Perhaps the robotic tone was because he’s not actually all that proud of his record. Starmer’s denunciation of the previous regime as “morally bankrupt” is difficult to dispute, but can a man widely referred to as “two-tier Kier”, for his palpably asymmetric approach to public order, really boast of “decency”? Can a man whose legacy will be full-term abortion, censorship, digital surveillance, and the abolition of trial by jury really claim to have rescued Britain from the moral abyss? Can a man who gave us soaring youth unemployment, who shrugged at farm suicides, who thinks nothing of bankrupting schools for disabled children and religious minorities, really boast of returning to Britain a sense of pride?

Who cares? Not the Westminster court press, which reports on it all excitedly, as though this now wearily familiar Downing Street bloodshed is nothing more than a soap opera. And perhaps they’re right to ignore the substantive issues, and treat it as spectacle. This is, after all, arguably, a sober assessment of the relationship between any given prime minister and the machinery of governance.

Exactly 10 years ago, the country went to the polls to vote on whether or not we should remain in the EU. I voted Leave, as (narrowly) did the country. Overall, the desire was twofold: in the words of Vote Leave, to “Take Back Control”: that is, to restore democratically accountable national government, from its dissolution into the opaque Brussels machinery. And, relatedly, to end an inflow of immigration that, thanks to Brussels, we were powerless to control.

The deeper issue at the time, to my eye, was not just transnational treaties but state capacity. We couldn’t long maintain a reserve of competent civil servants, politicos, and mandarins, while also outsourcing to Brussels much of the policy you’d expect such experts to devise and implement. Just as muscles atrophy when you don’t use them, my fear was that eventually we’d lose our capacity to do joined-up policy, as an independent state. Civil servants would relax into the inertia of EU autopilot, and assume the totality of their job was implementing procedures and strictures devised elsewhere.

More from this author

Keir Starmer’s lethal legacy

By Mary Harrington

But the hour was already late. The regime’s inflexibility began causing real frustration with the global financial crash. A post-political regime that hummed along (it seemed) nicely in the boom years began to show its downside in the bust, in a now-manifest indifference to national populations, an insatiable appetite for human quantitative easing, and all with minimal accountability. Even so, after the crash, public faith in the settlement didn’t falter straight away. A hung Parliament in 2010 attested, even then, to the deep divide over how Britain’s future ought to unfold, but Cameron, as coalition leader, served a full term and was re-elected. Back then, more people than not at least somewhat trusted the British government.

So did I, by and large. In 2016, I thought matters might still be salvaged: that state capacity might be retrieved, and that it was worth trying. Over the past decade, though, I’ve come to wonder if I was wrong. This time a decade ago, the British people voted for change, and to take back control. But 52/48 is almost a hung Parliament, and the Remainer resistance was immense and well-connected. The ensuing trench warfare took years, claimed two prime ministers, and gravely damaged what trust the public still held in the idea that British governments answered to the British people. So did it work? Well, the monkey’s paw curled, and we have since enjoyed incessant change — of prime ministers. But we don’t seem to have taken back control of anything that actually matters.

This sense, that the democratic steering mechanisms on the machinery of state are purely decorative, was ultimately what prompted the Brexit vote. But even Brexit doesn’t seem to have produced the desired increase in responsiveness. All it has done, in fact, is increase the speed at which frustrated electorates cycle through prime ministers, hoping each time that this will be the one whose efforts connect with the machine, and who can show an ability to drive it.

Again and again, since Cameron, we’ve elected a new leader, who then governs for an eyeblink, and sees their approval rating plummet. Again and again, they come up against the same problem, that the Leave vote was supposed to remedy: the machinery of government won’t be steered. And no matter how many times we yank out the steering wheel and replace it with a different one, the machine just keeps trundling along.

This is surely why Starmer’s list of vaunted achievements is so paltry he had to read it out, at the resignation podium, in his bad-faith robot voice. The contrast was all the starker because so swiftly followed an emotional expression of gratitude to his family, that — unlike his rubbish “achievements” — he obviously did feel able to deliver with his whole chest. But for all the time I’ve spent ragging on Keith-GPT, he was ultimately a victim of the same problem as all the others.

By December 2024, barely six months and a single rioting season into his premiership, he was rubbing civil servants up the wrong way by complaining that nothing he wanted to do seemed achievable, because so much of the bureaucracy seemed comfortable in the “tepid bath of managed decline”. The mandarins were miffed. But Starmer wasn’t saying anything Dominic Cummings hadn’t already said during the Coalition years — and which hadn’t, in fact, long animated Cummings’s rationale for bringing Britain out of the EU. Cummings is still saying it, arguing recently that we’re stuck with stagnant growth, lagging technology, and dysfunctional public services, because the governing class is hell-bent on preventing change. Instead, their priority is preserving the interests of their own caste.

So if, after scant months in office, a proceduralists’ proceduralist like Starmer was sounding off about the Blob in terms scarcely distinguishable from Dominic Cummings, the reasonable conclusion is that there’s probably something to the critique. But Starmer didn’t grip any of these structural issues. Instead, under his premiership we have enjoyed two years of interconnected and ramifying screwups, as assorted forms of entrenched dysfunction interact in ever more complex and unhappy ways. This background of fractal ineptitude, vividly set off both by the regime’s perceived bias against white Britons, at best ambivalent resolve on tackling mass migration, then provided a backdrop to assorted Labour factions who, sensing Starmer’s core ideological emptiness, have seized the opportunity to advance crank hobby-horses such as legalizing suicide.

