Starmerism: An Autopsy

Neal Lawson can do it when he wants to:

The king is dead, long live the king. In the end, Labour switched effortlessly from Keir Starmer to Andy Burnham, little more than two years after the former’s landslide election victory. Burnham’s ascendancy always looked inevitable to me, despite those who mocked him and blocked him. He had the semblance of a plan – based on ‘Manchesterism’ – the personality and therefore the popularity to replace Starmer. But it wouldn’t have happened if Starmer was any good as a political leader. He had to be terrible to be replaced so quickly, not least because Labour is essentially a loyalist party and all the power in the party is vested in the leader and their office. For this to have happened so soon after such a big electoral victory tells us much about the quality of both that ‘victory’ and Starmer’s leadership skills.

But the speed and efficiency of the transfer of power will mean little in the absence of any deep analysis of exactly what Starmer got wrong and why and the nature of the 2024 election result. Yes, he was unpopular in the polls and a poor communicator, but it was the midterm – he had time and was sitting on that huge majority. To go so spectacularly wrong so quickly demands a deeper post-mortem, so that mistakes can be learnt from instead of being naively repeated.

And here is irony number one. Starmer famously claimed that he had never failed. Someone who thinks they have never failed can never really learn. As he ponders his future and his resignation honours list – which he swore blind he would never write, just as he u-turned on so many other issues and people – let’s get our eyes down and scrub up for the Starmer autopsy.

But wait. First some personal throat clearing, given the personal is always political. I’ve got more fingers on one hand than times I’ve met Keir Starmer. A few times in very small groups before he became leader, and we exchanged a couple of emails after, in which I advised him to go big on ideas and movements. What he needed, I said, was the countervailing forces of ideas, organisation and culture to provide the capacity to act in office against the forces that would resist him. He did not take any of my advice.

He was obviously uninterested in big ideas and even bigger movements. It felt to me he had a ruthless, calculating shark-like disdain for anything that wasn’t going to be of immediate personal interest and assistance to him. I was just someone worth being courted in the run up to the Labour leadership contest in 2020, not least because I gave him cover on Labour’s left flank. I didn’t back him. Later, his henchman tried to have me expelled from the Labour Party for supporting the kind of cross-party pluralism that Compass, the organisation I’m the director of, has been backing for a decade and a half. They failed. I remained a party member, but one certain in the knowledge that it would in fact be Starmer that would fail.

From these early suspicions of deep flaws to the dawning horror of how he behaved, first running the party and then the country, my concerns grew. Uninterrupted, his premiership would make a Farage premiership more, not less, likely.

But people I knew and really rated – people who knew the Starmer of old and talked of a kind, thoughtful and sincere person – found it hard to reconcile their memories with the man who now led Labour and the country. Undoubtedly, the differences between their views and the view that I had formed of him say something about the man and his ability to change or conceal his true intent. But it also says something about our political institutions and culture and what how they change and even deform people. I’ve seen this in every Labour leader going back to the 1980s. How much Starmer’s leadership failure was down to nature or nurture, we are unlikely to ever know. Lives, especially leading political ones, are always complicated, and Starmer like all of us has conflicting and paradoxical passions and potentials. But the mix in him became politically toxic.

Now that more personal stuff is out of the way, what was Starmerism, in which context did it arise, why did it go wrong, and even if he never wants to learn from anything ‘because he has never failed’, what can we learn from it?

Irony number two. Starmer said there will be no such thing as ‘Starmerism’. He was even wrong on this. Just because a leader has a loathing of ‘isms’, doesn’t mean they can escape defining one. Every leadership, however conscious or unconscious, has a culture, a style, a method. Indeed, the very rejection of an ‘ism’ is itself an ‘ism’. So, to understand Starmer’s ‘ism’ we must go back to the moment it was catalysed in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn was crowned leader of the party.

Because Starmerism was essentially anti-Corbynism, even if he didn’t quite know it. Because the other player key in this origin story is Morgan McSweeney, the designated hyper-factional fixer for the Labour Party right. By hyper-factional it is meant a desire not just for a tendency or faction to become dominant within a party, but to eradicate all other factions such that the future of the party becomes impossible to contest.

