Good morning.
In our magazine this week, I have written about Keir Starmer and what will come after him. You can read the piece here. If you’re not subscribed, you can have £2 for two months here.
Over the past decade, no prime minister has served more than three years in power. None has left any deep legacy, aside from Boris Johnson who will always be remembered for taking Britain out of the EU, even if that was the consequence of a referendum called by someone else. Keir Starmer is far from the most disastrous of this bunch of prime ministers, nor is he the shortest-serving. But of all of them, it is he who already seems the most non-existent; the most ghostly in his presence, somehow still there and already not.
Here is a man who has been part of our public life for almost 20 years, rising to the top only to be removed in a carefully orchestrated coup that, in normal circumstances, would be a moment of explosive drama and repercussion. And yet, instead, Starmer departs the public stage in a scene of deep, tepid bathos, with no obvious emotional reaction either personally, politically or even nationally. He leaves behind no band of vengeful loyalists or uncontrollable swells of rancour. The country appears to have shrugged and moved on. And so, the Prime Minister departs as he served, removed and distant, a foreigner to politics, forgotten before he has even left.
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Couldn't agree less. There is a storm of people on social media appalled by the way Starmer has been treated, not least by the press, who think he has brought in a number of excellent and effective policies, and has been a strong and steady leader after a fluff of lightweights.
Starmar was never cut out to be PM.and lacked all of the qualities that make a Leader.
He practically destroyed the LP single handedly by his persecution of Corbyn and the Left, and this fiction that the Party is antisemitic. It is not.
If he had continued then he would have handed the next Election to the Farage and the Extreme Right Reform on a plate.
He will go down in history as the Great Appeaser as not having the guts to stand up to Trump and his disgraceful Republicans.
Let's hope Burnham remembers the Real Values and Principles of Labour and all that we have achieved in the past.