one ever came to Keir for the poetry. He was elected prime minister precisely because he was a bit dull. We had had enough excitement from 14 years of Tory incompetence. And now he’s being punished for governing in grey. He had promised change, and to many people the country feels much the same: broken.
The Labour backbencher Jade Botterill was put in charge of the introductions. And her three-minute speech carried more power than Starmer’s half hour. Maybe he should just have left others to make the case for him remaining in No 10. Instead, Keir took to the lectern with a nervous smile. It was hard to know what he was really thinking.
Does he know, deep down, that the game is up? That there is no way back for him and he just sounds delusional when he talks of remaining in office for another eight years? That the only way out is to bow out with dignity. Become foreign secretary in a Burnham government. Or does he imagine that, if only he can find the right words, he can win over the doubters? That he is a man who has been badly wronged and misunderstood? That it is us who should be saying sorry, not him?
“I get it,” he began. It wasn’t entirely clear that he did. I’m not sure that enlisting Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman was what the country had been gagging for. What even is a “special envoy for international finance and cooperation”? A global hustler?
He claimed the country hadn’t voted for the chaos a leadership election would bring. Yet that was precisely what the voters had done last Thursday. This hadn’t been a referendum on bin collections; it had been a ballot on Starmer’s premiership. And who was to say there would be greater chaos if there was a leadership challenge? Surely the country had been far better off getting rid of Johnson and Truss. Or did Keir think we should have blindly stuck with them regardless?
If this was Starmer’s way of building bridges with those parts of the electorate who had deserted the Labour project, he had a strange way of showing it. Because he immediately painted Reform and the Greens as enemies of the people. Parties whose only raison d’etre was as a refuge of despair and discontent. Not the usual way of going about winning hearts and minds. He also admitted to making mistakes – though he didn’t go to the trouble of saying what they were. Maybe that would still be an admission too far at this stage. Something for his therapist alone.
Then we came to the substance. This should have been his strong suit. The process bit he does best. But it all began to unravel. A nationalisation of British Steel that had in effect already happened. Changes to apprenticeships that had already been announced.
Closer ties with Europe. This was all the incrementalism that had long been the Starmer hallmark from which he was trying to escape. The Europe part was a disaster. Guaranteed to piss off the Brexiters who would look on it as a sellout. And guaranteed to piss off the remainers because it was meaningless without rejoining the single market and the customs union. This was Keir all over. Desperate to please and pleasing no one. By now, even his allies were wanting him this speech to end.
The questions were all about his future. Now Starmer became evasive. Almost as if he couldn’t bring himself to admit there was a crisis. That this specially arranged speech was all just part of a normal Monday morning in government. Would he stop Burnham returning to Westminster? He shrugged. Nothing to do with him. That was for the national executive committee alone. He didn’t even seem to know why Andy might want to become an MP again. It was as if Keir was disconnecting from himself. The only way he could make sense of what had happened over the past few months was to unplug himself. Restore his factory settings.
“Angela Rayner and I are the best of friends,” he said. “I talk to her the whole time.” Really? I’m not sure that Rayner’s direct challenge to Keir on Sunday night – setting out a bar he was bound to fail – was quite the act of a close friend. But maybe that’s the best he can hope for right now. In which case, things may be even worse than he feared. It feels as if the end is nigh.