McSweeney was tasked with a sly, cynical Trojan horse operation to ‘rescue’ Labour from the clutches of the Corbynites. Critical to understanding this mission means getting into the minds of the Labour right, whose attitude is that the Labour Party is their party, and theirs alone. It’s not just that they think their path is the best route to a successful Labour government, but that any other voices and views are illegitimate. The right’s broad view is that Labour only wins when it persuades the City, the media and a few swing voters in a few swing seats that it is safe to back the party. It is a worldview that is broadly anti-intellectual and suspicious of both deeper democracy and wider party’s and movements and the commitment to pluralism they demand. Theirs is a paternalistic and ameliorative social democracy which might have worked in the absence of the global financial crash, growing disparities between citizens and the mounting threat of climate change. But there was no longer an absence of any of this.

From the Labour right’s perspective, everyone else is a ‘Trot’ who can be stomached if they stay in their place in the outer margins of the party, but preferably they would F-off and leave Labour to them, the ‘grown-ups’. This mental and organisational grip on the party was manically and mechanically maintained up until the moment in 2010 when Ed Miliband beat his brother David. This was not meant to happen. But, worse – much worse – was to come. Because of the vast economic, environmental and cultural changes sweeping the globe (not least the mass take-up of social media which meant old forms of politics, like the technocratic paternalism practised by the Labour right) left-wing ideas, policies, parties and leaders had started to challenge their old and tired social democratic orthodoxies. So instead of reverting to type after the loss of the 2015 election and swinging back to the right, the Labour membership voted to keep heading left and Corbyn stormed to victory. To Labour’s right, the threat was existential and deeply personal. Their birthright to run the party, to be the party, had to them been suddenly and violently snatched away. They would do anything, anything, to get it back. And not just get it back but ensure that the left, in its widest sense, could never ever again take from them what was rightfully theirs.

Here are the words of McSweeney’s co-architect of the undercover takeover of Labour Peter Mandelson when he said of Corbyn in 2017: “I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure.” He even gave examples of his efforts, “maybe an e-mail, a phone call, or a meeting I convene.” And I was the one they tried to expel, while Mandelson was given the US Ambassadorship. I repeat, they would do anything, anything to regain and maintain their grip on the party – take a dip into Paul Holden’s book The Fraud to understand more.

Meanwhile, and at least initially separate to the Orwellian named Labour Together project – whose real goal was to tear Labour apart – Starmer had bundled himself into the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St. Pancras for the 2015 general election defeat.

It’s hard to believe that Starmer gave up his successful career in law and the civil service to become an MP without a strong desire to become leader and potentially Prime Minister. Every move he made should be seen in the light of the pursuit of that goal: initially supporting Jeremy Corbyn, being in the shadow cabinet, manoeuvres around Brexit to build his profile rather than find a workable national solution, the company he was seen to keep (on the left) and didn’t keep (Tony Blair), the things he said and didn’t say were all part of an endeavour to become leader. To be fair, he is not the first or last to act in this way. But he is remarkable in being the least intellectually and culturally prepared of any Labour leader in its history.

This personal ambition, almost by accident but great serendipity, met McSweeney’s factional desire to destroy the left. McSweeney was looking for a glove puppet, or seemingly in his own words from the Get In book by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund – someone who thought they were driving the automated DLR train.

McSweeney happened upon Starmer relatively late in the day. At first, through Labour Together he cultivated a team of possible future leaders such as Steve Reed, Wes Streeting, Lisa Nandy, Bridget Phillipson, and Shabana Mahmood. None were to wear the crown. Not least because McSweeney rather brilliantly, if you like this kind of deceit, saw an organisational route through the crisis for the Labour right, but it had to be based on a massive lie. His deep polling of the Labour Party membership convinced him that only a candidate pretending to be a Corbynite could win. But a candidate so malleable, that they were prepared to say anything to win, and then immediately do the exact opposite once in a position of power. Someone who could pose as a Corbynite, call Corbyn a friend, to say his task was merely to professionalise the operation so that Corbynism without Corbyn could win an election, but then turn on the very people whose support they had just sought. That person was of course Keir Starmer.

