Schrödinger’s PM: Keir Starmer is both politically dead and alive today

The “unless” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

The results in the local elections are panning out to be terrible for the prime minister. It is very clear there is a general and personal antipathy to Keir Starmer that will be hard to shake off. It is also clear he is going nowhere immediately, and there is no obvious appetite in Cabinet for a precipitous rebellion against him.

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Matthew d’Ancona

Starmer is failing as a prime minister. I have spoken to a number of people who testify he is deeply fed up, to the point where some have suggested he may even be depressed … though it should be said none of them are psychiatrists.

They say he hates the job, his family hates the job. He feels alone, isolated and frustrated. He is stuck in a rut. Things are piling up on his desk. The machinery he assumed would grease the cogs of government is grinding ever slower.

For sure, Starmer has the demeanour of a man whose heart and nerve and sinew are holding on through nothing more than his innate obstinacy and a justifiable fear of perpetual regret.

It is a bad situation. There will be plenty of calls today for him to just go. The logic that we might as well get on with the inevitable is powerful. But to be replaced by whom?

The contender at the top of many people’s list, Andy Burnham, is not even an MP today.

There is also the objective reality that a plunge into domestic uncertainty at a time of international chaos would exacerbate what is an already dreadful economic climate. The public may be clamouring for Starmer to go, but they will not especially like it when interest rates, borrowing costs and taxes all go up because financial markets deteriorate.

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Patience Wheatcroft

Starmer, it is said, is preparing to play big bold strokes in a speech on Monday and later via the proxy of the King’s Speech on May 13. Britain can no longer afford to ignore the need for closer alignment with the EU, he will argue. But at the same time, he will continue to stick with the so-called red lines: no joining the Single Market, or the Customs Union.

I am sorry, but abandoning the dogma of these manifesto pledges is precisely what he needs to do in this crisis, both personal and national. That he will not suggests he does not understand the definition of boldness; that he is still clinging to the delusion that he can appease a right-wing press out to finish him off regardless; that he has not yet fully understood the abject wrongness of Morgan McSweeney’s strategy to mollify the red wall voter. 

It is all, definitively, too little, too late. 

Keir Starmer is today, in a rather Schrodinger’s way, at the same time both politically dead and alive.

Public dislike of him, however rational that may be, has now solidified and is at such a scale as to make any marginal improvements he can deliver over the next 18 months or so immaterial. If he clings on to power until the next election, then it is his destiny to be known as the man who handed a hard-right populist the keys to Downing Street.

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James Ball

Starmer has, today, a choice. He can either barricade himself into Downing Street and commit to seeing out his premiership on the basis of personal stubbornness and an irrational belief that he can transmogrify himself from the most unpopular PM since polling began in 1977 into someone who can outperform Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski.

Or he can mentally commit to paving the way for a successor who can. He does not even have to say so. He just has to know so.

Let us all, still determined that there is a viable alternative to the pocket-lining populism of Reform, remember that Keir Starmer is not the enemy here. Nigel Farage is.

As politically dead as Starmer is, in the coming months he can still breathe life into a Labour Party capable of denying that nightmare vision of a victorious Farage on the steps of Number 10.