Keir Starmer: Britain's Worse Ever Prime Minister?

<p>Keir Starmer resigns as MP, bringing an extraordinary political career to a rather abrupt close. After becoming Labour leader in 2020, winning a huge Commons majority in the 2024 UK general election, becoming Prime Minister and then leaving Downing Street in July 2026, Sir Keir has now decided to leave Parliament as well. So the question rather writes itself: was Keir Starmer Britain’s worst ever Prime Minister?</p><p>That is the deliberately provocative question Mark and Pete tackle in this episode. Starmer was spectacularly successful at getting Labour into power. He took a party flattened in 2019 and, five years later, put it back in government with 411 MPs. You cannot really call that political incompetence. Yet that 411-seat victory came on only about 34 per cent of the national vote, an enormous parliamentary majority resting on a rather less enormous popular mandate.</p><p>What happened afterwards, though, is rather more awkward. A premiership of barely two years, collapsing public enthusiasm, internal Labour rebellions, difficult economic choices and, eventually, Andy Burnham taking over as Prime Minister.</p><p>And then there were the U-turns. Oh, the U-turns.</p><p>Winter fuel payments. Welfare reform. The grooming gangs inquiry. Digital ID. Earlier promises on tuition fees and green investment. Positions announced firmly, defended firmly and, sometimes with impressive speed, replaced by another firm position. Starmer’s critics came to argue that the problem was not simply that he changed his mind. Governments have to do that occasionally. It was that voters increasingly struggled to work out what the underlying Starmer position actually was.</p><p>Now comes perhaps the neatest turn of all. After indicating that he intended to remain in Parliament until the next general election, Starmer has resigned as MP for Holborn and St Pancras. The seat he first won in 2015 will now face a by-election, with Green leader Zack Polanski already saying he intends to stand.</p><p>So what exactly is the Starmer legacy? A highly effective Leader of the Opposition who turned out to be a poor Prime Minister? A decent man trapped by events and impossible expectations? Or the political embodiment of managerial Britain, endlessly reviewing, consulting, recalibrating and then discovering that somebody else has acquired the keys to Number 10?</p><p>Mark and Pete react to Starmer’s resignation, revisit some of his most memorable political reversals, assess Labour under Andy Burnham, and ask where Sir Keir sits among Britain’s shortest and least successful premierships.</p><p>Was he really Britain’s worst ever Prime Minister?</p><p>Liz Truss may reasonably request the right of reply.</p><p>Politics, power, promises and the peculiar speed with which yesterday’s landslide can become today’s footnote. Psalm 146 offers an older warning: “Put not your trust in princes.” Westminster continues to provide the illustrations.</p>