Yesterday, the Prime Minister embarrassed himself. The nation cringed as one.
PM Keir Starmer has been a bad joke from day one (Image: Getty)
Some people shouldn’t tell jokes. They simply don’t have a sense of humour. Keir Starmer is one of them. Being funny isn’t about memorising clever lines. It demands timing, awareness and natural instinct. Starmer doesn’t have any of that. As we saw again at PMQs yesterday, his jokes fall flat every time.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has worked this out, neatly skewering him over Labour’s endless U-turns. Starmer tried to turn the tables on the Tories with a crude gag: “They’ve had more positions than the Kama Sutra,” he said. “No wonder they’re knackered and left the country screwed.”
Just repeating that makes me want to reach for the carbolic soap.
A common mistake among the humourless is chasing a cheap laugh by being coarse. Starmer’s ‘dad’ joke didn’t raise a chuckle, it made us wince. He followed it with another quip that took longer to unpack than an Ikea kitchen. But even if it had been a zinger, his wooden delivery would have killed it.
But this isn’t really about comedy. It’s about judgement. Starmer doesn’t just miss the mark with punchlines. He misses it everywhere. He cannot read the room. And now he’s failing to deliver a flagship policy for exactly the same reason. Which brings me, weirdly, to housing.
It passed most people by yesterday, but shares in FTSE 250 housebuilder Vistry Group plunged 9% as Brits stopped buying new homes. Why? Because Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Budget scared the life out of them.
That matters because triggering a housebuilding boom was Starmer’s big idea, pretty much the only growth policy he brought into office. “Get Britain building again,” he said.
The plan was to churn out 300,000 new homes a year for five years, ease the housing crisis, create jobs and kick-start the economy. It was never going to work. That’s not hindsight. I said so at the time. On July 22, less than three weeks after the election, I wrote that Starmer’s faith in ‘build, baby build’ was so absolute “you wonder why previous governments didn’t think of it. Except, of course, they did”.
After his 2019 landslide, Boris Johnson also pledged 300,000 homes a year. Now Boris could tell a joke, but he couldn’t deliver either. Nor could New Labour, the coalition, or successive Tory governments. In practice, Britain struggles to build more than 150,000 homes a year.
As I pointed out, big housebuilders like Barratt Developments and Taylor Wimpey were actually building fewer homes as labour, materials and finance costs surged, while affordability collapsed.
Rachel Reeves made everything worse, as she does. Her £25billion ‘jobs tax’ and inflation-busting minimum wage hikes drove their labour costs higher still. Starmer’s building boom was always going to fall flat. Just like his jokes.
Once again, he failed to read the room. He made a pledge because it sounded good to him, not because it was deliverable. Another tone-deaf promise that didn’t land.
He does it again and gain. Britons aren’t laughing with Starmer. They’re laughing at him. He’s the punchline, and he still doesn’t get it.
