Unlike McSweeney’s mobile phone, there’s no mystery to the disappearance of Starmer’s ‘popularity’

“How did Liz Truss make this job look so easy?!”

Saturday Night Live UK – ‘Starmer and Lammy discuss calling Trump’ sketch

A sharp line, in a clever sketch, in a better than expect launch show, seems to have tickled President Trump so much he actually posted it online. He’s gone from liking, to lambasting, to laughing at Keir Starmer.

As you read this, the PM is about to chair a meeting of COBRA – or more accurately in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A – where whether involved or not war comes to bite you at home, on your latest ‘number one commitment’, the cost of living.

This page is too small to count the times over the years Trump has embarrassed his country, himself, and his own family so I’m not blowing the trumpet for him here, but it’s not good for either when a US President is laughing at a UK PM.

It’s particularly awkward because after twenty months of demonstrating – as the skit has him saying, with a savagely accurate parody of his grating nasal tones – “I’m out of my depth here” he’d actually been clawing back some modicum of credibility for not ‘giving in to Trump’ a man more unpopular here than our most unpopular PM and astonishingly it would seem less popular that an actual despotic Ayatollah.

There was a stirring of what’s left of life-in-the-left-for-Stamer last night as some argued it was simply disrespectful of Trump to belittle Britain. Unhappily I suspect this defence sits solidly in Kemi Badenoch’s response some months ago when Starmer said she was running the country down: “I’m not talking the country down; I’m talking him down”

His life raft idea of trying, at every single opportunity to pretend Badenoch is some missile riding warmonger who just can’t wait to get  stuck into Iran is undermined not just because it wilfully bends what she actually said but more importantly, our service men and women are involved and in harms way whether our PM likes it or not, and most of all “not being involved” has had no dividend whatsoever in the eyes of the Iranian regime.

Season 5 of the Chagos Islands – where the story is surely getting more and more surreal on the future of the deal itself – has seen Yvette Cooper  acknowledge an Iranian attempt to strike the Diego Garcia base but keep broadcasting how we are not involved and won’t be involved to all our allies.

Those allies in the Gulf and elsewhwere are definitely watching, and I can tell you they aren’t impressed. The incident creating as big a target for more satire as the airbase ownership saga has become. A former Tory MP quipping:

“The PM is probably consulting Lord Hermer on the correct level of compensation to offer Iran for the loss of their missile”

One of which that we did not deal with but the US did.

As one of our non-political yet very highly qualified and peer acknowledged defence and strategic minds pointed out to me

“Healey has disappeared. Cooper is transparent. And Starmer cannot say a sentence without contradicting himself. Good grief. It’s like they’re systematically failing not just at reading the international room. They’re systematically failing at any basic political instinct about it”

Of course looking at their polling – and no I’m not ignoring Conservative numbers – and Labour’s predicted results in May, a lot of their comments are not about an international room but domestic voters. But the compromise won’t work. The dividend of ‘not being involved’ won’t stop Labour votes going elsewhere especially the Greens.

So I understand. This is ConservativeHome, maybe I would say all this wouldn’t I? But such an observation would be to ignore the signs and issues coming from inside Labour itself.

There’s a satire to be done on the hunt for Morgan McSweeney’s mobile. One wag on X asking if anyone had looked in Louise Haigh’s handbag. But it means the stink about the way the PM appointed Mandelson and gamed the process just won’t go away.

A political Poirot has ensued; when was it stolen? in what circumstances? where is the record of it being reported to police – The PM’s Chief of Staff’s phone gets stolen? Trust me that would be a big red klaxon to all so some record should exist, and anyway why aren’t the McSweeney-Mandelson WhatsApps recoverable or in the cloud.

If everything is rosy in the red rose brigade why is Al Cairns talking about where he learned leadership, and Angela Rayner being helped by a Labour donor (who once tried and utterly failed to have yours truly ejected from a London hotel for ‘being a Tory’) to rain fire on the Starmer project and programme?  Why is whatever Starmerism is getting systematically targeted by increasingly transparent attempts to bring it down from within.

I’m going to talk more about my weekend at the Freedom Festival at the Margaret Thatcher Centre at the University of Buckingham in my next piece – but to conclude this one I was struck by something a close friend of Lady Thatcher discussed with me there.

Our starting point was that if Starmerism is really dead, it should be no more mourned than the ‘Blairite settlement’ that is also definitively dead. Part of that settlement was an assumption that you build a broad coalition of voters piece by piece, issue by issue, focus group by focus group, with promises for almost all to get that landslide.

In less than two years we’ve seen those groups peel away as the conceit unravelled on first contact with reality. They had won in 2024 because people were extremely fed up with the Conservatives and argued they simply didn’t know what they stood for anymore.

And there was where we discussed that bit of Thatcherism very much worth still keeping in mind, like Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty being thrown on the table and the silencing of the room with “This is what we believe!”

Today that means, no lawyerly language to seem present but not involved, but say our alliance is with America not one man.

To probe, how and why, because it genuinely matters, a man who remained friends with the world’s most infamous paedophile and sex trafficker was sent to be ‘our bridge’ to that ally, and wasn’t an instant principled driven ‘no’.

To say to her party, once Thatcher’s now Badenoch’s, with clarity and conviction: “this is what I believe in, this is what I’m going to do. It will be honest and direct. It may not always be easy to hear but it will be the right thing to do. This is what we believe and if you do too, vote for it”

Starmer tried to be the more moral, more principled, more straight, more genuine, to get to be Prime Minister but it was a façade built to appeal to the widest possible section of an ultimately fragmented network of niche wishes. Be honest and authentic – where the voter goes away and doesn’t have to like you but respects you – because they know exactly who you are and what you believe.

I’d take that path any day and it limits the amount they’ll ever end up laughing at you.