For all of Keir Starmer’s undoubted abilities, steady nerve and top-level experience in the legal profession, his tenure as prime minister has been fraught with difficulty. This is no doubt partly due to his limited enthusiasm for the (at times banal) realities of political leadership.
It is also due to his reluctance to engage sufficiently with the details of important decisions. At key moments, he has chosen to look the other way and defer to others to execute.
The most recent and consequential example of this is the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington DC, which we now know was driven primarily by former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. A quick refresh on recent Labour party history should have been enough to deter this decision. Instead, Starmer outsourced political judgment to others. Now that it has backfired, he is attempting to deflect the blame for his own misjudgments, perhaps not realising – or not accepting – that the buck ultimately stops with him.
