FlyTheNest

I will also give my successor my full and unequivocal support, knowing that they will inherit a Britain that is far stronger and fairer than the one I inherited two years ago, better prepared for the challenges ahead and better able to ensure the Labour party secures a second term in office.

I was asked on a US podcast once what Starmer was like and I quoted Thomas Carlyle on John Taylor: “An innocent dull good man”. This was what we thought we were getting. This is what we needed.

In the end he really wasn’t any of those things. He was scheming and Machiavellian. He was really quite shockingly chaotic. And anything that was good in him seemed to fade away entirely. His morality collapsed alongside his popularity.

People will say that he accomplished nothing. That is false. First, he extracted the poison of Corbynism from the Labour party. This ruinous fever dream stoked hatred against Jews and turned the opposition into an unelectable jumble sale of mad bullshit, thereby allowing the Conservative government to also degenerate into ever more extreme positions. It was a leadership cult for a moron. It had to be killed.

Starmer managed to turn 2019’s historic election defeat into 2024’s historic election victory. It is easy now, in retrospect, for people to insist that anyone could have done it. They couldn’t. Others would have struggled to combine a sense of possibility with a minimisation of threat. Many of the decisions taken in this period would later turn out to be ruinous. But that does not negate Starmer’s victory. He was the man who got rid of the Tories after 14 years of self-harm and decline.

His accomplishments in power are limited but consequential. The new fiscal rules reopened an avenue for government to borrow for infrastructure investment. Plenty of other errors were made in that first Budget, but that core decision was one which defined the government’s growth agenda. Incredibly, it has rarely bothered to state it out loud, but it is there nonetheless: Borrow to invest. This is the correct approach and it is telling that people rarely raise an objection to it.

Even in government, Starmer’s intellectual focus was on electoral strategy rather than policy substance. This was a kind of witless giddiness to the whole endeavour, a lack of ballast, like a balloon floating into the air. It was painfully obvious that conversations in Downing Street concerned how something would play electorally, rather than what they would do for the country.

Take the reforms to indefinite leave to remain. These plans make it almost impossible to integrate immigrants into the community. They exclude people who are here legally, in many cases for well over a decade.

Ignore the moral element. Who does that actually help? What problem does it solve? Which issue is it supposed to address? None. But then that was not the function. The function was to appeal to Reform voters. Decades from now, someone will be suffering as a result of these changes and no-one will really remember why they were even introduced or what the purpose was.

Take the reforms to indefinite leave to remain. These plans make it almost impossible to integrate immigrants into the community. They exclude people who are here legally, in many cases for well over a decade.

Ignore the moral element. Who does that actually help? What problem does it solve? Which issue is it supposed to address? None. But then that was not the function. The function was to appeal to Reform voters. Decades from now, someone will be suffering as a result of these changes and no-one will really remember why they were even introduced or what the purpose was.

For those who've spent the day celebrating the Prime Minister, demanding we respect the human frailties of a hard-done-to public servant, of Starmer's cracking voice as he struggled through the last few lines of his speech, there's a straightforward reply. Where was his respect and sympathy for the protestors ruthlessly designated as terrorists, for the refugees and trans people he's kicked up and down the country like political footballs, for the disabled people he terrified by threatening them with destitution, with the Palestinians whose genocide he abetted and publicly justified?