As the End Beckons, Starmer faces his Final Humiliations

Keir Starmer may not want to admit it, but the general belief at this moment in time is that he is entering the twilight of his premiership. His political capital has been depleted by his many missteps with each one cascading into the next.

His multiple U-turns.

His decision to block Andy Burnham from standing in a by-election in a transparent political move to head off a potential leadership challenge by strangling it in the crib.

Labour’s subsequent catastrophic loss at that by-election to a surging Green party.

His steeply declining personal polling numbers that are dragging down his entire party.

All have contributed to the sense that the end for the Prime Minister is increasingly nigh.

But his catastrophic error of judgment in appointing Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States has compounded each and every one of those other failures and turned Starmer into the political equivalent of a dead man walking.

His final duty as leader of the Labour Party will be to walk into the withering fire of the May elections and oversee the likely decimation of the party at council level, the installation of a Welsh First Minister from the nationalist Plaid Cymru and the blowing of the best chance in a generation to end SNP rule at Holyrood.

He will have to take the blame from his party and allow a new leader their best shot at rescuing their party from the same electoral oblivion to which the Tories were consigned. The only remaining question in my opinion is whether he will preserve a shred of dignity by resigning himself in the aftermath, or if his party will be forced into a hitherto unthinkable act of regicide they normally associate with their Tory rivals.

People will argue for a long time to come how a man who won such a huge majority not even two years ago so spectacularly blew it. Books yet unwritten will dig deep into the economics, the social forces, the circumstances and the events and they will produce meticulously detailed accounts, likely backed up by insider quotes, that will attempt to answer that question.

But in the here and now I would argue that the seeds of Starmer’s downfall lie very much in why he was chosen to lead Labour in the first place.

Brian O’Neill’s opening line in the post announcing Starmer had been chosen to lead Labour nearly six years ago nails it.

‘At last Labour Party members have seen sense and decided to choose an electable leader…’

Whilst many Labour members who gave him that vote may look back at that event now with a wince, remember the context of when those words were written. Labour had just gone down to a historic defeat under Jeremy Corbyn. We seemed poised for a decade of not only Conservative but Johnsonian rule.

The people of Ireland were watching British politics with trepidation as Westminster convulsed trying to process Brexit. Starmer seemed like a sober, boring grown-up and as time marched onwards and the Tories tore themselves apart during the political circus of the Boris years, politics being boring again sounded downright attractive.

And yet, Starmer is a cautionary tale of being careful what you wish for.

I argue that Starmer’s political sobriety is because he lacks the single most fundamental requirement of good leadership and that is a political vision that can inspire others.

Tony Blair had it with his pitch for renewing the United Kingdom after eighteen years of Conservative rule and whilst his unbridled optimism was easily lampooned in those early, pre-Iraq War years, it was a story people could buy into. When he greeted his own landslide victory in 1997 with the words ‘a new dawn has broken, has it not?’ and as he marched into Downing Street drenched in sunshine and cheered by onlookers, even the most hardened cynic had to accept that people wanted to believe the promise he offered (and Blair’s rictus-like grin as he stood beside Donald Trump at the inauguration of the ‘board of peace’ is no surer antidote to that unfounded optimism…)

Much was said when Starmer entered Downing Street regarding the contrast between Blair’s optimism and the utter pessimism of Starmer’s own outlook. Starmer would probably remind us that the circumstances he faced in 2024 where far, far worse than what Blair inherited in 1997. And while that is objectively true, Starmer still appears to have the soul of a technocrat with no wider vision for where he wants the country to go. In the age of Farage and Polanski, that simply isn’t going to work.

Nothing has exemplified Starmer’s problems more than his relationship with Donald Trump.

The bald facts are simple; the United Kingdom needs to stay in the good graces of the famously vindictive American President for a whole host of reasons. And plenty of leaders have had to swallow their pride and make the performative pilgrimages to the White House to offer Trump tribute.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin will have to tread that path next week for the second time, aware that he has to sweet-talk a President hostile to Ireland’s economic model and keenly aware that same President is enormously unpopular on this island.

Starmer is therefore not alone in deciding that turning the other cheek and enduring the President’s snide and bellicose comments is the wiser course of action. He has invested considerable time and effort in wooing Trump, including an unprecedented second State visit to the United Kingdom last year AND a return visit from King Charles III scheduled for next month.

