Keir Starmer’s boundless vanity – spiked

There is a peculiar kind of vanity that immunises its host against reality. Not the vain man who checks his reflection in shop windows, nor the narcissist who merely craves applause, but the man whose self-belief has calcified into something geological, impervious to rain, to wind, to the accumulated evidence of catastrophic misjudgement. Sir Keir Starmer is such a man.

Cast your mind back to Alec Guinness in The Man in the White Suit, that brilliant 1951 Ealing comedy in which a scientist invents an indestructible fabric and cannot understand why the world conspires to destroy him. He is not corrupt. He is not wicked. He simply cannot conceive that his invention might be the problem. Starmer inhabits precisely this world. Around him, the stains accumulate, the Lord Alli affair, the cronyism, the serial misjudgements of personnel, yet the suit, in his own estimation at least, remains spotless.

It was Jeremy Thorpe who skewered Harold Macmillan after the Night of the Long Knives in 1962, when a desperate prime minister sacked a third of his cabinet in a single afternoon to save his own skin. ‘Greater love hath no man than this’, Thorpe observed drily, ‘that he lay down his friends for his life’. The phrase has echoed across the decades as the definitive verdict on a certain kind of self-preserving leader. It fits Starmer with the precision of a bespoke suit – white, naturally, and apparently indestructible.

The past two weeks’ select committee evidence on the pressure Downing Street applied to civil servants to approve Peter Mandelson as US ambassador to is damning precisely because it is so legible. The prime minister told parliament one thing. The painstaking testimony tells us another. This is not a matter of interpretation or political spin – it is a question of whether the First Lord of the Treasury misled the House of Commons. In any previous era of British political life, such a charge would prompt at minimum a period of agonised contrition, possibly resignation. From Starmer, we receive serenity. He has told us on multiple occasions, with the earnest gravity of a man announcing a mathematical proof, that he is the only person qualified to lead Britain through its current difficulties. The evidence be damned.

This is not ordinary political resilience. Most politicians caught in a lie at least perform the theatre of accountability, the careful apology, the semi-withdrawal, the wounded dignity. Starmer skips the performance entirely. He speaks as if his own virtue is axiomatically beyond question. The trouble is that he appears to actually believe it.

Central to this delusion is his misreading of the July 2024 General Election. Starmer received one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern British history and has apparently concluded that this was due to him, to his vision, his seriousness, his sheer qualification for office. This is a man mistaking the tide for his own swimming. That majority was not a monument built of his virtue. It was a thin-red veneer, a brittle carapace constructed from the rubble of Partygate, Truss, the slow decomposition of a Tory Party that had exhausted every ounce of public goodwill. The electorate did not choose Starmer – they evicted the Tories, and he happened to be standing in the hall. Any serious student of British political history, any of the senior figures who have served in governments that actually changed the national mood, could have told him this. Precedent, in fact, screams it.

Look at his appointments. The ministerial roster assembled with such confidence has proved a monument to misjudgement. The senior civil servants who have departed, some eased out, some broken on the wheel of Downing Street’s briefing operation, represent not a clearing of deadwood but a slaughter of institutional memory and independent voice. Macmillan at least understood he was gambling. Starmer does not appear to understand that he has made choices at all.

And so we ask the question that the opinion polls are already answering with brutal efficiency: is there a Labour praetorian guard capable of intervention? Some palace revolt of the sober and the serious that might rescue the party, and the country, from a premiership unravelling in slow motion? Walk the corridors of Westminster and you find not the suppressed fury of a parliamentary party coiling for action, but something more dispiriting: a grey, exhausted resignation, the shoulders-down quietism of people who have concluded that nothing they say will matter and that the risks of speaking outweigh any conceivable reward. MPs mutter privately. They do not act. They will not act. The culture that Starmer and his circle have cultivated in the parliamentary Labour Party is not one of candour and courage – it is one of servility, self-preservation and risk-aversion elevated to institutional religion. The praetorians have been domesticated into docility. They know the white suit is threadbare. They lack the nerve to say so aloud.

The polls tell their own story. The New Statesman‘s forecasting, drawing on Britain Elects data, is not merely bad for Labour, it is a portent of historical disgrace. The projection suggests Labour could fall from first to fifth in next week’s local elections, retaining just 616 council seats, a loss of around 1,941. Reform is forecast to triumph with over 1,500 seats, the Greens could surge past 1,000, and Labour, polling around 19 per cent nationally, looks unlikely to hold even a third of the seats it is defending. These are not the numbers of a party that has temporarily lost the room. These are the numbers of a party being dismantled ward by ward, borough by borough, in its own heartlands.

Will any of this dent the vanity? Here, one must be honest and reach for a pinch of salt. Starmer will note that expectations are low, that the results are ‘baked in’, that they reflect a ‘difficult inheritance’ from the last government, that the work of change takes time. He will find in the wreckage some green shoot, some London borough held against the odds, and declare the strategy vindicated.

The comparison with Liz Truss is instructive and, to Starmer’s supporters, ought to be sobering. Truss failed catastrophically, and she deserved her fate. But she failed while attempting something – a fiscal gamble that the markets destroyed in 45 days. She had, whatever else one says about her, the courage of her convictions.

What has Starmer risked for Britain? What has he staked his reputation on, beyond the preservation of his own reputation? The answer, surveying the wreckage of his first year, is: himself. The project is Starmer. The white suit must be kept clean. And if friends must be laid down for his life, if civil servants must be cast aside, if parliament must be misled, if the country must endure a government that governs for its own continuance rather than for any discernible national purpose, well, the suit remains white in his mirror, and that, it seems, is sufficient.

Macmillan, for all his faults, eventually understood when the game was up. The question is not whether the polls will tell Starmer the same thing. They already have, repeatedly and at volume. The question is whether a man who built a mountain out of another party’s failure, and called it his own genius, is constitutionally capable of reading them.

The white suit does not show any stains. That is precisely the problem.

Gawain Towler is a commentator and an elected board member of Reform UK. This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on his Substack.