POLITICO: Keir Starmer’s leadership vacuum threatens to swallow him up

Keir Starmer
Photo: POLITICO

Keir Starmer’s team believed he was the perfect candidate to be British Prime Minister when he took office in July 2024. But winning an election is one thing and running the country, it turns out, requires something else, POLITICO notes.

Stuck in a months-long crisis over his appointment of Peter Mandelson as U.K. ambassador to Washington, Starmer is now stumbling toward what many on his own side fear is the endgame of his premiership, less than two years since leading his Labour Party to a landslide victory.

While he rages at the failings of “the state” and fires officials for letting him down, many of those he has burned over the past 21 months are now turning on him.

And they are bitter.

“Lots of people think Keir Starmer is a good man who is out of his depth,” said one Labour insider. “Wrong. He’s an asshole who’s out of his depth.”

Starmer, they say, has no ability to manage a team

A dozen politicians, aides and officials — including some who have worked intimately with the prime minister in Downing Street — spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity, because the matter is sensitive, and described a leader defined primarily by his absence.

Starmer, they say, has no ability to manage a team; an aversion to conflict; no guiding mission for power; no energy to drive change; little interest in people; and no interest in political strategy. While not all agree, some suggest Starmer just isn’t willing to do the tough work a prime minister must — perhaps because he likes his time away from the office more than he should.

So why did the former chief prosecutor for England and Wales ever want to be prime minister? “Because he is ambitious,” said a former official who worked closely with Starmer. “It was another profession he could climb to the top of.”

The crisis of faith threatening to end Starmer’s leadership springs from his ill-fated decision in 2024 to appoint Mandelson, a Labour grandee and former Cabinet minister, to be British ambassador to the United States, and thus a key conduit to the incoming Trump administration. This past September, Starmer fired Mandelson over his friendship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but damaging new revelations about the government’s handling of the episode are still coming to light.

The frontman

The Mandelson saga marks a spectacular decline for a leader who won a massive landslide less than two years ago and entered government promising to restore trust in politics.

Back in 2024, Starmer won praise for his center-left Labour Party’s highly disciplined campaign. His willingness not to interfere in the work of his talented election campaign team won him loyalty and credit from his own side and among analysts.

“He’s a perfect candidate, because he’s a candidate — he doesn’t try to be campaign manager, or speechwriter or logistics manager,” one Labour official said, shortly after the 2024 victory. “He’s good at properly backing his people and making everyone understand that they have his support to do the job.” In other words, as the national election frontman he delegated a lot, and it worked.

Against an unpopular Conservative Party which had been in power for 14 years, Starmer’s willingness to follow advice helped Labour win two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons.

Starmer trusted his first-choice chief of staff, Sue Gray, to have prepared an oven-ready plan for power, which Labour would roll out the day after winning the election. It turned out no such plan existed.

Starmer then replaced Gray with his election mastermind McSweeney, who had been serving in a political director role. McSweeney was given the power to provide political input on Starmer’s behalf into a huge swathe of policy decisions across government and, for a time, things improved.

But a year and a half later, McSweeney quit over the decision to appoint the disgraced Mandelson as ambassador to the U.S. — paying the price for the advice his boss appeared consistently happy to take.

“He delegates so much responsibility,” another former No. 10 aide said. “Yes, you delegate some stuff because you’re the prime minister and you can’t physically do everything, but you do have to have ownership and control.”

Scapegoat strategy

In the short time since becoming premier, Starmer has had three chiefs of staff, five directors of communications, three cabinet secretaries to run the civil service, and two principal private secretaries in charge of his office.

“He self-evidently cannot build a functional team,” one former official said. “It’s not a serious operation.”

“He is absolutely unable to run a team either in Downing Street or in cabinet or across the wider government and it comes back to the fact that he is fundamentally pretty uninterested in people.”

It has now become a problem of trust. In government, Starmer has become known for ducking responsibility, according to another former official who worked with him. “His team don’t trust him because he throws other people under the bus.”

The decision to appear on Friday as the familiar figure of a man “furious” with his own government machine for failing him went down poorly, Whitehall officials told POLITICO. “He’s furious with the state? Well, bad luck,” one ex-colleague of Starmer’s. “You are in fact in charge of the state.”

Many of those who spoke to POLITICO described a lack of “curiosity” in the PM. “He just doesn’t ask questions, on policy, politics or apparently propriety either,” another former official said. Some ministers agree.

A current government official described Starmer’s approach to interrogating policies and other decisions as “hear no evil, see no evil.” The official added: “You can’t claim to be this meticulous lawyer, this micro-manager, this mandarin and then not care for stuff like this.”

The Prime Minister is facing intense speculation about how long he can stay in the job

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer, left, former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham meet with school children at a primary school in Ashton-under-Lyne, north-west England

Photo: Associated Press

A former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner had a secret meeting with Andy Burnham, according to new reports from ‘Huffington Post’.

Their summit adds to mounting speculation the two soft-left Labour figures might be considering launching a joint coup.

Their encounter came hours after Keir Starmer furiously defended his premiership amid fresh developments in the Peter Mandelson scandal.

Rayner is allegedly also considering a run at the top job, but may still be hampered from any power grab by the ongoing HMRC investigation into her tax affairs.

She had to step down from the cabinet last year after underpaying on stamp duty when buying an £800,000 property.

Labour is expected to endure major losses at the elections in May, when Holyrood and the Senedd are up for re-election along with hundreds of local authorities in England.

Insiders have told HuffPost UK any leadership challenge to Starmer will likely come after the elections so any successor can avoid taking responsibility for the bloodbath.

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