What a strange, sad little spectacle in the Commons. Keir Starmer’s last PMQs had a lilting, melancholic tone, a mournful background hum. It was all terribly good humoured and gentlemanly. But underneath the mannered speeches there was a sense of tragedy and waste, of a historic squandered opportunity.
This was supposed to be the man who saved the country from decline and political squalor. But he proved utterly ill-suited to the task.
Kemi Badenoch did her best impression of emotional normality. She knew that now was the time to appear generous and sanguine, not partisan or gloating. So she pretended, for a full 10-15 minutes, to be a fully-functioning human being, complete with empathy and a capacity for abstract thought.
At one point she even dedicated a question to the Prime Minister’s family. “I hope he will allow me to draw our time together to a close by thanking them for the love and support they have given him throughout his time in office,” she said, looking like a cat trying to cough up a furball, every fibre of her being rejecting the pleasant words which had to come from her mouth.
She was unable to maintain the act for long. “Life comes at you fast,” she blurted out at one point, her shoulders dropping with relief at no longer having to impersonate a well-rounded human being. “He spent a long time laughing that I’d lost control of my party. I think he should have been paying attention to his backbenchers instead of mine.”
Ah, there she was. The real Badenoch. Spiteful and petty and implacably tribal. The real personality broke out of the strained facade, grasped for breath, then was forcibly submerged again, so she could issue some more half-hearted platitudes.
Starmer’s response to all this was wooden and evasive, because that is his default setting. He bounced from whatever question she asked to a pre-prepared tour of policy accomplishments. His team has placed select members of the public in the Commons gallery so he could allude to them, each representing some sort of supposed political success.
And there are, to be clear, some respectable accomplishments for him to point to. The government was right to prioritise Net Zero and housebuilding. It did valuable work on child poverty. It correctly opened up the fiscal rules to allow investment. Some of the pre-Iran fall in inflation was probably due to its actions.
The biggest accomplishment was in foreign affairs, where Starmer spent most of his time. He deserves genuine commendation for pursuing a Coalition of the Willing when the US relinquished its leadership role. Yesterday, French President Emmanuel Macron, who had been in the trenches with Starmer, made him the first serving British prime minister to be awarded France’s top honour, the Legion d’honneur.
Starmer held the line for Ukraine and for the Western rules-based liberal world order, as America declined into tin-pot demagoguery. He did not do this alone. He did it alongside Macron, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Canadian president Mark Carney and German chancellor Friedrich Merz. But he was the chief author of these efforts.
He took the lead in putting together a patchwork of informal institutions on an ad-hoc basis in response to America’s moral and ideological collapse. It was not a startling achievement – more of a damage limitation exercise than anything else. It was also not the kind of thing which wins an election. But the world would be a much worse place if he had not done it.
It was good. It was commendable. It was crucial. And it was nowhere near enough.
The ultimate problem with the Prime Minister’s list of accomplishments is that he had so few. He spent his time in Downing Street stranded between a communication failure and a delivery failure, refusing to provide either poetry or prose. He functioned as neither a charismatic leader nor a technocrat. His skills, insofar as they existed, were ill-suited for the role.
In the end, it turned out he ultimately just wasn’t that interested in politics, or policy, or parliament, or government, or the Labour party. In fact, it became hard to work out why he wanted the role in the first place.
There was therefore very little for him to point to. That’s the horrible truth of it, the great despairing vortex at the centre of proceedings. He just hadn’t got much done.
He’d been sucked into the shallow strategic hyper-brain froth of the Westminster machine, constantly positioning himself to win the next election, constantly fighting a rearguard defence against some emergency or other, and he never really knuckled down and set up the kind of operation which might provide real change in people’s lives.
Starmer came to power with a historic majority when everything was at stake: the viability of the mainstream political system, the battle against populism, the fragile promise that democracy works. He promised to be a serious man for serious times. But he frittered it away.
Nothing could define that failure better than his final policy flourish, a pledge to impose a bedtime social media curfew so that teens could get “the sleep they need”.
Social media is being used to radicalise whole swathes of the population, seduce men into hating women and coordinate far-right riots. It allows impossible rich men in Silicon Valley to mutilate Britain’s social discourse and its civic society. It requires deep thought and radical action. Instead, we got exactly the kind of half-hearted work-the-details-out-later blather which defined Starmer’s time in office: attention-grabbing, superficial, ineffective, inane.
What an utter failure, with that big a mandate, to spend your time fiddling around as the country burns. What a terrible wasted opportunity. What a tragic, sorrowful result for a man who so many people placed their hopes in.
These were terrible wasted years and his administration was an abject failure. That’s the rotten truth of it. And no forced Commons politeness could hide that fact.
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