Like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Keir Starmer has “come unstuck in time”. He is a 20th-century politician faced with 21st-century challenges. He is analogue, not digital. He is limbering up for shove ha’penny in the world of PlayStation 5.
The circumstances in which he is marking his first anniversary as prime minister on July 5 could hardly be more downbeat. Though he has a working majority of 165, Starmer still had to make emergency concessions (at a cost of at least £3bn) to give Liz Kendall’s Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill a chance at second reading in the Commons.
I am not against U-turns in principle: politicians should be able to change their minds without being branded losers. But there is a difference between an occasional, reasoned reassessment and a pattern of behaviour that suggests strategic bedlam.
On June 9, Rachel Reeves restored winter fuel payments to millions of pensioners, reversing the original cut which would have reduced the number of potential recipients from 11.4 million to 1.5 million. Five days later, Starmer announced that he would, after all, be launching a national inquiry into grooming gangs – having previously accused those calling for such an investigation of “jumping on the bandwagon” and “amplifying what the far right is saying”.
The opinion polls, meanwhile, are dire for a government only 12 months old. According to YouGov’s MRP mega-survey of 11,000 respondents published in the Times last week, its first since the general election, Labour is on track to lose 233 of the 412 seats it won last July, while Reform UK would gain 271, up from its present tally of five. Poll after poll shows that the notion of Nigel Farage leading the largest single party in the next parliament is, at minimum, perfectly conceivable.
The audit of Starmer’s first year is not wholly dismal. It would be churlish to deny that the investment he and Reeves have pumped into the NHS, public housing and defence is a good start. His response in March to Volodymyr Zelensky’s mauling in the Oval Office by Donald Trump and JD Vance – an emergency summit in London of European leaders and Canada’s then prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to shore up support for Ukraine – was authentically statesmanlike.
On May 19, furthermore, he successfully reset relations with the European Union alongside the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and António Costa, the president of the European Council, shifting his government’s focus from the “stale old debates” of Brexit to what von der Leyen called a “roadmap” for future action.
All the same: there are plenty of reasons to suspect that Starmer is, to borrow Clement Attlee’s clipped response to a junior minister he had sacked, “not up to it”. As recently as last Wednesday he was dismissing the rebellion of more than 120 Labour MPs against Kendall’s proposed benefit cuts as “noises off”. And this misreading of the room is not atypical.
Yes, he has apologised in recent interviews for his seriously bleak address in the No 10 rose garden last August (“frankly – things will get worse before they get better”) and his use of the phrase “island of strangers”, uncomfortably reminiscent of Enoch Powell’s rhetoric, in a speech in May on immigration policy.
“I wouldn’t have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of Powell,” he told his biographer Tom Baldwin in the Observer. “I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn’t know either.”
But why not? How can a prime minister and his team dive into the complex and often toxic issue of immigration policy without knowing the basics? Aren’t lawyers supposed to immerse themselves in precedent? And – speaking of the law – should it really have taken a Supreme Court ruling to compel a KC to accept the legal meaning of the word “woman” in the 2010 Equality Act?
I am also unconvinced that he is of the very specific character type that makes a successful PM. Certainly, he exudes the public confidence of old-fashioned credentialism: in particular, he never misses an opportunity to cite his record as Director of Public Prosecutions. With his earnest managerial countenance, he reminds me all too closely of Michael Palin as Herbert Anchovy, the accountant in the Monty Python sketch who wants to be a lion tamer – and declares that “I’ve got a hat!”
Worse, such displays of self-belief are matched by bouts of panic. After Labour’s defeat in the Hartlepool by-election in May 2021, he came close to resigning the party leadership. After the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election in 2023, which was overshadowed by a row over the expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone, he became deeply anxious about the green agenda – a fit of anxiety from which he has not truly recovered.
Worst of all has been his response to the challenge of Farage. “If we’re going to have a battle with Reform – a battle for the heart and soul of the country – we’re better off having it now,” he told Baldwin. “If we’re to win that battle, we have to be the progressives fighting against the populists of Reform – yes, Labour has to be a progressive political party.”
But that is not what he has been doing. Instead, and with the enthusiastic support of his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, he has more often seemed to be nervously mimicking Reform than fighting it. His feeble “smash the gangs” slogan; his claim that net migration has caused “incalculable” damage; No 10’s pursuit, reported in the Times this week, of “authoritarian-leaning” voters: at such moments the PM conveys not strength but weakness.
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As Lord Kinnock put it recently to Prospect magazine: “Appeasers get eaten. It’s very important to remember that if people are offered two versions of a particular political brand, they will always choose the genuine one.”
One-year Keir: unkind, I know, but it does have a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? If Starmer threw in the towel today, he would be remembered as the leader who saved Labour from Corbynism and achieved one of the greatest parliamentary majorities in modern political history, less than five years after its worst result since 1935.
Yet he does not strike me as a quitter. For all the headlines about rebellion and Starmer’s precarious position, anyone who imagines that it is easy for Labour to sack its leader should consult the 2025 rulebook at their leisure.
