Why Starmer has been such a failure

• Sunday, June 21, 2026, 7:34 AM

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  Ameer Kotecha

  Why Starmer has been such a failure

  
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There were lots of contested takeaways from the Makerfield by-election this week. But the one thing that seems incontrovertible is that almost everyone wanted to get rid of Keir Starmer. Some of those people voted for Reform, more did so for Burnham – in large part because that was the quickest way to change PM.

This is effectively the end of Starmer’s premiership, with reports today that he may step down as soon as Monday. I have spoken previously of Sir Keir as a Beadlet anemone – a red jelly-like blob – that sticks stubbornly in place until forcibly dislodged. He has lived up to that reputation throughout this leadership crisis. Only on Friday he announced new measures to make it easier to move home. An antenna for irony is not one of our PM’s strong points.

What then are his strong points? They were meant to be competence, a strong work ethic, and a conscientiousness and seriousness of purpose that the public saw as absent from the Boris and Truss administrations. Yet all of these things have turned out to be lacking. The revelations by the journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire that colleagues do not hear a peep from the PM from Friday evening to Monday morning, and that he appears more concerned with the dress code of meetings than the substance to be discussed, speak to a bizarrely shallow and hands-off approach to governing a G7 economy and nuclear power. 

There is something lame about him that Starmer has struggled from the start to shrug off. He appears constantly at the mercy of events, barely able to control his own office in No. 10 let alone run the country. Yet if it were ‘Events, dear boy, events’ alone that had knocked the Starmer government off course – war in Iran for example – he may have garnered some degree of sympathy from voters. The reason he hasn’t is because the public have seen also his startling ruthlessness.

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Mere haplessness does not accurately describe Starmer. When I speculated several weeks ago what would be written on this Prime Minister’s political tombstone, I put forward Southport and Chagos as suggestions. Inheritance tax on farmers, closing private schools, cutting jury trials, grooming gangs and persecution of veterans were amongst the additional suggestions I received. There has been a steely resolve in his prosecution of matters he cares about which is even more unattractive than his mere ineptitude.

Starmer appears to have a deeply-held superiority complex – of morals as well as talents – that explains his habit of telling everyone else that they are irresponsible and incompetent. He seems to genuinely believe it. It is less ‘Après moi le deluge’, more ‘Get rid of me and you’re all going to hell in a handcart’.

But what has been the strangest and most damning aspect of all in my view is the failure to do any preparation for office. Labour had 14 years to prepare for power – Starmer himself had more than four years as Leader of the Opposition. What on earth was he doing in all of that time? Claiming he was occupied by internal party management is frankly embarrassing. As is the idea that he asked Sue Gray to do it all but she never delivered. We see in this failure to prepare for office Starmer’s flaws on display – the detachment from the job and the arrogance.

He did not arrive in No. 10 with the faintest idea of what he wanted to achieve save for a bit of vindictive class warfare. The ‘Five Missions’ were slogans without any worked-out plan underneath. It took only months for him to bemoan the rubber levers of the state. There are undoubtedly too many in Whitehall ‘comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline’ – but he possessed no plan whatsoever as to how to fix the government machine.

All this is explicable when we remember that Starmer’s whole pitch to the country was that his administration would succeed where the Tories had failed simply because he and his ministers were more ethical and sensible. But that makes it no less forgivable. As a pen-pusher-in-chief and the first Whitehall permanent secretary to become Prime Minister – the public rightly expected that Starmer would at least do the basic preparatory work before taking up the highest office in the land.

It was meant to be Adults Back in the Room. Starmer was meant, if nothing else, to be a competent technocrat. The fact that he has floundered even at that tells us all we need to know about this unrivalled failure of a premiership.