But at this stage, the Labour Together project was only about gaining control of Labour, not changing the country. After the general election loss in 2019, the broad view was that it would take two elections to get Labour back in. But stage one of wresting back control of the party could only, by definition, be achieved by someone that McSweeney and his right-wing vanguard could never fully trust, because unlike them they had to have been tainted by proximity to Corbyn to win the leadership vote in a largely Corbyn friendly selectorate. This candidate would improve Labour’s position at the next election and then be ousted in favour of a true believer, who could win the subsequent election on sound Labour right-wing grounds. But of first order importance, it would let them regain control of their party.

And then the Tories imploded, first Johnson, then Truss and finally Sunak. Labour didn’t win in 2024; it was handed a slam dunk victory by default by a corrupt and inept Tory administration who the electorate desperately wanted to see the back of. Anyone else would do. And so McSweeney was saddled with Starmer, a Prime Minister he neither trusted nor rated. And Starmer had reached the political summit with little idea of what to do, why or how.

So, the whole Starmer Premiership was based on an accident and a lie. It wasn’t meant to happen and when it did, it pretended to be one thing, but was in truth the very opposite. Starmer, the accidental leader who feigned to be Corbynite but was viciously anti-Corbyn.

Defenders of Starmer in the Party and the press would argue that none of this mattered, all that did was destroying Corbyn and the wider left and therefore making Labour electable again. Well now, there are two big problems with this approach, as events since have shown. The first is that the deceptive position that McSweeney landed on to secure hyper-factional control of the Labour Party was broadly the right one for the country and its progressive majority. This is irony number three. Corbyn never had the skills nor the ambition to lead Labour, but the broadly social democratic policy platform of economic intervention set out in the 2017 manifesto was the kind of thing the country needed then and still does. Hence its popularity and how close Labour got to power then. But this wasn’t about what was right for the country, it was about the total control of Labour. By ditching the policies that were good for the country, the right was purposefully opening the door to all on the left-wing in Labour, inviting them to leave. Remember Starmer in a nationalised television address told them “You know where the door is”. This, combined with an industrial scale of expulsions for the most spurious reasons and the rigging of parliamentary selections, was the method to refashion Labour. Losing hundreds of thousands of members was to be welcomed. As ideas and policy were dropped, all that was left was a vacuous ‘stability equals change’ mantra.

And the left did leave, initially to the doomed Your Party and then to the Greens, who (irony number four) built pressure from the left on issues such as Gaza and immigration which culminated in Labour losing the Gorton and Denton byelection, sealing Starmer’s fate. You reap what you sow.

Second, and perhaps even more problematic for the McSweeney method, is the issue of political behaviour and culture. The Starmer experience begs the meta question, can you build a good politics and a good society based on bad behaviour? Can the means justify the ends, or do means always shape the ends? It is of course a matter of degree. Serious politics must be about compromise but without being compromised. But when your whole electoral pitch is probity and yet you inject the system with such naked cynicism, then people notice and feel it. The gap between the image Starmer wanted to portray of reliability and integrity, and what people saw could not be bridged – even via sticking plaster politics.

Eventually a lack of intellectual foundations, and in this case a profound anti-intellectualism, will always catch up and trip up any political project. Politics to Starmer was simply about his personal good judgement, both moral and practical. There was no wider intellectual project, and no method of implementation beyond his command. As such it was a profoundly unpolitical regime, imbued with a level of arrogance that meant despite the years they had to prepare for government, they refused to dig any foundations beyond what was needed to secure forever their control of the party. Failure was baked in.

