The UK Government: A Crumbling Circus and the Curious Case of Keir Starmer
In the grand theatre of UK politics, the curtain rises on a epic tragicomedy. The government is crumbling faster than a soggy biscuit in a cup of tea, all eyes are on the star role: Keir Starmer.
Elected in 2024 on the back of the best Parliament return since the halcyon days of 2000s Blair Labour, Keir Starmer was in a strange position - both winning a supermajority in the House of Commons, and securing Labour’s worst popular vote return in an election in nearly a decade.
His own personal popularity seemed remarkably shaky: the people who knew him best seemingly turned away from him most in 2024 as he dropped nearly 20,000 votes from his performance in 2019, and brought the vote below 50% for Labour in the constituency for the first time since 2010.
Since then it truly feels like those nearly 40,000 voters in Holborn and St Pancras in 2024 were seeing the future, trying to save Sir Kier from the humiliation he was soon to face.
Elected on the back of 14 years of Tory rule, brought to Labour leadership on the back of the machinations of expert machievellian Morgan McSweeney, Kier was supposed to be the one who brought adult governance back to the UK. The adults were back in the room, but then it turned out they were just several kids stacked in a trenchcoat.
Over the past 18 months Starmer has gone from all time low to all time low. Officially the least popular Prime Minister in the recorded history of polled approval ratings, while leading the least popular government in those same records, he’s had to watch that fragile coalition he constructed in 2024 crumble completely. These days a poll where Labour finishes ahead of the Green party is something to celebrate.
But, at the same time, he can’t blame much more than him. It seems every decision he makes backfires. He’s blown up the left of his party, leading to mass resignations in the party membership (Labour only posts their membership totals once a year now to avoid the embarrassment) and the creation of a brand new political party formed around a former MP of his 2024 majority and his Labour leadership predecessor. He’s forced his party into voting for constant benefits caps, to scrap heating support for the elderly, and destroy disability support, and then u-turned over those same policies multiple times.
At the beginning of this year he was faced with yet another problem - that of his party potentially winning a by-election in a seat they’d won an outright majority in just 18 months prior. But in order to do so he would need to allow back into Parliament perhaps the only remaining popular Labour figure, Andy Burnham, assumed to be an upcoming challenger to Starmer’s Prime Minister position. So instead he personally lobbied to utilise a rule his party had effectively designed to block this specific challenge from Andy Burnham so that Burnham couldn’t even be put up for even a local party selection.
Now Starmer’s Labour appears 3rd in an area they’ve been largely in control of since the 1970s.
But all of this might have been survivable if Starmer weren’t simultaneously having to handle scandals like a child playing whack-a-mole at their birthday party. Incredibly, it all appears to have been remarkably avoidable. In 2024 Starmer made the shocking decision to name Lord Mandelson (a Labour party grandee who has defined the Labour right since the 1980s) as his ambassador to the United States. It was something that reeked of poor choices back when it first came out. Mandelson himself has been known as the “Prince of Darkness” for decades. He resigned 3 times due to scandals during the Labour governments of Blair and Brown.
Most importantly, his relationship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been public knowledge since the man was arrested back in 2019. Its almost as bad as if Starmer’s first demand upon becoming Prime Minister was for King Charles to abdicate and allow his sweatless brother to take the crown.
Then it the US DOJ released even more Epstein files, and Lord Mandelson was only on all the more of them. However, Starmer still wasn’t able to look decisive. It took Mandelson himself to exit the party, Starmer couldn’t even bring himself to expel the associate of pedophiles from his party. This is the same man who had his own predecessor kicked out of the party in around 30 minutes after he posted a facebook message he didn’t like.
Since then his position has only gotten more precarious. McSweeney as his chief of staff has decided to jump before being pushed - but if his machievellian ways are still as strong as ever he may well be right back in control in the party with his next puppet Wes Streeting. Even worse, the leader of Scottish Labour has come out and demanding Starmer step down as Prime Minister. Of course this is the same leader who is leading Labour into a 4th place finish in Scotland in this year’s Scottish Parliament elections, so maybe not the best judge.
Starmer has suddenly got support from a stange place though - Andy Burnham. In spite of his snubbing by Kier “The King in the North” has deigned to advise him to both stay in power, and to start governing like he was a Labour Prime Minister. Of course, Andy may well just be trying to keep Kier in power for however long it will take for him to finally get into parliament! Won’t want to be missing the bus will he? Especially as he’s already lost two Labour leadership contests before, would be even worse to not even get the chance to run for third time.
All of this leads us to ask - what will even happen now? Starmer seems to have proven a remarkable incompetence for leadership, so he may be just another few weeks from his next blunder, but regardless it seems he has survived this latest challenge. But with all this latest drama Labour looks to be in even worse shape for the May Local Elections. It’s looking likely that they could well prove to be an electoral wipeout on the level of the Tories back in 2023, when they lost over 1000 councillors and dozens of councils. Perhaps worst for Labour, they look likely to not just be destroyed by Reform as the surging far-right, both the Greens and Lib Dems seem well poised to sweep ahead of them putting Labour in the unprecedented position of no longer being the obvious alternative choice to the British right.
Come that May election it looks undeniable that Starmer will at the very least face the leadership challenge that has frankly been coming since last Autumn. Whether he stays and tries to fight it, as Jeremy Corbyn famously did and succeeded in 2016, or simply gives in to his undeniable unpopularity across the UK it seems inevitable that he will not make it to the end of this term of Parliament as leader of the Labour party.
Whether this latest moment has revealed to him that realigning to the side of the Burnham/Miliband soft left of the Labour party is advantageous as a group who have a major leadership vacuum in Parliament might be indicated by this latest ride of the valkyries by both soft left Labour leaders coming to his aid.
But, the man who spent the majority of his time in opposition focusing more on decimating his party’s left than the Conservatives may find it difficult to win much trust from that faction of the Labour party. Come June we will most likely be looking at the coronation of Wes Streeting as Labour leader... but thankfully he doesn’t have even worse ties to Mandelson and Epstein... right?
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