Bernard Argente: Why on earth for the sake of the country and his own party won’t Starmer just go

Bernard Argente writer, student, and parliamentary researcher who assisted Richard Tice and his staff.

“It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times” is the opening line of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

Similarly, the Labour Party appears to be a tale of two Keirs; Keir Hardie founded the Labour Party and Keir Starmer desolated it.

Regarding a comparatively minor scandal to Peter Mandelson and Matthew Doyle, especially with the release of documents that show the PM knew, the Beergate investigation “risks looking like hypocrisy,” Henry Hill posited on GB News three years ago. Now, the Prime Minister has inebriated himself with hypocrisy, and because he lacks the humility to resign or perhaps because he is so intoxicated by hypocrisy that he is unable to effectuate his resignation, his party is going through a political exodus of support.

To have your then chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who bore a resemblance to Augustus’ political adviser Maecenas, ‘resign’—yes, with quotation marks—is a clear indication of a desperate attempt to save one’s skin.

McSweeney, the figurative ventriloquist that makes puppets speak, had said, “I take full responsibility” regarding the appointment of Lord Mandelson as ambassador to the United States. The mastermind who pioneered the machination to bring Starmer in has become a sacrificial lamb. Sir Chris Wormald, former cabinet secretary, had also been “thrown under the bus,” conceivably because the prime minister had binge-watched Yes Minister and was taking on the persona of Jim Hacker, treating Sir Humphrey Appleby as a scanty prosopopoeia for Wormald.

To put this aside, how does Starmer’s party view the economy? And would Labour’s economic prism be enough to save him?

Well, it is a misnomer to classify Labour’s economic policy as right-wing. Not only would Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman all be rolling in their graves hearing that, but Starmer has not shifted the Overton window at all. Keir Hardie’s left-wing politics and pacifism made him so unpopular that the British people, sometimes his own constituents in Merthyr Tydfil, sang the national anthem in protest against his stance on the First World War. This clearly wasn’t optimal for the Labour leader. Nevertheless, Keir Hardie founded the party. Keir Starmer, on the other hand, has adopted a radical centrist stance compatible with Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey’s philosophy that aligns with the obsolete Tory doctrine, “one-nation conservatism,” which believes the state has a noblesse oblige to support its people. So, it is understandable how one can misconstrue Keir Starmer’s policy as being right-wing when Starmer could potentially be viewed as an aspirant one-nation Tory, certainly now when his actions mirror those of the old Conservative Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, as both refused to resign.

Former Prime Minister Anthony Eden, a centre-right Tory whom the Liberal Democrats likely idolise off the record, faced a severe backlash from the United Kingdom and its people for mismanaging the Suez Crisis in 1956. In spite of this humiliating failure, Eden refused to resign at first and finally resigned on 9 January 1957, when the United States threatened to cripple the pound. Eden did not claim the reason for his resignation was because of the United States; instead, he said it was because of health issues from traveling to Jamaica.

If it were not obvious already, this is comparable to Keir Starmer’s current issue. The 58th Prime Minister has a track record of U-turns, notably his U-turn on Chagos after President Donald Trump called it “a great act of stupidity.”  and then refused to let America use the same base, before U-turning on that. So, this begs the question: if President Trump puts pressure on Starmer to resign in the way Eden was pressured, would he follow suit?

Keir Starmer’s unwillingness to resign could be due to his own vanity. During Prime Minister’s Questions, when the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are vis-à-vis, both loom over their designated dispatch box and signal authority. Could it be that Keir Starmer has a feeling of antipathy toward Kemi Badenoch’s authority and that compels him not to resign?

It appears that Starmer takes on the role of a pugnacious lecturer in PMQs when speaking to Badenoch, ridiculing her for the substance of her questions rather than answering them. He constantly reminds her of his time as Leader of the Opposition and how he would ask questions to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. By somewhat underestimating the Leader of the Opposition, he leaves himself open to attack. Mistaking kindness for weakness is what the Greeks at first did to Hector in the Iliad, and Badenoch has dismantled Starmer’s party piece by piece, spotting their flaws from Angela Rayner to Mandelson. Spotting hypocrisy is the Conservative Party ideal, similar to how they criticised Lord Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, for stating he had ‘failed in life’ if in five years there were not fewer journeys by car yet owning two Jaguars for transport.

Starmer may not be able to stand Badenoch asking better questions than he did as Leader of the Opposition. Kemi Badenoch at the despatch box quintessentially embodies the quote from Lady Macbeth in the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare: “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t.”

The Conservative Party points out the irony of the Labour Party, which Labour loathes. Keir Starmer, like Sir Anthony Eden, will have to accept Kemi Badenoch as his emblematic executioner, and if not, he risks taking his entire party down with him, though there is scarcely any party left to bring down after the Mandelson appointment faux pas. A spokesperson for 10 Downing Street attempted to dispel any thought of Starmer wavering about staying at the highest office, and yet even a layman not au fait with British politics would question if that would be a sign of pride or imprudence.

It is fair to say Starmer should resign of his own accord instead of losing it all, as Sir Anthony Eden did. Whether the pressure comes from Kemi Badenoch or an external force like America, he must exit his comfort bubble and make the “tough decisions” as he promised to do, and resign. His resignation would be the most definitive action he could take after all his broken promises to the British people.