In July 2024, Labor won a landslide general election victory after 14 years in the political wilderness. However, it took less than 24 months for the British government to dismantle itself.
Keir Starmer on Monday announced plans to step down as leader after just two years in office, despite the party having promised to end the turmoil at the top during the Conservative era. If his successor is chosen, he will become Britain’s seventh prime minister in 10 years.
In less than two years, Mr Starmer led Labor to its biggest parliamentary majority in a century and inflicted its worst defeat on the Conservative Party in its history. But the British public quickly became dissatisfied with Starmer after they elected him. He worked through the scrapes for a few months, but eventually the pressure to quit became too much to bear. Mr Starmer left office as the least popular Prime Minister in history.
But why things went so wrong so quickly in Britain is baffling. Unlike his predecessors, Starmer did not engage in a nasty foreign war, fail to respond to a pandemic, or collapse the economy. His failures were more mundane. He tried to make wealthy pensioners pay more to heat their homes. A plan to cut some benefits for people with disabilities. Receive a prize. And in recent months there has been a scandal surrounding the appointment of Peter Mandelson, a politician with ties to Jeffrey Epstein, as British ambassador to Washington.
Policy failures alone do not explain Starmer’s downfall. There are two other obvious factors. The first is his legacy. When Starmer took office, Britain was exhausted by the Conservative Party’s austerity policies. This decade of cost-cutting was aimed at reducing Britain’s debt and helping it recover after the 2008 financial crisis, but it has failed on both counts: the debt has ballooned and economic growth has slumped ever since.
Britons were tired of stagnation, longing for better times and hoping Labor would provide them. When the last Labor government took office in 1997, D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ became the soundtrack, riding a wave of optimism. Starmer said in a different tone. In his first major speech as Prime Minister, he told the nation it would take years to repair Britain’s foundations and that “things will get worse before they get better”. After Boris Johnson’s cake-and-eat-it-all as prime minister, some thought Britain was ready to accept the hard truth and forgive Starmer’s disastrous inheritance. they misunderstood.
The second reason for Starmer’s downfall is more personal. He was unable to come up with a political philosophy that could be easily expressed. Lacking the narrative cohesion that held the governance project together, many of Labour’s decisions appeared arbitrary. Starmer struggled in part because “Starmerism” did not exist.
Starmer intended to uphold due process instead of big-picture political ideas. He entered politics in 2015 after an illustrious career in human rights law and becoming the National Director of Public Prosecutions. He served in the shadow cabinet of Labor’s far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn. After a crushing defeat in the 2019 general election, Mr Starmer was chosen to succeed Mr Corbyn, seen as a safer alternative following Labour’s longstanding radicalism.
By contrast, Mr Starmer’s cross-examination skills helped him corner three Tory prime ministers at the dispatch box. Mr Starmer has increasingly been tipped to be the next prime minister after sparking public anger over “partygate”, in which Tory MPs ignored their own laws regarding the coronavirus lockdown.
But the closer Labor got to government, the more cautious it became. Even when opinion polls were predicting a landslide victory before July 2024, Labor pursued a “vessel of Ming” strategy, acting as if one wrong move could erode its overwhelming poll lead. Wanting to appear as non-threatening as possible, they suppressed their government ambitions and refused to dream big.
That cautiousness came at a price. Anticipating a crushing defeat, the Conservatives announced sweeping tax cuts before the election, but expected that Labor would have to implement them after taking office, given Britain’s fiscal woes. Instead, Mr Starmer ruled out increasing the three main sources of tax, including income tax, as he wanted to avoid renewing Labour’s “tax hiker” image.
Labor has avoided the opportunity to talk positively about the need to raise taxes to repair Britain’s public services, which have been destroyed by years of Tory austerity. This decision was taken in response to opposition and became a straitjacket for the Labor Party in government. The party needed to raise taxes from its small and fragile financial resources.
Shortly after taking office, Labor announced that it would cut some disability benefits and scrap the universal grant to help older people pay for their winter heating bills. Both plans were withdrawn after backlash. To left-wing voters, Labor appeared indifferent. Financial markets seemed unwilling to make tough decisions.
If the government’s economic policy appears to be rudderless, so too is its stance on immigration. Starmer announced early on that Reform Britain was Labour’s main electoral threat, pushing the upstart far-right party, which won just five seats in parliament, into the de facto opposition party in the 2024 election. Labor then spent months trying to stem the growth of reformers by appealing to right-wing voters with tougher rhetoric and immigration policies.
This strategy backfired. Labor alienated progressive voters, many of whom flocked to the Lib Dems and Greens, but the Reformers surged in the polls. Mr Starmer’s subsequent attempts to soften his stance on immigration seemed inauthentic.
His government was also roiled by scandal. Mr Starmer was criticized after it emerged he had accepted the most freebies of any former MP, including tickets to a Taylor Swift concert and an Arsenal match. The scandal might not have been so damaging if Starmer hadn’t portrayed himself as a process man keeping everything in order after years of being perceived as Tory nepotism.
But the most damaging scandal arose over Mr Starmer’s decision to appoint Mr Mandelson to the role of plum ambassador to Washington, despite the veteran Labor politician’s well-known links to pedophile Mr Epstein. Mr Starmer sacked Mr Mandelson in September, but the revelations led to months of scrutiny over whether security services deemed Mr Mandelson suitable as one of Britain’s top diplomats and what he knew.
After all, the leaders who were supposed to uphold due process were ousted by the government’s failure to do so. The party’s crushing defeat in local elections in May only underscored the rock bottom of his government’s popularity, and set off a slow-motion leadership race to replace him.
When leadership candidate Andy Burnham won a landslide victory over his reformist rival in a by-election last week, winning a seat in Parliament and being given the chance to mount a challenge, it became clear that Starmer’s days in Downing Street were numbered. Other Labor leaders may also enter the race, with a new leader expected to be in place by the time the new parliament begins in September.
Starmer’s mistakes might have been forgiven if he had been more charismatic, or had a bolder government plan. But he began to resemble a manager, believing that Britain’s problems could be solved by mere tinkering rather than fundamental change.
Instead of a clear vision, Mr Starmer promised hard, grueling work to “root out 14 years of corruption”. He will repair Britain’s strained relations with Europe after painful Brexit negotiations and improve relations with China, which entered an “ice age” under the Conservative government. He will reduce NHS waiting lists, build new homes and cut people’s bills. It won’t happen overnight, he warned. But the country wanted faster results.
When he announced his resignation outside No. 10 Downing Street, Starmer insisted he was leaving his party and Britain in better shape than when he took office.
But he admitted there were questions about whether he was best placed to lead Labor into the next general election.
“I have heard my party’s answer to that question and I respectfully accept that answer,” he said. “Every decision I have made has been to put the country I love first, which is why I am stepping down as Labor leader.”
The impression Starmer leaves is of someone who could have been a prime minister in the 20th century, when much was done behind closed doors and government was conducted quietly. But in his own time, he was less patient, more visual, and struggling.