The Tories long ago acquired the habit of regicide. In contrast, Labour (as Jeremy Corbyn showed when challenged in 2016) has stacked the deck in favour of its incumbent boss. I suspect that, when Starmer goes, it will be at a time of his or the electorate’s choosing.
In any case: the problems that he faces are problems that face almost all progressive politicians in 2025. They are tectonic rather than merely personal. A change in mindset is more important than a change in personnel.
First, I sense little awareness in Labour’s highest ranks that voters throughout the free world now reliably despise and punish establishments and elites. The YouGov MRP poll was indeed very bad news for Starmer and his colleagues. But even more striking was what it revealed about the standing of the two main parties.
According to the survey, Labour and the Conservatives would win only 224 seats between them: just 34% of 650 seats. In the local elections in May, the average vote share of the two main parties was only 36.8% – down 20 on the previous record of 56.9% in 2013.
The challenge for Labour, therefore, is not only to fend off Reform and (a lesser task) keep Kemi Badenoch at bay. It is to acknowledge and respond to a fundamental realignment in British politics which has much less to do with left and right than with the chasm between the elites and the people they represent. In such a cultural context, the inert technocracy of Starmer and Reeves is a route to catastrophe.
Closely connected to this, second, is the warning offered by the US journalist, Derek Thompson, co-author with Ezra Klein of Abundance: How We Build a Better Future, and the wonko di tutti wonki: “People vote for people”. Thompson’s point is not that policy is irrelevant; far from it. His message is that the best policy in the world will make no difference to anyone unless it is championed, explained and incarnated by charismatic tribunes.
Starmer is proudly opposed to this philosophy. In a Sunday Times interview at the weekend, he reaffirmed his preference “to be serious and pragmatic rather than do the performative art, which doesn’t actually get you very far.”
This is a positively perverse response to the predicament in which he finds himself. If performance doesn’t “get you very far”, how does he explain the fact that a saloon-bar charlatan, personally responsible for the worst postwar blow to the UK’s global standing, and one of only five Reform UK MPs, is running rings around him? If “the performative art” is so trivial and inconsequential, how come Farage is beating him in every poll?
“I believe in the world we live in,” said the PM in the same interview, “not the world we want to live in.” Exactly. Which makes one wonder why he behaves as though we are all stuck somewhere in the last century, TikTok is the noise clocks make, and the gentleman in Whitehall really does know best.
Of Trump, he says: “I understand what he’s trying to achieve.” But does he understand the epochal change in political culture which the 45th and 47th president personifies? Indeed: how many senior British politicians have realised that when people say they want politics to be boring they are mostly lying or kidding themselves? That – like it or not – public life in 2025 requires agile showmanship and flair?
Look at the triumph last week of 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic mayoral primary contest in New York. Leave aside for now his views on the Middle East, his precise location on the ideological spectrum or the applicability of his strategy to statewide or national contests.
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Focus instead on the sheer energy and kineticism he brought to the race; his apparent round-the-clock availability to voters, journalists and podcasters. The Democratic establishment backed Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced 67-year-old former governor of New York state, and confidently expected him to sweep to victory.
But New Yorkers had other ideas. They liked the style of the Kampala-born immigrant, his street-level emphasis upon affordable living, his connection with the people he met as he walked the length of Manhattan.
As Starmer admits: “It’s the challenge… getting our story across… If I was to list to you all the things we’ve done, it’s a big long list of things. [But] how do we tell the story of what we’ve done? How do we make sure it’s actually felt by working people?”
Candour would be a start. By which I mean real candour: an admission that in a century in which government will have so much more to do, taxes will have to rise as part of a paradigm shift in statecraft.
This is not the 1980s, when the frontiers of government were being rolled back. People are living longer; geopolitical instability is driving up the cost of defence; climate change, pandemic resilience and the AI and quantum revolutions will require more state intervention. Savage inequality is testing the very fabric of the social order. All of which is a matter of empirical observation, not political doctrine. This is the world we live in.
The task for progressives – and not only Starmer – is to play political alchemist and turn these crises into a shared endeavour, a patriotic adventure for all citizens. It is to offer a sense of vivid meaning, as well as prospective efficiency.
As holiday reading, I recommend to the PM William E Leuchtenburg’s classic book, Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963), which chronicles FDR’s transformation of the presidency into “the fountainhead of ideas, the initiator of action, the representative of the national interest”.
The essence of the New Dealers’ project was the marriage of strategy and persuasion; of policy execution and popular explanation. It can be done. It could, on this side of the Atlantic, be done again.
That, of course, is not only a question for Starmer. The entire, dilapidated British polity faces this existential challenge. But, for now at least, the buck stops with Keir, and it is he who must decide whether or not to recognise the stakes, to accept what he is up against, and to raise his game accordingly and radically.
Until further notice, he is the only prime minister we’ve got. As Vonnegut would say: So it goes.