Starmer’s vapid but rapid ascent and descent reveals much though, not least about what the party looks for in a leader. There is still a strong hankering within the party to return to what has been called ‘the long 90s’, the era in which Labour seemed to be able to govern in a managerial style because there were few distributional or global conflicts. Everyone and everything seemed largely to be OK. But they weren’t. Despite some successes, New Labour never challenged the underlying orthodoxies of Thatcherism. The left behind were still largely left behind. And that was before the global crash, Brexit, COVID, endless austerity, then a cost-of-living crisis and now Trump and the rise of authoritarian populism, climate change and the threats and opportunities of AI. More than anything, Starmer seemed to offer the route back for the ‘centrist dads’ who just wanted things to ‘go back to normal’. It was a forlorn hope.

At a deeper level, the whole Starmer episode revealed the rather dark heart of the party’s right and their old culture of ‘labourism’ that sustained it: a managerial, tribal and paternalistic approach to politics. I held out little hope for the Corbyn project, an energetic wave of ideas, groups and people shackled to a rather lacklustre surfer. But despite his big leadership win in 2015, his subsequent re-election in 2016 and the quite amazing electoral result in 2017 (I know he didn’t win but he came much closer to victory than anyone suspected), the legitimacy and validity of Corbyn’s leadership was never accepted by the party machine, a huge chunk of the PLP or the media. In the end they got their way, but the foundations of their project were rotten.

For a while at least, if you are cynical and ruthless enough, then you can fool and frighten enough of the people enough of the time through the bureaucratic manipulation of votes and selections, and by creating a toxic environment of fear in which members self-police their comments to avoid punishment. But you can’t fool or frighten all the people all the time, you certainly can’t rule a country by this method, let alone transform it.

So, despite Starmer claiming there would be no such thing as Starmerism, we can detect in its actions and behaviour what it was as a political project. Ultimately it was a crude and cynical attempt to reassert control over Labour, not just to beat the left but to eradicate it for good. To achieve these ends, any means could be justified.

Just like Corbyn, Starmer came, saw, won, lost and disappeared. Whether he leaves more of a trace remains to be seen. The likes of Darren Jones, Steve Reed, and McSweeney himself, will plough the furrow of right-wing nostrums about financial orthodoxy, immigration and law and order. They will seek to keep a grip on the deep state of the Labour machine, the PLP, NEC and the regional offices. It is, after all, ‘their party’. Only last week someone from their camp leaked a paper on their strategy for Starmer’s survival to embarrass his successor.

Meanwhile, the long tail of McSweeneyism hobbles Labour in terms of its culture of hyper-factionalism, the narrow talent pool it allowed to enter parliament and the restrictions, via the manifesto, it placed on the necessary ideas to transform our country. Not least the ability to raise sufficient taxes.

So, what is to be done as a consequence of this analysis? Broadly, the response to Starmerism should be to look at what it did and do the opposite. So don’t reject political vision, embrace it to galvanise direction, purpose and energy. What sort of lives and what sort of society do we deem to be good? The only real lodestar for Labour must be the creation of a much more equal society via a much deeper democracy. Below that needs to be a coherent sense of what kind of robust political economy is going to support this vision of a good society, which in turn demands a constructively critical relationship with capital in all its modern forms. All of this is obviously much easier said than done, but is an essential foundation for any successful Labour government.

And any notion of a transformative government, of the kind people are crying out for, demands a theory of change and the countervailing powers to overcome forces that will resist because they want a very different kind of society – one that continues to be much less equal, sustainable or democratic. This starts with the party itself, not seeing it as something to be massively diminished and the rump controlled, but the place in which prefigurative ideas for the kind of society you want to create are encouraged, not least via members developing their influence and voice nationally and locally. It means that in the fragmented party-political system, which Labour’s failure in office and hyper-factionalism helped create, Labour develops more constructive relationships with other progressive parties and develops that approach wider still into civil society. If Labour wants to transform the country, then it isn’t going to do it on its own from the parliamentary green benches or old offices in Whitehall. Finally, it needs a leader who can pull all this together and communicate a hopeful and compelling narrative of change. But that alone while necessary, is far from sufficient.

With Starmer gone, we are witnessing in real time whether Labour can put in place a project which learns from and breaks with Starmerism and isn’t just Starmerism 2.0.