But Trump’s opinions can turn on a dime, the only part of a relationship he seems to place stock in is the grievances he has with any given individual and how he can exact retribution upon them.

Trump has swung from praising Starmer to damning and belittling him when he doesn’t get his way. He thought nothing of mocking the contributions of British troops in previous American wars, the one time it was felt he had gone too far with the British who demanded (and received) an apology, but I doubt anyone hoped that apology would prompt a more reflective Trump.

He knows the power he wields over the UK and he is adept at weaponising the sentimentality of the special relationship that no American really cares but with which they are able to manipulate British public and political opinion who see in it an affirmation of their own relevance. I have to point out that there’s only one country on the planet that the United States has a special relationship with and they are currently fighting a war alongside them.

Starmer rarely stands up to Trump because of the lopsided nature of this relationship, an imbalance made ever more pronounced by Brexit. And once you factor in Starmer’s lack of vision…the absence of a political, moral framework that the public can see informing his decision-making…it means that when Trump turns on Starmer, Starmer is left looking weak and willing to endure the abuse because he lacks both the options and the political courage to forge a different path.

Starmer clearly doesn’t want to get involved in the ongoing Iran War and is desperately trying to keep the United Kingdom out of it but he is also trying to preserve his relationship with Trump.

Unfortunately for Starmer, Trump only has two modes of operation. One with equals and one with subordinates.

Vladimir Putin is clearly treated as an equal. So is Chinese President Xi Jinping. Powerful autocrats backed by capable militaries, unrestrained by checks and balances. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also in that exclusive club.

And that’s it for his perceived peers. Three.

Everyone else is a subordinate from whom he demands tribute, and any reluctance on their part enrages him. Starmer’s equivocations have certainly provoked him mightily.

In response he has retaliated by throwing a wrench into the Chagos Islands deal and taking to the airwaves to publicly humiliate, berate and rebuke the Prime Minister by demonstrating that Starmer’s careful cultivation of their relationship and attempts to appease his ego amounted to nothing.

Trump clearly regards the modified UK position of allowing the US to launch ‘defensive’ strikes against locations where Iranian missiles as being fired from as insufficient and on Saturday he bluntly told Starmer that the UK’s help was not needed.

“The United Kingdom, our once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them all, is finally giving serious thought to sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East, “That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer – But we will remember. We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”

And this was after a more cutting jibe when he unfavourably compared Starmer to Winston Churchill.

It’s a bit of a contrast with Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Like Starmer, Sánchez is facing difficult electoral headwinds from the populist right in his country. Like Starmer, there are American bases on the soil of his country the Americans wished to use for their war on Iran.

Unlike Starmer, Sánchez didn’t mince words as he refused him.

“The question is not if we are on the side of the ayatollahs – nobody is. The question is whether we are in favour of peace and international legality,” he said. “You cannot answer one illegality with another, because that is how the great catastrophes of humanity begin.”

Trump was apoplectic with Sánchez and began threatening to cut off all trade with Spain (an impossibility as Spain as a part of the European Union and thus cannot be singled out) but whilst there is every possibility that Sánchez’s approach is driven by domestic considerations (Trump and the war are enormously unpopular there), you can’t help but admire that he is willing to stand by his convictions and stand up to Trump. Though if Trump finds a way to make Spain pay for their Prime Minister’s temerity, he may end up affirming the caution of other leaders.

Starmer looks smaller in comparison, and while his ministers have attempted to make a virtue of Trump’s put-downs by arguing it shows Starmer is acting in the national interest, the very act of endurance diminishes him at a moment when some moral backbone would not have gone amiss.

It is almost certainly too late to save Starmer. Labour got what it voted for with him, an electable safe pair of hands who ended the Conservative psycho-drama. That those same qualities meant he was constitutionally incapable of actually leading his country, not just running it, is something that has only become apparent in hindsight. When his time comes, as it almost certainly will shortly, he will surely argue that he did what he thought was best for his country. And I actually believe that is true. The problem is that if he does a deeper vision than managing the day-to-day crises now plaguing the world, of encouraging people to aspire to a better tomorrow, then he has completely failed to communicate that.

Perhaps the next leader of the Labour Party will do better on that count.