Where did it all go wrong for Starmer?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, a farewell to Keir Starmer, Britain's sixth Prime Minister in just under a decade.

0:19We did it!

0:25You campaigned for it, you fought for it, you voted for it, and now it has arrived. Change begins now.

0:41When the former human rights lawyer, full of ambition, won by a landslide in the 2024 general election, hope was in the air. Yeah, excited for something that needs to happen, I think. I think the country needs it. So since the Labour Party is in power now, I think the country will be more better in terms of job, in terms of safety. I think they've got sensible policies. I feel like having competent adults in the room again is going to be a big help. So Kia Starmer had arrived on a promise to repair 14 years of Conservative damage. Just two years later, with anger and disappointment swelling across the country, he's been forcibly ejected from the job.

1:28He's a decent man, we're told repeatedly. But he's the most disliked Prime Minister since modern polling began. As Starmer stepped out to the lectern outside Downing Street, he certainly looked the part. elegant grey suit, immaculately slicked sidequiff and the dignified gravitas you'd expect from a Prime Minister. Thank you. Walking up this street two years ago was the proudest moment of my life. A new Labour government, the first in 14 years. But he just couldn't deliver. It was an emotional departure. Whatever your political opinions, it was a sad moment. And when I leave the biggest job in the country, I shall spend more time on the most important job.

2:21Being the best husband I can to my fantastic wife, Fig, who has been a rock by my side through good times and bad. And being the best dad I can to my beautiful children, who are my pride and my joy. Thank you very much.

2:54How did it all go so wrong? And will Labour now convince voters that things can only get better? From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, will losing Keir Starmer reboot Labour?

3:15Raf Bear, welcome back to Today in Focus. Now, you have been a political columnist for The Guardian for well over a decade. And in that time, we've seen six prime ministers. Is that unprecedented in British history? And how's your whiplash? In the whole of British history, as far as I'm aware, it's not entirely unprecedented. I must say this isn't my speciality, but I believe in the 1760s there was a period of great turbulence. And I read that between 1827 and 1837, there was a 10 year period where there was a lot of chopping and changing. But no, I mean, obviously, the last seven or eight years in particular have felt extraordinarily febrile.

3:57And I think the measure of that is the sense that that point where the lectern is brought out and put in front of Downing Street and the Prime Minister steps up and makes one of these resignation statements, as we've seen this morning, has started to feel like a regular ritual in British politics. Everyone knows the routine. Everyone even recognises the people who come and install the lectern. This guy here, I've seen him come out and do the testing of the microphones umpteen times over the last few years. I mean, he probably never thought that when he got that job that he would be doing it quite so regularly.

4:28But I think he's known on the internet as hot podium guy, John. But that's her other. I don't think that's a reference. So that in itself is just a measure of quite how narrow, how shortwave the cycle has become. Well, let's look at some of those very recent outings of the lectern, as it were. I mean, how did Keostama's speech go down? What did you make of it? Because it felt like quite an unusual atmosphere on Downing Street. Like he walked out and there was a lot of whooping and clapping and cheering. And of course, yeah, it was a very sombre statement. To an extent, it was quite standard and boilerplate in the way of these things.

5:01I think most people want to give a resigning prime minister an element of dignity and to give them the opportunity to say what they want to say. And he said the sorts of things you'd expect a prime minister to say, which is I was elected to do certain things. I've actually achieved quite a lot, open brackets, a lot more than you people seem to think, close brackets. The inevitable concession where you say, you know, although open brackets, I think I could have carried on and actually would have been much better at this. And you realise, close brackets, it appears that I can't. The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election.

5:38He did that with a lot more dignity than, for example, Boris Johnson, who, when he did his resignation speech, effectively said, well, you're all just sheep and you're following a media herd. And frankly, this is a terrible mistake. But so do you. The baton will be handed over in what has unexpectedly turned out to be a relay race. They changed the rules halfway through, but never mind that now. All for that might matter, David Cameron, who ambled back into number 10, whistling a happy tune to himself, which felt vastly inappropriate for the gravity of the moment.

