Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation speech on Monday was a list of declared successes, with all the signs of being hurriedly written in a bad mood — staccato sentences and a stiff list of boasts of everything that had gone right — just as it had all gone so spectacularly wrong. “Welcome to the Job Centre, Keir” was the heartless poster waved by a protester outside the No 10 gates as the PM bowed out after less than two years in the job. He has, as an old friend from his legal days put it to me last night, “Just completely blown it. He is a smart guy and an honest man, and I still do not entirely understand why he could not grip the job.”
Starmer sees this very differently. He highlighted supporting Ukraine, raising defence spending, ensuring renters’ and workers’ rights, tackling immigration numbers and “lifting half a million children out of poverty” by removing the two-child benefit cap as his legacy. He had, he insisted, turned around a Labour Party he inherited in 2020, as “politically, financially and morally bankrupt”, and taken it to power with a huge majority.
