‘Starmer: A historical perspective’

Now Keir Starmer has announced his resignation, and begins to enter history, we can start to place his leadership of the Labour party and the country into some kind of perspective.

Measured in a certain way, Starmer is one of the most successful of Labour’s leaders. Just winning a Commons majority in 2024 puts him streets ahead of all but three predecessors; moreover at 174 seats the size of that majority is only bested by Tony Blair.

What makes Starmer’s achievement even more remarkable is that it came after Jeremy Corbyn’s drubbing at the hands of Boris Johnson. It was widely believed Brexit had created an electoral realignment to the advantage of the Conservatives who many predicted would remain in office for a generation. Few thought Starmer, when elected to replace Corbyn in 2020, would ever become Prime Minister; that he would instead play a role like that of Neil Kinnock who spent nine years transforming the party after 1983 only for Blair to reap the reward. Despite initially promising more continuity than change, Starmer turned Labour away from Corbyn’s radical commitments and chased the former leader and many of his supporters out of the party.

Even so, Starmer’s huge 2024 majority was deceptive, being based on only 33.7 per cent of votes cast: if Labour won 211 more seats than in 2019 it did so with just a 1.4 per cent bigger share. In terms of mobilising popular support therefore Starmer looks a much less striking figure, especially when one considers how desperate many were to be rid of the Conservatives who by then had squandered their Brexit advantage. Indeed, Labour’s vote share was below that of any other majority governing party in the modern era. That this shallow triumph was followed, once Starmer became Prime Minister, by an unprecedented collapse in support to just 17 per cent in the May 2026 local elections,only compounds such an impression.

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The 2024 election victory, undeniably Starmer’s greatest achievement, was then paradoxical, one whose causes and consequences (and his own contribution to both) will likely be the subject of much debate in the future.

Some might argue Starmer’s modest 2024 support and its disintegration was largely out of his hands and that he faced problems unlike those of his predecessors. He inherited an ailing economy, one suffering the combined results of austerity, Brexit, Covid and the Ukraine war. Government debt was huge so the scope to borrow and invest in collapsing public services was severely limited especially given, thanks to a prolonged stagnation of living standards, there was little public appetite for tax increases.

Starmer also operated in a uniquely fluid electoral landscape in which voters were alienated from old party loyalties, where age and education rather than class created new affiliations, especially support for populist parties. The impact of these changes was, moreover, turbo-charged by the traditional media and social media platforms embracing what amounted to a far-right politics of nihilism.

How far Starmer was the prisoner of structural factors over which he had little control is however something others would challenge. For, under the tutelage of Morgan MacSweeney – the main architect of Labour strategy during this period – the party deliberately sought less to engage with these difficult new realities and more to restore a lost politics. It was this approach – and its demonstrable failure – which mostly explains the truncated nature of Starmer’s premiership.

Most Britons were never sure what Starmer stood for, partly because he was a poor communicator, but he had a clear objective as leader and Prime Minister. He wanted to return the country to the time before populism and so to the world prior to the 2008 international financial crisis, austerity and Brexit to what he considered ‘normal’ politics. To that end he sought to recreate Labour as the party of the pre-Brexit working class, which many older, white and less educated proletarians supported, especially by emphasising his commitment to reducing immigration.

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But such voters had no desire to return to Labour. He could not satisfy their visceral dislike of immigration, something revealed by the 2024 result and confirmed even as his government oversaw a significant decline in numbers while it introduced harsh measures to deter refugees entering Britain. Unfortunately for him, instead of gaining votes, Labour lost many of their 2024 voters dismayed by this approach. And yet he persisted with this approach until the end.

Starmer’s other – and most critical objective – was to promote higher economic growth, notably through investment in green industries. This involved granting a greater role to the state to direct resources to neglected parts of the country and make good the depredations inflicted first by Margaret Thatcher and then those governments which followed in her neo-liberal footsteps. Many of these radical plans were however reined in during the run-up to the 2024 election confirming Starmer’s deep-set caution, Put together with the impact of Donald Trump’s erratic policies Britain looks set to remain a low growth economy for years to come. Significantly, the one measure many economists believed would bolster growth – reversing Brexit – was something Starmer refused to countenance.

Starmer campaigned in 2024 promising ‘Change’ but so far as most voters were concerned, he has delivered too little of it. Some would argue that was because he was not given enough time, others that he was simply too conservative, that he was simply inadequate to the moment in which he came to lead his party and country, that he neither had the actions and certainly not the words to challenge an increasingly visceral popular mistrust of the kind of ‘normal’ politics to which he wanted the country to return – if that was even possible.

Most significant political figures go through reputational transformations: many of those seen as successful at the moment they depart the stage are eventually held up to opprobrium. For others, those viewed by contemporaries as failures, who later may see be seen in a more positive light. Ramsay MacDonald, once the great betrayer, is now viewed as having achieved some modest but important reforms; Clement Attlee, now regarded as a kind of secular saint was, for many years after his retirement, thought to have lost the plot in office; and Harold Wilson, who resigned amidst accusations of corruption and lack of principle, is now praised for avoiding British entanglement in the Vietnam war and as the architect of the Open University.

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So, assessing Starmer as a historical figure when he has only just announced his resignation is perhaps something a ‘fool’s errand’. In the end, how historians of the future see him depends on what happens next. Will Starmer’s successor chart a successful new course for the government, dish the populists and secure re-election or will they be overwhelmed by the same problems that faced Starmer? Over to you … Andy Burnham.

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