6:15Right. Whereas Starmer, what really struck me was how uncharacteristically emotional the Prime Minister was at the very end. His voice was catching when he talked about how he was going to move on to the most important job, which was being a good husband and a good father to his children. He sounded very close to breaking down, actually. You could hear the tears, really. Absolutely. And given that one of the criticisms of Keir Starmer has been the lack of emotional connection, the fact that he can come across as stiff and robotic. I just think for him to have showed that amount of emotion at that moment was setting aside the politics of it, I thought very poignant.

7:04Well, Raph, if you try to zoom out and look at this situation that we've got in Britain, this sort of sense of political perma crisis, what, you know, would be described as systemic volatility and chaos were it anywhere else. You know, how do you make sense of and explain Keir Starmer winning this massive landslide just two years ago? And as Sir Keir Starmer heads to the palace to become the new prime minister, with a forecast majority now of 176. I believe the third biggest in Labour's history to being so unpopular that he's effectively been booted out. It is extraordinary when you look at it, you think the UK constitution is such that a prime minister with a majority of 160, 170, can do more or less whatever he wants.

7:49And so I think the big picture answer to the question, well, why didn't he do that? Why didn't he exercise that power? Why didn't he dominate British politics? I mean, it feels like such a waste. And the answer is you can use those powers, that constitutional opportunity is available to you if you know exactly what you want to do. And I think that is where it really unraveled, the sense that he came in thinking that ultimately someone who had a good sense of duty, civic obligation, a heart in the right place not a chaotic wicked Tory would bring a kind of ethics and pragmatism to the job would necessarily succeed because everything that had gone wrong before was a function of just the wrong people being the job conference it's easy to comfort yourself that your opponents are bad people I don't think Boris Johnson is a bad man I think he's a trivial man I think he's a showman.

8:43He's a showman with nothing left to show. He's a trickster. And it just wasn't enough. The tough job of prime minister involves making really hard political choices. And he didn't have, it seems, that clear sense of what his political destination was, that when he was confronted with a problem that couldn't just be solved by the way he had when he was a DPP, the director of public prosecutions when he was a barrister you could just look at the evidence and stare at the problem hard enough and the solution would present itself to you that doesn't work when you're prime minister there are there's some insoluble problems and you just have to make a hard political choice what are you going to spend the money on if you haven't got the money who are you going to take the money away from all those things and that was deficient he just didn't have the heuristics the political ideological compass inside himself to say okay this is a really hard choice.

9:34I'm going to have to really annoy some people here. But ultimately, I know where I'm going with this. And I'm going to make the case and I'm going to stick with it. And he looked like he was adrift within months, really. So if you were conducting a postmortem on this premiership, where did things start to go wrong? The original sin was very possibly, and I would say probably, fighting the general election on a manifesto that meant you tied your hands on promising not to raise revenue from income tax, VAT or national insurance. So doomed before you even started? Not necessarily doomed, but if you come into office wearing a straitjacket, it's pretty hard to grab the levers of power and steer effectively.

10:10And a lot of people, the MPs, ministers who supported that manifesto and thought it was the right political judgment at the time will now privately say, in hindsight, that was a mistake. We should have had the guts to make an argument for a more radical tax agenda that would have at least given us some kind of capacity to do some of the hard things. Because once you've made that choice, you're then locked into finding money down the side of the Treasury sofa here and there. And then you get into things like taking money from winter fuel payments, changes to inheritance tax for farmers, not paying the WASP compensation, whatever it is, you're desperately trying to get little pots.

10:46And the political cost you pay for that is basically annoying each little constituency here and there, rather than just doing some big, broad, bold tax change, really meant that the authority of the government was just dissolving day after day after day, and they weren't even making that much money out of it. So that, I think, is structurally, in hindsight, a terrible mistake that was made. I mean, there were so many missteps very early on, stories about the freebies, getting the concert tickets, the suits, the posh glasses. The truth is that successive prime ministers, unless you're a billionaire like the last one, do rely on donations, political donations, so they can look their best, both in the hope of representing the country, if you're in the opposition, or indeed as prime minister.

11:33That's the situation. These are the sorts of things that they were embarrassing, but a more able communicator or someone with good political antennae could have jumped on top of it really early on. And I think a lot of people would say, in the garden of Number 10 Downing Street, the big speech saying, by the way, this is going to be really painful and horrible and it's going to hurt and things aren't going to be better for a long time, which is a reasonable thing to do if you want to mandate to make hard choices. But, and this is a crucial thing, without having the final paragraph that says, but I promise you it'll be worth it because this is what you'll get at the end of it.

