For a man so often thought of as unemotional, hearing the Prime Minister’s voice crack outside Downing Street was as unexpected as Margaret Thatcher’s tears in her ministerial car. But it was not surprising that Keir Starmer’s lawyer’s tone faltered as he mentioned his wife, Victoria, and his “beautiful children”.
Starmer has often called Victoria his “rock” in office and he said it again on the steps of Downing Street – “a rock by my side in times bad and good”. And it was Victoria’s arms he turned to as he finished at the ominous black lectern, as the two hugged and then walked together back into Downing Street and into the rest of their lives.
There comes a moment for all Prime Ministers when political power drips away. The lonely realisation that those around you who once swore undying loyalty have melted into the shadows.
For Macbeth, it was the moment “Great Birnam Wood” came against him. Over the weekend, Burnham’s supporters left the shadows. Some 2-300 MPs prepared to switch sides and march to Dunsinane.
Betrayed by those around him, holed up at Chequers, Starmer’s inner circle of trusted confidantes had shrunk to just two people, him and Victoria. Before his resignation, Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, said there were “only two people in the world who know what he’s going to do — one of them is Vic and the other one is the Prime Minister.”
An isolation made more painful by the ecstatic scenes greeting Andy Burnham at Euston Station as the King of the North headed south this morning.
Sir Keir and Lady Victoria have been together since they worked on the same case together as lawyers at Doughty Street chambers. He has admitted their first work encounter, on the phone, ended with him overhearing her ask colleagues ‘Who the f*ck does he think he is?”
When Starmer was elected, he suggested he valued her advice as much as she valued her privacy. “She’s a streetwise, grounded, gorgeous woman,” he told the Mirror, “who wants as far as she can to get on with her own life and to protect it.”
Starmer’s graceful exit was fitting of the man. And yet, even so, there was an air of incredulity as her husband took to the ominous black lectern this morning. That it had finally come to this. There has been no Partygate scandal, no Suez Canal, no Poll Tax, no Iraq War, no Mini-Budget plunging the country into crisis.
Starmer has more moral fibre in his little fingernail than Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, or plenty of recent Tory Prime Ministers who have served much longer than him. The hatred he receives on the football terraces is unfair and orchestrated.
After 14 years of hurt, he made Labour electable again. The achievements of his last two years are not nothing – half a million children lifted out of poverty, NHS waiting lists falling, a belated fightback against the tech companies, the biggest uptick to workers rights in a generation, protections for renters rights.
And yet. Starmer once said that politics was a different art to law because it involved persuasion. In an otherwise good man, it has proved to be a fatal flaw.
His allies once called him ‘Steer Calmer’, an appealing thought after years of Tory recklessness at the wheel. But calm steerage has been no match for the crashing global tides caused by foreign strongmen. And without a convincing destination, his rudderless boat was unable to correct itself after a string of catastrophic early mistakes.
The first 100 days of free-floating Starmerism felt miserable and pointless. And then the Mandelson scandal robbed him of even that moral authority that was the last bulwark against piracy.
But perhaps Starmer’s greatest crime is to have been underwhelming. To have not know what to do with a landslide other politicians dream of. To have left his party and the our country suddenly, viscerally vulnerable to the most right-wing forces ever unleashed in British politics.
Elected to government on the slogan “change”, today Keir Starmer’s party took him at his word, and sent him on a landslide to oblivion. But at some time over the weekend that just passed – in the sunny grounds of a 16th century manor house in Buckinghamshire which holds the secrets of Britain’s Prime Ministers – it was Sir Keir’s rock who told him it was time to go.