Keir Starmer didn’t flinch over farmers or Mandelson – but one thing finished him off
Sir Keir Starmer didn’t flinch when he betrayed farmers, installed Mandelson or broke his tax promise – but one thing finally finished him off.
Starmer’s resignation speech outside No10 (Image: Getty)
Resignation speeches can be one of two things: a noble farewell, or an unmasking. Sir Keir Starmer’s, delivered outside Downing Street this morning, was unmistakably the latter. The occupant of No 10 was vacating, he told us, because his party had made clear that he was not the man to lead them into the next General Election.
In itself, that statement damns him, and the party he once led. This entire miserable affair is an act of lefty navel-gazing being done at our expense. No amount of emotion at the podium can disguise the plain truth, which is that Sir Keir has fallen not because the country has turned against him, but because his own side is petrified and smells blood.
Perhaps, as a fair-minded observer, we can grant him one thing – Sir Keir is entitled to leave with as much dignity as he can muster.
Yet dignity is not the same as honour, and the timing of this regicide tells its own story.
The English have always had a taste for it. We removed the head of Charles I one cold January morning in 1649, and we have been quietly disposing of inconvenient leaders, by axe, by ballot or by the whispered word in the corridor, ever since.
The Romans had their Ides of March; Labour has its Makerfield.
We must consider what did not move him.
He was not moved when he betrayed the farmers of this country with a tax that would break up holdings tended for generations.
He was not moved when he installed Lord Mandelson, of all men, in Washington against every warning placed before him.
He was not moved when he broke the most solemn promise of his manifesto and raised taxes on the working people he claimed to champion.
Through all of it, he stood firm, his jaw firmly set as he stoically insisted he would not err from his path.
And now, over none of these things, he goes.
Starmer makes for the door because his own side calculated that he could not beat Nigel Farage, and that Mr Burnham might.
Burnham eyes Downing Street curtains at last (Image: Daily Express)
This grubby process has been conducted for the good of the Labour Party, and not for the good of the nation it pretends to govern.
We must only look at the photographs of the victor these past few days – the King in the North beaming from ear to ear, wearing the contented smirk of a man who has been sizing up the Downing Street curtains for a decade and has at last been handed the tape measure.
Will what follows see us to a brighter tomorrow?
We simply do not know. Nobody, least of all those anointing him, can say what a Burnham government would actually do, beyond more of the same, delivered in a warmer accent.
The faces change and yet the pace of managed decline does not.
Sir Keir came to power promising to put the country first and now he departs having proved, one final time, that he only ever put his party first.
It is a fitting epitaph for a premiership that asked the British people to trust it, and squandered that trust at every turn.
