The Rot Was Built Into The Foundation

There were 17 Labour losses on Camden Council this year, including the Leader. They will be circling Keir Starmer’s seat like piranha. Meanwhile, Starmer will be looking forward to spending more time with his families. The media round today has been done by Jonathan Reynolds, who committed the specific criminal offence of pretending to be a solicitor. Thank heavens that he was not a black Professor at Cambridge. Reynolds went on to be the Chief Whip when the Parliamentary Labour Party brought down Starmer, after which he was reappointed to the position from which Starmer had sacked him, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade and President of the Board of Trade. See also John Healey, whose resignation as Defence Secretary was key to the coup, and who has emerged from it as Chancellor of the Exchequer, with his stated reason for having vacated the Defence brief shelved indefinitely. The true believing Al Carns has not been made the Minister for anything. He really is new to this politics lark. Unlike his fellow combat veteran, which Healey is not any more than Starmer was, Paul Knaggs:

A baton, in a relay, passes smoothly from one runner’s hand to another while both are moving, still on the same track, still running the same race. That is the neat, reassuring image Sir Keir Starmer reached for when he told the Camden New Journal he was ready to “pass the baton to a successor” and step down as MP for Holborn and St Pancras after eleven years. It is a tidy, dignified metaphor. Set against the actual record of his tenure in Downing Street, a catastrophic experiment that ended not in a victory lap but in disgrace, public rejection, and record-low popularity, it is a grotesque rewriting of reality.

He chose to slip his exit line into the local pages of Camden rather than face the House of Commons. He lists his local achievements with practiced pride: breakfast clubs, free school meals extended to thousands of children, the two-child benefit cap lifted for 2,500 local families, a Renters’ Rights Act, an Employment Rights Act. These measures are not nothing, and a publication that speaks for the working class will not pretend otherwise. Free school meals are real meals for real children, regardless of who delivered them.

A political legacy is not a curated list handed to a local reporter on the way out the door. It is defined by the character of the government that produced it and the state of the country it leaves behind. Both tell a far darker story than “passing the baton” allows.

The rot was built into the foundation. Labour’s landslide in July 2024, winning 411 seats on just 33.7 per cent of the popular vote, was the thinnest, most illusory supermajority in British history. It was the lowest vote share ever recorded for a majority government since the modern franchise began in 1830. It rested not on a wave of popular hope, but on a collapsing Tory Party splitting its vote three ways. Crucially, Labour’s support fell to historic lows in England’s poorest constituencies, even as it gained in affluent suburbs. It was a mandate built on sand, an fragile electoral coalition managed by technocrats who believed they could govern without the burden of principles or transformative ambition.

That technocratic management collapsed the moment it met reality; it was founded on broken promises. Campaigning for the leadership in 2020, Starmer made ten explicit pledges, including public ownership of rail, energy, water, and Royal Mail. Every single one was scrapped. The 2024 manifesto promised no tax increases on working people; within months, Chancellor Rachel Reeves hiked employers’ National Insurance by £25 billion a year and froze tax thresholds, forcing workers to foot the bill.

For years, Labour promised to abolish the Conservatives’ cruel two-child benefit cap. Once in office, Starmer kept the cap, and when seven of his own Labour MPs voted to scrap it in July 2024, he suspended them from the party for six months. When the cap was finally lifted two years later under intense pressure, it was offered to Camden voters as a benevolent gift rather than what it truly was: a battle the government spent two years losing to its own backbenches.

Within weeks of taking office, the government stripped winter fuel payments from ten million pensioners, restoring them to nine million only after severe council election losses and a humiliating lost by-election proved the sheer cruelty of a policy estimated to push 100,000 elderly citizens into poverty.

