Arrogant and Inept, Keir Starmer’s Hubris Is Blowing Up in His Face

The belly flop is the signature move of this government. “Phase two of my government starts today,” Keir Starmer intoned on 1 September, signalling little more, it turned out, than his own hubris. His announcement fired the starting gun on the most disastrous and shambolic period of his premiership to date. Rayner, Banksy, Herzog, Mandelson – Starmer is having an absolutely torrid time of it, sinking further with every passing day into the mire of his monumental unpopularity. In Westminster, the countdown seems to have officially begun toward the end of his government.

For longstanding Starmer critics, it’s hard not to laugh. Rarely have so many chickens returned to roost all at once. Another underwhelming “reorganisation” of No 10 staffing – one newly-appointed strategist lasted not even two weeks – was immediately eclipsed by the defenestration of deputy prime minister Angela Rayner over her tax affairs, a reminder of the earlier ethical woes of this grasping “gimme” government and its predilection for freebies.

The resulting Cabinet reshuffle was a game of musical chairs, rotating the same faces among the great offices of state. The evident loser when the music stopped was former leader of the Commons Lucy Powell – and yet so cack-handed was her ejection that she has been immediately catapulted back into the headlines by the deputy leadership race, which she is contesting as a ready-made tribune of the backbenches and standard bearer for party discontent.

Meanwhile, Starmer’s continuing fealty to Israel is also coming back to haunt him. The unsupportable and unsustainable proscription of Palestine Action has conjured up an unending supply of lovely silver-haired pensioners willing to step forward from retirement to be arrested in admirable acts of civil disobedience against not merely unjust but completely indefensible laws.

And so the government woke up last week to find that Banksy had struck, with a devastating mural on the Royal Courts of Justice showing a judge beating a protestor. Like Lady Macbeth’s blood that would not out, even scrubbing it away has only served to improve and elevate it to worldwide fame. The timing of the graffiti’s removal was impeccable, occurring just as the prime minister was set to greet Israeli president and génocidaire Isaac Herzog on Downing Street, leaving Starmer without ready cover as the political noose of his complicity in war crimes tightens around his neck.

Reverse Midas touch.

All that would be enough to give Liz Truss a run for her money on incompetence and misadventure. But the other shoe had yet to fully drop. In Washington, the congressional Democrats finally did something useful, prizing loose Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book from the house oversight committee and placing it in the public domain. With exquisite cosmic irony, this caused Peter Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to the United States to boomerang back in Starmer’s face, with explosive ongoing consequences that may ultimately bring down the prime minister, his éminence grise Morgan McSweeney, or both.

The dogs in the street knew that Starmer’s appointment of Mandelson carried significant political risk. Twice before the so-called prince of darkness – as cynical and mercenary a figure as you could hope to find in British public life, against stiff competition – was forced to exit frontline politics in disgrace. On both occasions, this was due to his taste for extravagance and his dalliances with the superrich. In the case of Epstein, Mandelson’s close association with the late paedophile financier and sex trafficker, even after the latter’s initial conviction, had long been established.

Heedlessly, Starmer and McSweeney pressed ahead anyway – even though installing Mandelson required going against the security services’ advice and breaking with civil service procedures in order to parachute a political appointee into a civil service role; and even though it courted the ire of the incoming Trump administration, which briefly threatened to reject Mandelson’s diplomatic credentials.

A game of “who in the government knew exactly what, and when” is now being played out with the press and opposition, with Labour politicians’ increasingly baroque reasoning for Mandelson’s appointment recalling Ronald Reagan’s quip, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” But all analyses of the Mandelson affair miss a fundamental point: what’s got Starmer in this mess is the arrogance and lack of judgment at the heart of his operation, coupled with his extraordinary reverse Midas touch. This week’s state visit by Trump, whose timing could hardly be worse, was another unnecessary hostage to fortune offered by Starmer, widely praised at the time by the lobby journalists, but the political bill for which must now be paid in full.

What’s Labour for?

On the present course, Starmer could be gone by Christmas. If he weren’t such an awful human being, one might almost pity him. But in each case, the damage has been largely self-inflicted.

A Labour party faction credited with strategic genius just a year ago has squandered its political capital at an unprecedented rate. Who now remembers the Mariana Mazzucato-inspired “missions”, or can say clearly what this government is for, other than a lash-up of grim raison d’état and the careerism of its own ministers?

The country already decisively rejected Starmer and Starmerism a while ago, but word is finally reaching the rarified precincts of the political class. Belatedly, there are stirrings of unrest amongst even the parliamentary Labour party, an army of briefcase drones handpicked by the Labour right for their cognitive and ideological uniformity and obedience.

Urgent questions are being raised, whispered briefings have begun; there are rumours of a return to Westminster of former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, king of the North. None of it will be enough.

The direction from here is clear: down, down, down. The last election wrecked the Conservative party; the next one will almost definitely destroy Labour. It will take more than a highly circumscribed deputy leadership contest or a half-hearted reboot of the soft left in the form of Burnham’s new grouping, “Mainstream” – far too little, too late.

Beyond personnel.

For all Starmer’s faults, the underlying causes of the government’s catastrophic failures run far deeper than him. A combination of a structural crisis that they are unable and unwilling to address, and political commitments – to an ideological forever war on the left, to an outdated Atlanticist foreign policy, to a City of London-led economic model of extractive financialisation – prevents any real change and locks the government into the failing status quo.

To break with continuing decline requires breaking with the fundamental tenets of the four-decades-old clapped-out elite consensus: privatisation, public austerity and chasing after rightwing populism. This wider conversation on Britain’s broken political economy is almost entirely missing, banished to the far reaches of the left following the establishment counterinsurgency against Corbynism.

Like some Melanesian cargo cult, today’s political class perform their regular incantations for economic growth with little understanding that no growth will come from the sky – or that, even if it should, it would be growth in the upwards financial extraction that is hardwired into our economic model.

Filling the vacuum.

Empty promises of a decade of national renewal are already yielding to the prospect of still another lost decade and the dangerous social dynamics that will attend it. This is Starmer’s true legacy, a giant doomsday machine installed at the heart of our politics, producing unending far-right backlash.

This weekend, upwards of 110,000 people marched through the streets of London for a Tommy Robinson-aligned “unite the kingdom” protest. The only question remaining is whether Farage’s Trumpist Reform party fills the breach in our politics left by Starmerism, or whether a re-emergent actual left – in the shape of Zack Polanski’s eco-populist Greens and the nascent left party of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana – can get organised in time to prevent this.

It’s hard to recall a period with higher stakes, or a greater mismatch between the enormous demands of the time and the vicious small-mindedness of the people who presently govern us.