Keir Starmer: the Windows 95 prime minister

The real Keir Starmer. That, we’re told, is what we’re in for, now that the embattled PM is embarking upon what feels like the 47th ‘reset’ of his 19-month rule.

Starmer is the Windows 95 prime minister, requiring endless reboots just to stay functioning. But it certainly feels different this time around. His last, juddering stand while Labour MPs ponder when, not if, to oust him.

With the departure of chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and chief mandarin Chris Wormald, No10 spinners insist Starmer is now free to be true to his values and deliver for Britain. The problem is that Starmer seems to have few principles to speak of and no idea what he’s doing.

At a pseudo-event in Welwyn Garden City this week, Starmer tried to paint his government as Proper Labour, focussed on the ‘cost of living’ and led by the ‘most working-class cabinet in the history of this country’.

The working classes still haven’t got the memo. Labour now polls in third place among blue-collar Brits, with Reform UK commanding a double-digit lead and the Tories clinging on in second. Labour is, however, the most popular party among the privately educated.

Indeed, one of the few historic achievements of this generation of Labourites is severing the long-fraying link between their party and the working classes. Starmer, in his role as shadow (anti-)Brexit secretary during the Jeremy Corbyn years, is more culpable than most.

And if this is the most ‘working class’ cabinet in history, it doesn’t reflect the longer, historical trend of plummeting worker representation in the Commons, driven almost entirely by the colonisation of the Parliamentary Labour Party by lawyers, think-tankers and the Third Sector.

This is a clue as to why Labour not only routinely scorns and ignores the concerns of working-class people, but also embraces policies diametrically opposed to their interests – such as paying vast sums of money to keep people locked out of work on welfare or making energy more expensive to give Ed Miliband a warm feeling. Best of luck on tackling the cost of living, Keir.

Starmer’s pitch for power was all about technocratic delivery – hence, those interminable speeches setting out his ‘missions’, to be measured against ‘milestones’, all anchored by the ‘foundation stones’ of ‘economic security, national defence and secure borders’.

We can now see how that turned out. Housebuilding is in its deepest downturn since Covid, defence chiefs are near-mutinous over insufficient spending, and those gangs remain stubbornly unsmashed. Last year, small-boats crossings hit a near-record high.

Whether or not Labour actually wants to smash them is far from clear. Still, for a man who prides himself on process, Starmer appears to be across all the wrong details, even fussing about the dress code for meetings, if the insider accounts are to be believed. ‘You’d get a note the night before a meeting telling everyone to make sure they’re wearing smart casual’, one Downing Street source recently told Tim Shipman of the Spectator.

If it isn’t the working class, or managerial prowess, what does this Labour Party stand for? On current evidence, the only thing that unites the Labourites is their glee in calling critics of mass immigration racist – be they Nigel Farage or Manchester United part-owner Jim Ratcliffe. Apparently, more than a decade of this tactic backfiring spectacularly – sending former Labour areas into the arms of the pro-Brexit right – hasn’t killed their buzz.

It’s not that Starmer’s Labour doesn’t have its views on the world. Like much of the liberal left, it is wedded to all of the worst orthodoxies of the age. But even so, it all feels reflexive, inherited, vibes-based. And so their shibboleths crumble under even modest scrutiny, as seen in their comical responses to any hack who asks if a woman can have a penis. They cling to greenism or wokism or whatever not out of any deep thinking, but a desperation to appear purposeful and virtuous.

That Keir Starmer ever became leader of the Labour Party is a damning indictment of the Labour Party. But the current challengers vying to replace him remind us he is hardly a pygmy among giants. Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham – they may, unlike Starmer, appear to have a pulse. But they have no answers to the crises confronting us, offering up either New Labour nostalgia or the warm bath of soft-leftism.

The Keir Starmer premiership has shown you cannot ‘deliver’ in politics if you have no politics in the first place, and you cannot empower the working classes if you consider them to be either bigots or charity cases or both. Starmer has proven to be a truly woeful prime minister. On that front alone, he has surpassed expectations. But he is the leader that Labour – a party that no longer knows who or what it is for – deserves.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.