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Chapter 1: How did Keir Starmer's victory lead to his resignation?
Today, a farewell to Keir Starmer, Britain's sixth Prime Minister in just under a decade.
We did it! You campaigned for it, you fought for it, you voted for it, and now it has arrived. Change begins now.
When the former human rights lawyer, full of ambition, won by a landslide in the 2024 general election, hope was in the air.
Yeah, excited for something to happen, I think. I think the country needs it. So since the Labour Party is in power now, I think the country will be more better in terms of job, in terms of safety. I think they've got sensible policies. I feel like having competent adults in the room again is going to be a big help.
So Kia Starmer had arrived on a promise to repair 14 years of Conservative damage. Just two years later, with anger and disappointment swelling across the country, he's been forcibly ejected from the job. He's a decent man, we're told repeatedly. But he's the most disliked prime minister since modern polling began.
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Chapter 2: What were the early expectations of Starmer's leadership?
As Starmer stepped out to the lectern outside Downing Street, he certainly looked the part. Elegant grey suit, immaculately slicked sidequiff, and the dignified gravitas you'd expect from a prime minister.
Thank you. Walking up this street two years ago was the proudest moment of my life. A new Labour government, the first in 14 years.
But he just couldn't deliver. It was an emotional departure. Whatever your political opinions, it was a sad moment.
And when I leave the biggest job in the country, I shall spend more time on the most important job, being the best husband I can to my fantastic wife, Vic, who has been a rock by my side through good times and bad, and being the best dad I can to my beautiful children, who are my pride and my joy. Thank you very much.
How did it all go so wrong? And will Labour now convince voters that things can only get better? From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, will losing Keir Starmer reboot Labour? Raf Baer, welcome back to Today in Focus.
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Chapter 3: What factors contributed to Starmer's unpopularity?
Now, you have been a political columnist for The Guardian for well over a decade. And in that time, we've seen six prime ministers. Is that unprecedented in British history? And how is your whiplash?
In the whole of British history, as far as I'm aware, it's not entirely unprecedented. I must say this isn't my speciality, but I believe in the 1760s, there was a period of great turbulence. And I read that Between 1827 and 1837, there was a 10-year period where there was a lot of chopping and changing.
But no, I mean, obviously, the last seven or eight years in particular have felt extraordinarily febrile. And I think the measure of that is the sense that that point where the lectern is brought out and put in front of Downing Street and the prime minister steps up and makes one of these resignation statements, as we've seen this morning,
has started to feel like a regular ritual in British politics. Everyone knows the routine, everyone even recognises the people who come and install the lectern.
This guy here, I've seen him come out and do the testing of the microphones umpteen times over the last few years. He probably never thought that when he got that job that he would be doing it quite so regularly.
I think he's known on the internet as Hot Podium Guy, John.
So that in itself is just a measure of... quite how narrow, how short-wave the cycle has become.
Well, let's look at some of those very recent outings of the lectern, as it were. I mean, how did Keir Starmer's speech go down? What did you make of it?
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Chapter 4: How did Starmer's emotional departure impact public perception?
Because it felt like quite an unusual atmosphere on Downing Street. Like, he walked out and there was a lot of whooping and clapping and cheering. And, of course, yeah, it was a very sombre statement.
Thank you.
To an extent, it was quite standard and boilerplate in the way of these things. I think most people want to give a resigning prime minister an element of dignity and to give them the opportunity to say what they want to say. And he said the sorts of things you'd expect a prime minister to say, which is, I was elected to do certain things.
I've actually achieved quite a lot, open brackets, a lot more than you people seem to think, close brackets. The inevitable concession where you say, although, open brackets, I think I could have carried on and actually would have been much better at this. And you realise, close brackets, it appears that I can't.
The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election.
He did that with a lot more dignity than, for example, Boris Johnson, who, when he did his resignation speech, effectively said, well, you're all just sheep and you're following a media herd. And frankly, this is a terrible mistake, but so do you.
The baton will be handed over in what has unexpectedly turned out to be a relay race. They changed the rules halfway through, but never mind that now.
All for that matter, David Cameron, who ambled back into number 10 whistling a happy tune to himself, which felt vastly inappropriate for the gravity of the moment.
Right.
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Chapter 5: What were the significant missteps during Starmer's premiership?
You could hear the tears, really.
Absolutely. And given that... One of the criticisms of Keir Starmer has been the lack of emotional connection, the fact that he can come across as stiff and robotic. I just think for him to have showed that amount of emotion at that moment was setting aside the politics of it, I thought very poignant.
Well, Raph, if you try to zoom out and look at this situation that we've got in Britain, this sort of sense of political perma-crisis, what, you know, would be described as systemic volatility and chaos, were it anywhere else, you know, how do you make sense of and explain Keir Starmer winning this massive landslide just two years ago?
Keir Starmer heads to the palace to become the new prime minister with a forecast majority now of 176.
I believe the third biggest in Labour's history to being so unpopular that he's effectively been booted out.
It is extraordinary when you look at it, you think the UK constitution is such that a prime minister with a majority of 160, 170 can do more or less whatever he wants. And so I think the big picture answer to the question, well, why didn't he do that? Why didn't he exercise that power? Why didn't he dominate British politics?
I mean, it feels like such a waste.
