The End of the Starmer Regime
And a prediction about what comes next
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Watching Keir Starmer this week it is clear: the Starmer regime is over.
It’s now just a matter of time.
Keir Starmer is still in office. But he is no longer in power. The man whose pitch to the country, less than two years ago, was that he was a man of process, detail, bureaucracy, and competence — the very opposite, he claimed, of Boris Johnson — has been completely undone by his glaring failure to manage precisely those things.
Yesterday, amid the ongoing furore over Peter Mandelson, senior civil servant Olly Robbins dismantled Starmer’s carefully constructed image, minute by minute.
What emerged was a picture of a Prime Minister and a Number 10 operation that was willing to ride roughshod over the process and machinery of government .
They did so, clearly, to ensure that their man, Peter Mandelson — a known friend of a convicted paedophile, a known lobbyist for firms in China and Russia, and a man known to have already been forced out of politics in disgrace twice before — could ascend to one of the most prestigious diplomatic posts in the country.
What is most astonishing in the unfolding scandal is not Keir Starmer’s claim that officials had not told him that Mandelson had failed vetting by the security services but that, according to Olly Robbins, Number 10 had displayed such little interest in vetting Mandelson to begin with — a man who is literally known as the ‘Prince of Darkness’.
Such is the sense of moral righteousness around Starmer’s regime that they clearly did not think vetting was required.
Using words that Keir Starmer once used against Boris Johnson, what emerges is a picture of a prime minister and a team around him who clearly think there is one law for them, another for everybody else. And now they’ve been found out.
The damage is profound and clearly spells the end of Starmer. Because, at root, his image of authority and initial appeal to voters rested on trust — on the key promise that, unlike Johnson and the Tories, he would do things properly. He would restore standards in public life.
Those with longer memories will point out this claim was suspect from the very start of Starmer’s premiership. While he likes to project himself as the embodiment of integrity and decency, Starmer, we should remember, is also the man who chose to begin his premiership by helping himself, in an unseemly display, to clothes, glasses and dresses for his wife courtesy of Lord Alli, a Labour Party donor. A man of high moral virtue would not do such a thing.
But now, after yesterday, Starmer’s image lies in ruins. And once that goes, what is left? What is Keir Starmer’s legacy, exactly?
The economy is in the toilet. A recession is on the horizon. Taxes are surging to the highest level in peacetime, rising faster than in any other advanced democracy. Unemployment is increasing. So too is the number of small boats crossing the Channel. Petty crime and gang violence are essentially legal now, with soft-on-crime policies bringing misery to the high street and early release to prisoners.
Starmer has utterly failed to revive economic growth, to make the British people feel safe and secure, to improve our standing on the world stage, and to reverse the managed decline that has now become a permanent fixture of British life.
Worse, he has actively alienated the country, taking a wrecking ball to many things the British people have long cherished. Two-tier justice. Attempts to scrap jury trials, even elections. A concerted crackdown on free speech. Bizarre detours into digital identification with no democratic mandate to do so. And no less than fifteen U-turns along the way. This is not competence; this is chaos.
All delivered by a prime minister who quite clearly, visibly, hates much of the country he governs. Listen to Starmer’s speeches. He clearly views what he now simply calls ‘right-wing politics’ - which happens to be supported by half the country - as illegitimate, and has made no secret of the fact that he views millions of his own citizens as ‘far-right’.
Like most radical progressives, Starmer’s overwhelming sense of moral righteousness simply does not allow him to view political opposition as healthy, legitimate, worthy of discussion. It must either be ridiculed, or simply shut down.
Perhaps more than anything, Starmer’s complete disconnect from the country that surrounds him was best reflected in his ongoing refusal, until the very last possible moment, to commit to holding a national inquiry into the mass rape and sexual abuse of British children by the grooming gangs.
The prime minister of our country literally had to be dragged kicking and screaming by the people to commit to delivering justice to children who had been raped on an industrial scale. Starmer simply could not see the importance of this issue because, as a radical progressive, it turned his entire worldview upside down. And even now, he has still not prioritised it.
In fact, Starmer has consistently been on the wrong side of the British people from day one. From ditching winter fuel allowances for pensioners while sending billions in foreign aid overseas, to destroying British farms and selling off our national territory for no clear reason. He neither understands nor respects the British people, that much is obvious. As he said himself, he would rather be in Davos.
And the consequences are now clear for all to see. Under Starmer’s regime, Britain both feels and looks deeply unstable, divided, and febrile - like an unruly, febrile school that’s readying to blow under an authoritarian, aloof headmaster who has completely lost the respect of pupils.
Roughly three quarters of the British people, according to one recent survey by Ipsos-MORI, now expect ‘large-scale disturbances’ in Britain. This is Starmer’s legacy; he has pushed the country and its people to the very edge.
Inside the Labour Party, meanwhile, because of the latest crisis, the mood is shifting fast. Cabinet ministers are this morning briefing openly against Starmer. MPs are looking ahead to the local elections on May 7th, bracing for what many expect to be historic losses in England, Wales, and Scotland. They are waiting for Starmer to absorb the defeat. And then, no doubt, the knives will come out and he will be gone.
What then? I predict that the Labour Party …
