Evasive, indecisive and inconstant: Starmer shows how not to be Prime Minister

Sir Keir Starmer’s propensity to blame anyone else but himself shows no sign of diminishing. It does not seem to occur to him that as Prime Minister one of his duties is to take responsibility.

At yesterday’s PMQs, he as usual evaded most of the questions, and instead launched irrelevant counter-attacks on Reform, the Greens and the Conservatives.

The PM remains addicted to the excuse that anything which goes wrong is the fault of the wicked Conservatives.

But various of the appointments which have gone wrong were made by Starmer himself, including those of Sue Gray, Morgan McSweeney, Chris Wormald and Peter Mandelson.

And most of the policy decisions which have later been reversed were likewise made by Starmer and his colleagues.

It would be wearisome to go through a complete list of the Government’s U-turns, but the scrapping of the Winter Fuel Allowance, followed by its reinstatement, is an egregious example.

There is a case for abolishing this allowance, and a case for keeping it, but no case for what actually occurred.

So too the insistence, at first, that the two-child benefit cap must stay, followed by the decision, under pressure from Labour MPs, to abandon it.

Who now relies on Starmer’s word? Under pressure he crumbles. This appears to be the case with the Chagos deal, though as usual it is difficult to tell what is really going on, and what weight should be attached to the use yesterday by Hamish Falconer, a junior Foreign Office minister, of the word “pausing”.

Who now would wish without ambiguity to defend any controversial Starmer appointment or policy?

In a recent cover piece for The Spectator about where it all went wrong for Starmer, Tim Shipman quotes a Labour insider who has struggled in vain to define Starmerism, and has come to realise,

“Keir has never met a policy that he had a natural view on. That’s why he’s capable of thinking that ID cards are terrible and then ID cards are wonderful and must be compulsory and then that they mustn’t be compulsory.”

Shipman recounts the story of Starmer’s speech in May 2025 warning that mass immigration would lead Britain to become an “island of strangers“.

Starmer and his aides did not realise this would be seen as an echo of Enoch Powell. Without telling his staff what he was about to do, Starmer admitted to Tom Baldwin that he was uncomfortable with “island of strangers”.

Baldwin hastened to publish the interview containing this repudiation in The Observer, cutting across a Sunday Times profile which had been in the works for weeks.

One of Starmer’s staff told Shipman about the effect this episode had on them:

“Keir basically threw everyone under the bus. That really turned things in terms of the internal dynamics. Even people who didn’t like the speech were stunned that he would wash his hands of it and hang people out to dry. It also undermined those people with civil servants, who see that the boss won’t back them up.”

All PMs make mistakes, but few have so frequently put their own staff in such a difficult position. Margaret Thatcher treated some of her Cabinet colleagues, notably towards the end Sir Geoffrey Howe, with appalling rudeness, but was known for her consideration towards her own staff.

Shipman quotes “a senior figure close to No. 10” who says:

“Fundamentally, the Prime Minister cannot make a decision, stick to a decision, implement a decision, defend that decision when it gets tough, or explain that decision, ever.”

In opposition, Starmer had a campaign team, run by McSweeney, but no policy team working out how to turn the promised “change” into a programme for government.

Thatcher, Howe, in the early years a key ally, and others in her team knew where, amid appalling difficulties, they were trying to go, and had mapped at least some of the route to get there.

Starmer has brought back senior Blairites, including Jonathan Powell and Peter Mandelson, presumably in the hope that they would supply the experience of high office he himself lacked.

But Mandelson has not merely resigned, he has been arrested, and we do not yet know what warnings of future trouble the PM received before appointing him.

Powell remains in post as National Security Adviser, but seems to have sought, on the dubious plea of necessity, to apply in the Indian Ocean the concessionary strategy which in Northern Ireland led to the Good Friday Agreement.

At yesterday’s PMQs, Kemi Badenoch asked whether the PM would cut the interest rate paid on student loans. He gave no reply, but claimed instead to be cutting energy prices, and at one point instanced, as he likes to do, the introduction of “free breakfast clubs”.

Badenoch was right to stick yesterday to student loans. By doing so, she demonstrated Starmer’s evasiveness, and the Conservative Party’s new-found determination to think about the needs of younger voters.

But one trusts that one day soon she will point out there is no such thing as a free breakfast club. These clubs have to be paid for by taxpayers.

Starmer evinces week by week his indecisiveness, his inability to think things through, and his inclination to abandon any policy which is unpopular with Labour MPs.

For Badenoch, this opens a wide field of action, as the leader who does the hard thinking, takes the hard decisions and sticks to them.