The Incredible Shrinking Starmer: A Prime Minister Promising More, Delivering Less
What will be recorded as the true cause of Keir Starmer's political demise when he eventually steps down? It won't be the Peter Mandelson scandal, the numerous policy U-turns, or the dismal nights at provincial counting centres. These are merely symptoms of a deeper ailment. The real disease turning the man elected just 19 months ago into an ex-prime minister is the slow, painful realisation among ministers, colleagues, and voters alike: there is far less to him than meets the eye.
Promises Evaporate in the Wash
Starmer's commitments seem to shrink in the wash. A bold green new deal has been jettisoned, an Employment Rights Act watered down significantly, and a manifesto pledge to end Britain's feudal leasehold laws suddenly sprouted caveats. His claimed achievements, a modest puddle at best, evaporate swiftly in the sunlight. Just listen to his cabinet ministers this week, delivering hostage-video-style messages about their boss's accomplishments: a roll-call that starts with extended childcare—actually one of Rishi Sunak's final acts—and scrapping the two-child benefit cap, forced on No 10 by Labour backbenchers.
In this era of vanished crafts and endangered trades, a cottage industry recently emerged to define "Starmerism." Writers and academics attempted to plumb its depths and chart its hinterland. Some ventured as far as Reigate in Surrey, searching for clues in the man's childhood home, but all eventually surrendered, defeated somewhere between the government's ninth and eleventh U-turn. They could have saved themselves the trouble by simply defining it as shrinking ambitions, shrinking attainments, and a shrinking electoral base. It's not a philosophy but a business model, long perceived as profitable—even as some warned of its dangers. Now, it's understood to lead only to bankruptcy.
The Lobbyist-Laden Government
When Mandelson texted his Westminster apprentice Wes Streeting last March that "the government problems do not stem from comms," he was spot on. The issue isn't communications; it's that there's so little substance to communicate. And when No 10 talks about unleashing its resident, it will soon become apparent there was no big beast to put on a lead. Starmer began his fightback this week with a solemn vow to purge Westminster lobbyists, a risible claim from a government filled with them. Jacqui Smith, the frontbencher defending him on Monday, was a lobbyist until Starmer gave her a job. His jobs tsar, Alan Milburn, has made over £8 million from lobbying, while former New Labour minister Jim Murphy runs a lobbying firm where two staffers became MPs for Starmer in 2024. According to journalist Peter Geoghegan, 34 of the most recent intake of Labour MPs worked in lobbying.
This "less-ism" applies not just to the prime minister but his inner circle; not just their policies but their careers. Consider Morgan McSweeney, the just-departed chief of staff, whose shadow looms over this entire week. In career obituaries, journalists praised him for three key achievements, but scrutiny reveals flaws. First, he was hailed as the "hammer of the left" against Ted Knight's Trotskyism in Lambeth—yet when Knight ran Lambeth in the 1980s, McSweeney was in primary school in County Cork. By the time he joined London Labour, the party's big fight was against the Lib Dems, not the hard left.
Myth-Making and Electoral Realities
Second, he was celebrated as a hero of the 2010 Battle for Barking, a mass mobilisation against the British National Party. However, volunteers and witnesses from that campaign don't recall McSweeney playing a significant role. Nick Lowles, an organiser and seasoned anti-fascist, details the battle in his book How to Defeat the Far Right, without mentioning McSweeney once. Among those credited is Sam Tarry, a "young but experienced campaigner" who slept in the office to guard it from violent racists. Tarry later became a Labour MP but was blocked from running again by Starmer and McSweeney's regime.
Finally, there's the 2024 landslide: a historic turnaround, yet not the triumph McSweeney and Starmer hoped for. They believed flags and tanks might win over "hero voters" who had turned from red to blue, but it didn't. Labour's overall vote share rose by only 1.6 percentage points from the 2019 wipeout. The person who truly won the 2024 election for Starmer was Liz Truss, whose disastrous tenure split the rightwing vote. The net result is a bigger majority than Clement Attlee in 1945, but a platform closer to Sunak's. In a forthcoming analysis, York University's Kevin Farnsworth notes that Starmer's manifesto for "change" was strikingly similar in language and positions to Sunak's, representing "a decisive embrace of positions historically closer to Conservative than Labour platforms."
A Faction, Not a Party
Politicians and journalists love myth-making, but preferring legends to history leaves no guide for the future. One guiding attitude of Starmer and McSweeney's regime has been that grave danger lies in looking even a millimetre left, leading them to take pops at Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan and expel anyone resembling a dissenter—not just Jeremy Corbyn but peaceable figures like Neal Lawson, threatened with expulsion for endorsing cross-party cooperation on Twitter.
Footage shows former Labour metro mayor Jamie Driscoll browbeaten by party bureaucrats for simply sitting on stage with leftwing film-maker Ken Loach. Long-serving councillors and community figures have been barred from candidacy for such misdemeanours as "liking" a tweet from Nicola Sturgeon about being Covid-free. This is McCarthyism dressed as election-winning politics, and it has failed. The result isn't much of a government or even a party—it's a nasty, narrow rightwing faction of what was once a great pluralist tradition. In place of real politics, there's office politics. The refrain that Starmer is a "decent" man doesn't fit his record of deceiving his way to the top, sitting on his hands during the Gaza massacre, or clamping down on protests against it.
Voters Seek Alternatives
This government is already toast, according to one Labour heavyweight, but the 125-year-old Labour party may not survive Starmer and McSweeney. The diminution of the party's horizons is evident in the upcoming leadership election. Fifty years ago, replacing Jim Callaghan drew heavyweights from Tony Benn to Roy Jenkins; in 2015, the range went from Corbyn to Liz Kendall. This year, we're likely to have Streeting, a former student politician, versus someone from the soft left—no ideas in contest, little semblance of a plan for change.
Now, the shrinking is being done by voters. Labour's polling is disastrous. At each election, leftwing voters ask: who is the candidate to stop Farage's candidate? In Caerphilly, it was Plaid Cymru; in Gorton and Denton this month, it may be the Greens. But it rarely seems to be Starmer. Voters are actively searching out alternatives because why should they settle for less? As the political landscape shifts, Starmer's legacy risks being remembered not for what he achieved, but for what he promised and failed to deliver.
