Keir Starmer’s time as Prime Minister is over

It’s only a matter of making it official now.

Honestly, his premiership can be described as mediocre, with history remembering him only as a footnote, if at all. On the bright side, he won’t go down as the absolute worst, just the worst Labour Prime Minister… if people can even remember him existing. He provided stability, sure, but without any real strategy or a clear goal in mind. He wanted power for the sake of it. He seemed to just exist and do the bare minimum. He fundamentally seemed to misunderstand what it actually means to be Prime Minister. Odd job really but could split role into two. Core idea is acting as a referee. To make matters worse, he outsourced his politics to someone who was deeply factional within the Labour party. That was the absolute source of his problem. He muddled through instead.

I’ll be fair to him: he’s a good man. He’s just not interested in politics, nor is he good at it. He was great in opposition, but as a PM? Not so much. Which is why it is a puzzle that he even wanted to be Prime Minister in the first place. Everything he needed to do as PM he hated doing. Disliking some pretty important parts of the job.

Rishi Sunak was far better as a PM, far better at politics, with an actual degree of interest in it. In many ways, Starmer was a bit like Boris Johnson: refusing to make a choice. A terrible PM. The thing is, both of those figures loved the game of politics. Compared to what came before him, Starmer was definitely an improvement. Reason why he was PM due the chaos of 14 years of rule from other side. Who became so hated by public they gave that party it worse result in history and almost got wiped out. Is no love for labour so he was on borrowed time. He was dull and boring, but an improvement. Yet his legacy will just be a footnote to the Labour government of 2024. At best, he’ll be a footnote under Labour Prime Ministers.

In a weird way, he sums up everything wrong with Britain right now:

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  Poor leadership that promotes people to roles they shouldn’t hold.

  
  
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  A failure to explain things and act as a teacher to the public.

  
  
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  A total failure of vision and an unwillingness to make the hard choices.

  
  

Instead of leading, he just let the political battles carry on, battles he should have been the one to decide.

Why did he fail? Well, for many reasons. First was the cardinal sin of not listening. Second was letting his advisors do his thinking, which created some real problems. Then there was the poor party management, the poor judgment around appointments, and a general, overriding feeling that he just didn’t get the job description. What destroyed his premiership was himself, and not having a clue what to do with power once he actually had it. Like I said: stability without a strategy. Which is why, unless you follow the day-to-day grind, it’s easy to miss how we actually got here.

If you truly want to understand why, look at his own words. When asked what he was most proud of, his answer was winning the election in 2024. That tells you everything you need to know. Nothing about child poverty, renters’ rights, or workers’ rights. The thing is, when the results looked bad and it looked impossible to turn things around, his time was pretty much over. Everything else was just window dressing on the reasons to ditch him. Once people no longer believed he could win, his power was gone.

Then Andy Burnham was able to unseat him without much effort. That is partly because Burnham actually gets what being Prime Minister means. The former Greater Manchester Mayor has shown everyone that there is more than one route to Parliament now.

As Andy is crowned Prime Minister on Monday, the real task of governing begins. We’ve only had one speech so far from Andy on what he actually wants to do, and the country will be watching.