12:05This is what we're working towards. This is the country we're going to be. And I think Stummer probably thinks he tried to do some of that, but it is just not a gear that he could ever really get into. Sending hope effectively. Yeah. And if we're talking about why MPs lost confidence in Kirstom, I think the point at which the parliamentary party was really lost was the welfare rebellion. And there was an available audience in the parliamentary party for reforming the benefits system. I think a more gifted political leader could have navigated that. But what happened was that together, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor realised that they had about 10 billion missing in fiscal headroom.

12:46And lo and behold, they said, well, and by extraordinary lucky coincidence, there's 10 billion in savings that you can make from the welfare budget. And we're not just taking money away from disabled people. And no one bought it. And it was just not credible. And so rather than making a case for benefit changes as part of a social reform, they essentially said we're going to take money from some people to fill a fiscal black hole. And then when lots and lots of Labour MPs who didn't come into Parliament to say, actually, we want to take money away from disabled people, said you're going about this completely the wrong way.

13:17Number 10 just said, well, you're all basically predictable lefties. You don't get it. Shut up. Do what you're told. I am now one of the only visible physically disabled members of Parliament. I am proud that our manifesto committed to championing the rights of disabled people. It was just such a misjudgment of the presentation of it, the mood, who the people were who were worried about this, why they were worried about it. And he just lost the parliamentary party over that and never really got it back. And to add to all of those obvious missteps, it feels like the political climate was changing around them and they were bleeding votes to the left, to the right, and they just kind of struggled to respond to that.

13:54Yeah, it was bad enough when people started to think, well, you know, we're losing a lot of vote share to reform and Nigel Farage is insurgent and this is damaging. And then they start to see also coming from their left flank, the green surging. And if you're an MP facing a green challenge, you think, well, why aren't we the leading progressive party in this country? And there are a couple of things that fell into that. I think, you know, his, the Prime Minister's earliest interventions around Gaza would just, at the best that can be said, they were tone deaf, tin-eared, and then had to row back eventually, but really upset a lot of people, gave people the impression that he just didn't really understand the seriousness of what was happening there.

14:35And then obviously on the immigration policy, separate to how much of it could have been a perfectly sensible, workable way to reform the immigration system, the tone around it felt so obviously presented to try and appeal to reform voters. Then the Prime Minister makes this speech. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together. so when you have the phrase redolent of enoch powell it just told a lot of labour mps they were never going to be able to go to their constituents or to their activists or to their people the sort of the the core centre-left liberal progressive tribe and go we are with you we are the main body for your kind of values in this country and when you've got zach polanski coming up on the left and nigel farage attacking from the right that left a really not very wide bit of terrain that the Labour Party was standing on.

15:27And so no wonder Labour MPs panicked. And I suppose the Mandelson stuff, people really did care about that saga unfolding and the decisions that were made behind the scenes. Yeah, I think that really reinforced a sense generally of doubt about who Keir Starmer was, who his people were, what he really believed in. It was so important for his self-image as Prime Minister in 2024 that he was a decent, honourable person and that was going to be culturally, ethically, a fundamental rupture from the Tory era to then be just by association, by proxy, bundled up with Jeffrey Epstein at a couple of removes, obviously.

16:05It just meant, on top of everything else that had been going wrong, it was going to be impossible for him to ever appear in the public eye as a man of tremendous integrity. But Rath, what would you say was the final straw for the public? Keir Stommer's poll ratings have been very, very low for quite a long time. So I think a lot of people had essentially given up on the idea that he could do this job and he was good at it. But in terms of what the damage that was done to him as prime minister from which he could not recover. And then just a couple of minutes ago, this letter from John Healy to the.

16:39I do think John Healy, the Defence Secretary, resigning essentially on the day that you were supposed to be launching a defence investment plan, saying this Prime Minister cannot make the necessary choices required to protect the country, to keep us safe. There's no coming back from that. Coming up, the end of Starmer drama. So what now?

