The Prime Minister is living on borrowed time. I can’t see how he survives the year ahead.
Sir Keir Starmer isn’t up to the job but he’s the best Labour’s got (Image: Getty)
Keir Starmer truly is a hapless figure. It says terrible things about our establishment that a man of such limited talents was appointed head of the Crown Prosecution Service and Director of Public Prosecutions, two very impressive-sounding jobs. And it says even worse things about British politics that he then went on to become Prime Minister. Have we really fallen this far?
Well, yes. Today, it’s par for the course. Starmer’s immediate predecessors were calamitous too. Liz Truss, anyone? Nobody with real talent goes into politics today. We’re left with chancers, egotists and the downright deluded. Starmer may be scraping the bottom, but that doesn’t mean things will improve when he goes.
As PM, Starmer is supposed to put his country first. That’s what leaders are elected to do. Yet it always comes last.
His first major foreign policy act was to sell out the Chagos Islands, a move set to cost us a staggering £35billion. Now he’s expressed “delight” at the release of an Egyptian political prisoner who’s previously tweeted: “I am racist, I don’t like white people”.
That’s a strange thing for a British PM to be “delighted” about.
If I were PM, I’d express delight if I’d boosted economic growth, cut energy bills, slashed unemployment or something else that actually benefited the country.
Not because I’d engineered the release of yet another anti-Zionist. It’s not as though we have a shortage of them. Imagine how thrilled Starmer will be if ISIS bride Shamima Begum returns too.
It says everything about Starmer’s warped priorities. And he still wonders why he’s the most unpopular PM in modern history. But here’s the strangest thing about Starmer’s blighted rule.
He’s by far the most left-wing Labour leader of my lifetime. Taxes, borrowing and spending are at record highs, woke posturing is off the charts, and Angela Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill is about to hand unions more power than they’ve had since the 1970s.
You’d think party activists, hard-left MPs and the unions would love him for it. Instead, they want him out.
Unite boss Sharon Graham is gunning for Starmer, not because he’s too radical, but because he isn’t radical enough. She’s even floated a historic split from Labour, proving an old truth: the more you give the unions, the more they demand.
Graham suggests Starmer’s political demise may be “inevitable” and it’s hard to disagree. What follows is what terrifies me.
His replacement won’t be chosen by voters, but by Labour members and affiliated organisations such as trade unions and socialist societies. In other words, the real die-hards and dreamers. They won’t worry about electability either. The next election is ages away.
So they’ll pick whoever makes the wildest, daftest promises, and foist them on the country whether we like it or not. Labour will tear itself apart competing to see who can be more left-wing, while the economy goes to hell.
The obvious contenders are Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband and Wes Streeting, with Shabana Mahmood an outside chance, or Andy Burnham if he can somehow return to Parliament. Rayner or Miliband look the most likely winners to me. They’re both nutty enough to carry the membership.
And then all hell will break loose. Once in power, they’ll make Starmer look like a stout-hearted, Union Jack waistcoat-wearing patriot by comparison.
Here’s the truly terrifying thing. Keir Starmer is as good as it gets this Parliament. We’d better hope he clings on because whoever replaces him will be so much worse.
