Starmer has never put the country first – not even in his final, insipid act

It has finally happened.

Keir Starmer, the man who promised to deliver “change” with all the revolutionary fervour of a Lib Dem focus group, has slithered out of Downing Street like a deflated balloon animal after a kids’ party gone wrong.

Two years. That’s all it took for the great anti-Tory Labour landslide of 2024 to collapse into a humiliating pile of U-turns, scandals, and moral cowardice.

Today, as he stood outside No. 10 delivering his resignation speech – all misty-eyed about his fantastic wife and being the best dad to his kids – I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

Not with him, obviously. At him. At the sheer, breathtaking audacity of a man who spent his entire leadership purging the left, cosying up to the establishment, and abandoning every principle Labour was supposed to stand for, now pretending this was some noble act of putting “the country I love first”.

Please. The country Starmer loved was the one that let arms flow to Israel while Gaza starved. The one where the super-rich got tax breaks, and poor and working-class people got lectures about fiscal responsibility.

Spare us the crocodile tears, Keir.

Starmer: an unrivalled legacy

Starmer’s legacy isn’t one of service – it’s one of spectacular, self-inflicted failure, and we have been screaming it from the rooftops since he first donned that red tie and started sounding like a Tory in denial.

Let’s start with the Gaza betrayal, because nothing exposes the utterly hollow core of Starmerism quite like it.

From the very beginning, when he told LBC that Israel had the right to cut off power and water to Gaza — collective punishment that any actual socialist with a spine would’ve called a blatant war crime — Starmer revealed himself as a man who would rather lick boots in Washington and Tel Aviv than stand with the oppressed.

While Palestinian children were being ripped to fucking shreds, intentionally starved, and forcibly displaced in what the International Court of Justice and human rights groups repeatedly flagged as potential genocide, Keir Starmer dithered.

To the point? Yes. But when the blood of tens of thousands is on the ledger, politeness is a luxury for centrists.

This wasn’t just incompetence, it was ideological.

Ideological

Starmer’s Labour wasn’t the party of international solidarity – it was the party of progressive imperialism, where condemning Israeli excesses came with endless caveats about Khamas and hostages, but never, ever the same fire for the daily slaughter enabled by Western complicity.

Starmer’s Gaza complicity was the moral stain that eroded whatever credibility he had left with the working class and the global left.

This is Starmer’s legacy.

And what about the repeatedly-disgraced Peter Mandelson? This wasn’t just one bad hire. It was emblematic of the entire Starmer regime, a desperate cling to the Blairite ghosts of the past, surrounding himself with the same deceitful operators who turned “Labour” into a byword for triangulation and ruthless betrayal.

Mandelson symbolised absolutely everything rotten about the Starmer project – the contempt for the membership, the worship of power and access, the belief that the establishment knows best.

While ordinary people faced soaring energy bills, and a cost of living crisis that Starmer’s government failed to meaningfully tackle, the elites got their man in Washington. Until they didn’t.

This is Starmer’s legacy.

Avoidance

The resignation speech barely touched on it, of course. No accountability for the revolving door of scandals and U-turns that defined his time in office. Just more self-serving piffle about pride and family that made me feel a tad nauseous, to be honest.

And what a resignation speech it was. Emotional, they called it. I call it peak performative centrism. Standing there thanking the rock, Vic (does he mean his wife is a rock, or was he actually thanking Dwayne Johnson?), gushing about his beautiful children, that nobody has ever seen, and claiming every decision was about “putting the country first.”

This from the man whose government oversaw local election massacres, policy flip-flops on winter fuel payments, worker rights watered down, and an economy that continued to squeeze poor people until our bones started crumbling.

It’s almost funny how the landslide winner who lectured the left about electability couldn’t even survive two years without his own MPs turning on him. Starmer wasn’t a leader but a corporate lawyer cosplaying as a progressive.

Starmer’s resignation was the final admission that the New Labour 2.0 project was a hollow failure.

Starmer ends with a whimper

Poor and working class people deserved so much better than this mealy-mouthed managerialism bullshit. They deserved genuine wealth redistribution, an end to arms exports to Israel, a real NHS rescue, council housing on a massive scale, and an end to the revolving door with the rich.

Instead, we got Starmer – all suit, no substance, all rhetoric, no redistribution. As he packs his bags (until September, apparently), we should feel no pity. This was predictable. The man who stabbed his own party’s soul in the back got what was coming to him.

Believe it or not, Mr Starmer, rebranding austerity as “fiscal responsibility” was never going to be much of a vote winner with an electorate that had just sent the Tories packing after fourteen years of… austerity.

And to think they pay people to make these ridiculous decisions for them.

Keir Starmer’s brief, dismal era ends not with a bang, but with the whimper he always was.

Cheerio.

Featured image via the Canary

By Rachael Swindon