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18:08All that said, Raf, a lot of the problems that Starmer has faced won't go away with a new Labour leader, whether it's Andy Burnham or anyone else. They will still come in and face some of those persistent economic challenges, you know, the cost of living crisis, high public debt, inflation and so on. What is it specifically about Starmer that you think has failed? It's very difficult to sell misery and cost of living crisis and ongoing malaise when you've promised change anyway. it's particularly difficult to sell it if you're a terrible salesperson if there's no collective sense of what the enterprise is if you're not balancing that pain with both a sense of where it's all going but also a galvanizing idea of solidarity you're you're fermenting and churning the anger the bitterness the grievance that then boosts politicians who really feed on that stuff particularly, obviously, Nigel Farage.

19:03And so I think that Starmer's big picture deficiency was not having that concept of what it was all for that meant that when Farage, when Reform UK really started surging in the polls, there wasn't a counter story about the kind of country we could be, something he could say to people who are interested in voting reform, who thought maybe reform was the only thing that was going to address their grievances. Irrespective of that, Ralph, there have still been triumphs in these two years. What would you characterize as solid Starmer achievements? Triumphs is a strong word, but I think Ed Miliband's department, Energy and Climate Change, he has driven this forward quite hard and against a lot of opposition, but actually he stuck with his guns.

19:48I think it shows that he'd been a cabinet minister before in a previous government. He'd had that portfolio before. So unlike so many people, including the prime minister, he was really able to hit the ground running. and actually in the world that we live in war in ukraine russian threat war in the gulf the argument that we could really do without being totally dependent on uh hydrocarbon imports and we could really move towards a green transition is a great progressive uh story that actually reaches a large number of people it's broadly a majority position in this country so i think that's probably a good idea and i think actually ed milliband has has done well to to cement that And I actually think the EU reset has gone OK.

20:30Personally, I think it's been a bit slow and it's been a bit frustrated. But broadly speaking, he has done some of the necessary diplomacy so that if someone now wants to come in and say, you know what, we're really going to transform Britain's relationship with the European Union. The foundations for that will have been laid by Keir Starmer. And the other things the government would name, workers' rights, renters' rights, starting the process of changing the planning legislation so you can actually get some houses built. These are all things that, you know, if they are going to make a difference to people's lives, it will be incremental and it'll be something that people will look back on and go, the foundations were laid by Keir Starmer.

21:04You don't get popular in politics generally for laying foundations and particularly not in a political climate where attention spans are short and people want the payback now, not in 15, 20 years time. Well, let's zoom forward in 15, 20 years. I mean, what do you think Starmer's political legacy will be? How will historians look back? I think winning the landslide election is not to be sniffed at. The Labour Party was in a terrible, terrible state. And actually, as he said at the lectern in front of number 10, in his resignation statement, people thought maybe the Labour Party was finished. And certainly it was going to take a couple of terms of opposition really to get back and to win on the scale he did.

21:47It was a significant achievement. And on the foreign affairs portfolio, generally, he's actually handled a very, very difficult diplomacy quite well. I think people might criticise the relationship with Donald Trump, saying he got too cosy too early on. But actually, I think a lot of that was very necessary, particularly when a priority was trying to forestall a Donald Trump total betrayal of Ukraine. Which he was instrumental in doing and has so far not fully happened yet. But other than that, there isn't a whole lot because what was Keir Starmer's thing? What was he about that you could then say, and at least he achieved that?

22:24And the answer is no one really knows. No one knew. And that's why he's resigned. So Keir Starmer has announced a formal exit plan, which means we could have a new prime minister as early as July 17th. Andy Burnham, meanwhile, didn't even give Starmer a day before announcing his leadership bid. We now come to Andy Burnham, member for Makerfield.

22:51Just, you know, the pictures of him being sworn in as MP yesterday, it was quite something to behold. All the Labour lot giddily lining up to take selfies with him, treating him as the coming messiah.

23:08Even West Streeting, his main rival up until this point, he's taken note of what he's up against and said that he's backing Andy. Raph, how optimistic are you about what Andy Burnham will bring to the job and to the country at large? I think the winning maker field is important, not just because Burnham won that by-election, but the scale of it. Because that does suggest that, as Andy Burnham's supporters will say, he has something that can reach voters that Kirsten clearly, if he ever had it, had lost. And that he brings an ability to at least get a hearing and start from a position of a bit of benefit of the doubt, people ready to give you a chance.