And the answer is you can use those powers, that constitutional opportunity is available to you if you know exactly what you want to do. And I think that is where it really unraveled, the sense that he came in thinking that ultimately someone who had a good sense of duty, civic obligation, a heart in the right place, not a chaotic, wicked Tory would bring a kind of...
ethics and pragmatism to the job would necessarily succeed because everything that had gone wrong before was a function of just the wrong people being the job.
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Chapter 6: How did the Labour Party's internal dynamics affect Starmer?
He's a showman with nothing left to show. He's a trickster.
And it just wasn't enough. The tough job of prime minister involves making really hard political choices. And he didn't have, it seems, that clear sense of what his political destination was, that when he was confronted with a problem that couldn't just be solved by the way he had when he was a DPP, Director of Public Prosecutions, when he was a barrister, you could just look at the evidence and
stare at the problem hard enough and the solution would present itself to you. That doesn't work when you're prime minister. There are sort of insoluble problems and you just have to make a hard political choice. What are you going to spend the money on? If you haven't got the money, who are you going to take the money away from? All those things. And that was deficient.
He just didn't have the heuristics, the political ideological compass inside himself to to say, OK, this is a really hard choice. I'm going to have to really annoy some people here. But ultimately, I know where I'm going with this and I'm going to make the case and I'm going to stick with it. And he looked like he was adrift within months, really.
So if you were conducting a post-mortem on this premiership, where did things start to go wrong?
The original sin was very possibly, and I would say probably, fighting the general election on a manifesto that meant you tied your hands on promising not to raise revenue from income tax, VAT, or national insurance.
What, so doomed before you even started?
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Chapter 7: What achievements did Starmer accomplish during his time in office?
Not necessarily doomed, but if you come into office wearing a straitjacket, it's pretty hard to grab the levers of power and steer effectively. And a lot of people, MPs, ministers, who supported that manifesto and thought it was the right political judgment at the time, will now privately say... In hindsight, that was a mistake.
We should have had the guts to make an argument for a more radical tax agenda that would have at least given us some kind of capacity to do some of the hard things. Because once you've made that choice, you're then locked into finding money down the side of the treasury sofa here and there. And then you get into things like taking money from winter fuel payments.
changes to inheritance tax for farmers, not paying the WASPI compensation, whatever it is, you're desperately trying to get little pots.
And the political costs you pay for that, just basically annoying each little constituency here and there, rather than just doing some big, broad, bold tax change, really meant that the authority of the government was just dissolving day after day after day, and they weren't even making that much money out of it. So that, I think, is structurally, in hindsight, a terrible mistake that was made.
I mean, there were so many missteps very early on. Stories about the freebies, getting the concert tickets, the suits, the posh glasses.
The truth is that successive prime ministers, unless you're a billionaire like the last one, do rely on donations, political donations, so they can look their best, both in the hope of representing the country, if you're in the opposition, or indeed as prime minister. That's the situation.
These are the sorts of things that they were embarrassing, but a more able communicator or someone with good political antennae could have jumped on top of it really early on.
And I think a lot of people would say, you know, in the garden of number 10 Downing Street, the big speech saying, by the way, this is going to be really painful and horrible and it's going to hurt and things aren't going to be better for a long time. Which is a reasonable thing to do if you want a mandate to make hard choices.
But, and this is a crucial thing, without having the final paragraph that says, but I promise you it'll be worth it because this is what you'll get at the end of it. This is what we're working towards. This is the country we're going to be. And I think Starmer probably thinks he tried to do some of that, but it is just not a gear that he could ever really get into.
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Chapter 8: What does the future hold for the Labour Party after Starmer?
Selling hope effectively. Yeah.
Yeah. And if we're talking about why MPs lost confidence in Keir Starmer, I think the point at which the parliamentary party was really lost was the welfare rebellion. And there was an available audience in the parliamentary party for reforming the benefits system. A more gifted political leader could have navigated that.
But what happened was that together, the prime minister and the chancellor realized that they had about 10 billion missing in fiscal headroom. And lo and behold, they said, well, by extraordinary lucky coincidence, there's 10 billion in savings that you can make from the welfare budget. And we're not just taking money away from disabled people. And no one bought it. And it was just not credible.
And so rather than making a case for benefit changes online, as part of a social reform. They essentially said, we're going to take money from some people to fill a fiscal black hole. And then when lots and lots of Labour MPs who didn't come into Parliament to say, actually, we want to take money away from disabled people, said, you're going about this completely the wrong way.
Number 10 just said, well, you're all basically predictable lefties. You don't get it. Shut up. Do what you're told.
I am now one of the only visible, physically disabled members of Parliament. I am proud that our manifesto committed to championing the rights of disabled...
It was just such a misjudgment of the presentation of it, the mood, who the people were who were worried about this, why they were worried about it. And he just lost the parliamentary party over that and never really got it back.
And to add to all of those obvious missteps, it feels like the political climate was changing around them and they were bleeding votes to the left, to the right, and they just kind of struggled to respond to that.
Yeah, it was bad enough when people started to think, well, you know, we're losing a lot of vote share to reform and Nigel Farage is insurgent and this is damaging. And then they start to see also coming from their left flank, the green surging. And if you're an MP facing a green challenge, you think, well, Why aren't we the leading progressive party in this country?
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