Starmer's broken promises

While breaking faith with working-class support, the administration mounted an assault on civil liberties unmatched in modern times. In July 2025, ministers proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, turning mere vocal support for a protest group into an offence punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. Police systematically arrested pensioners in their eighties and teenagers in Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square for holding placards: nearly 900 arrests on a single August weekend. They were protesting the continued licensing of arms to a state carrying out what millions recognise as a genocide in Gaza. Even after the High Court ruled the proscription unlawful in February 2026, the government appealed rather than accept the verdict. Simultaneously, ministers rammed through the Courts and Tribunals Bill, stripping defendants of the right to a jury trial for a vast array of offences, ignoring the desperate pleas of over 3,000 lawyers, solicitors, and retired judges.

Personal hypocrisy completed the ruin. In 2024, details emerged of Starmer and his inner circle accepting over £107,000 in lavish gifts, accommodation, and designer clothes from peer Waheed Alli. By 2026, records showed Starmer had racked up 39 foreign trips costing taxpayers £4.2 million in under two years, including a £60,000 overnight flight to Zurich for a football match, just months after promising to reign in official jet usage.

Then came the Mandelson affair. Starmer’s reckless decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador imploded amid appalling revelations regarding Mandelson’s ongoing ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Police searches followed, senior party leaders called for Starmer’s resignation, and his chief of staff and communications director resigned in tandem. His approval ratings collapsed to minus 57, matching the record low set by Liz Truss during her ill-fated mini-budget. A prime minister who leaves office rivalling Liz Truss, having curbed jury trials, sent police after pensioners holding cardboard signs, and protected corporate arms flows, has not earned the right to call his departure a graceful handover.

The party machine tried desperately to manage the decline, but the electoral arithmetic caught up with them. When Andy Burnham sought to return to Westminster through the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour’s National Executive Committee blocked him, with Starmer voting to bar him from standing. The result was an unprecedented disaster: Labour finished third in a seat it had held continuously since 1931. Panicked by the collapse, the same executive executed a cynical U-turn months later. On May 14, sitting MP Josh Simons, former head of the Labour Together think tank, resigned his Makerfield seat explicitly to clear a path for Burnham. Simons admitted the party was heading into a leadership contest with “no hope, no energy that anything would change.”

Burnham won the manufactured by-election, Starmer resigned four days later, and Burnham was installed in Downing Street by July. It was not a relay; it was an insider fix. Vacating safe seats to engineer a line of succession is an old and dirty parliamentary trick. When Harold Wilson tried it in Leyton in 1965 to force Patrick Gordon Walker back into Parliament, voters revolted and elected a Conservative instead. While Makerfield proved more compliant, the underlying insult to democracy remains identical: a governing party that cannot find a leader among its sitting MPs simply fabricates a vacancy and demands the electorate rubber-stamp its choice.

Now, Sir Keir abandons his constituents entirely, breaking a clear promise made just weeks ago to remain as MP for Holborn and St Pancras until the next general election. The moment his prime ministerial perks vanished, representing the working class of Camden lost its appeal. International consultancy, global defence forums, and the lucrative international circuit beckon.

Labour headquarters will try to manage the upcoming Holborn and St Pancras by-election with the same centralising arrogance, parachuting in another compliant manager. But the public has seen behind the curtain. They have watched a party block a candidate in January, beg him back in May, and execute a corporate takeover of the state while ignoring the voters who put them there.

A baton passed fairly leaves the team stronger and the runners in unison. Keir Starmer leaves his constituency a sudden by-election, leaves his party a leadership installed by backroom manipulation, and leaves the British public holding the bill for two years of authoritarian, corporate management masquerading as democracy. Sir Keir Starmer has passed the baton, but he has left the country holding the bill.

Starmer’s parting shot was to claim to have rescued the Labour Party from “moral and financial ruin”. But under Jeremy Corbyn it was in the black for the first time since the 1970s. It was under Starmer that, despite huge corporate and individual donations, Labour has returned to an overall deficit approaching four million pounds. That lie itself is a mark of its moral ruin under Starmer, but of course there have been very many more, from Lord Alli to Lord Mandelson.