Suggested Reading

How to end the Brexit shitshow

By Dominic Cummings

I see no evidence anywhere else in Labour (except from the Dark Lord himself, Tony Blair) of concrete thought on these structural issues. Starmer has evidently decided not to make it easy, and has announced a leadership contest. But it’ll be Burnham in the end, and my unhappy suspicion is that that come September, he will rock up at No. 10 with his boxes of Jamie Oliver cookbooks and suitcase of Professional Northerner regalia only to find that he, too, can’t get the machinery of government to respond.

Will he be steely enough to get under the hood and change how the engine works? I don’t know. But a recent profile by a Manchester journalist, who has covered his mayoralty for years, depicted Burnham as a gifted unifier and genuinely popular, but weaker on joined-up governance. For example, a flagship homelessness scheme he launched in Manchester ended up, in practice, operating at cross purposes with other housing services. Meanwhile, the rest of the Labour bench are overwhelmingly more aligned with the architectures of business as usual — with the quangos, the mandarins, the judges, the human rights, the entitlements, and all the suffocating rest of it — to have any interest in letting him tinker. And Labour’s ungainly post-industrial coalition pulls in so many contradictory directions that the party remains, for now, woefully paralyzed.

So unless Burnham is keeping his cards very close to his chest, once we’re through the latest round of court soap opera the almost inevitable prospect is more of the same. Another round of flashy, headline-grabbing schemes; another round of the permanent bureaucracy limply going through the motions, then resuming whatever it was doing before. More mass immigration, more Net Zero, more decline. More unrest. And, in due course, more Downing Street blood-letting.

But who knows, perhaps this is the least worst outcome. Last time we had a Labour government with a substantive plan for revolution, we ended up with Tony Blair’s constitutional vandalism. We are still living in his world today. That’s why voters are so frustrated, why the system won’t do anything else, and why every prime minister ends up hated. Ending the bloodshed requires not revolution, but counter-revolution.

This of course raises the grimmer and deeper question of whether Britain even retains the state capacity to make a success of such a counter-revolution, or could muster enough aligned operatives to replace those who would inevitably try and obstruct it. But evidently I haven’t learned anything from Brexit, after all, because I think it’s worth trying. If nothing else, just because it would make such a pleasant change to get through a full Parliamentary term, without having to hose another prime minister off the pavement.

By ending Britain’s nearly 50-year membership of the European Union (EU), by returning it from being the so-called “awkward partner” of Europe to becoming an independent sovereign nation-state, the blunt reality is that Boris Johnson will go down in the history books as a Prime Minister who can genuinely claim to have fundamentally changed the direction of Britain. Whether positive or negative, the consequences of his premiership will continue to be felt for decades, if not centuries, to come.

Along the way, he also overhauled his party, its electorate, and political geography. It is true that Britain’s realignment was under way long before Johnson entered No 10. The Conservative Party’s invasion of Labour’s heartlands had not only been visible under Theresa May but can be traced to rising levels of apathy among Britain’s workers and non-graduates, during the late Nineties and the early 2000s, many of whom abandoned New Labour because of its support for mass immigration and EU membership. But it was Johnson who, through the sheer force of his charisma, rallied larger numbers of them into the Conservative Party during the tumultuous months of 2019.

As my own analysis of British Election Study data has shown, feeling positively about Boris Johnson was not just one of the most significant drivers of the Brexit vote but one of the most significant drivers of whether somebody switched from Labour to the Conservatives in 2019. “My voters did not vote for the Conservative Party’” summarised one MP at the same time. “They voted for Boris.” It was, ultimately, Johnson who doubled down on the realignment, handing his party an electorate that was and remains demographically and ideologically different from the one that had rallied around David Cameron only four years earlier. Post-Brexit conservatism became far more blue-collar, non-graduate, older, more white, less urban, and far more culturally conservative than pre-Brexit conservatism ever was.

Yet while Johnson willingly reshaped his party around this electorate, he never really knew what to do with it or where to take it. What his loyalists call The Project never became intellectually coherent or ideologically sophisticated. Cake-ism became the inevitable consequence of a premiership that had no serious intellectual roots or overarching philosophical framework. The glaring absence of serious thinkers among his entourage found its expression in a long list of thin, short-term, and at times openly contradictory policies that never came close to reflecting the wishes of his party’s new voters.

While they wanted less immigration, he gave them more. While they prized aspiration and economic freedom, he gave them the highest tax burden since the Fifties. While they were instinctively suspicious of the state; he put it on steroids. While they expected a serious strategy for Levelling Up, he consistently failed to provide one. While they wanted a strong pushback against the illiberalism of radical “woke” progressivism, he appeared reluctant to get involved. While they thought they had elected a political fighter, he too often worried about how he was perceived by cosmopolitan liberals. While they thought he was on their side, he appeared to treat them with contempt. And while they wanted an economy and a system that did more for ordinary working people, he often appeared more interested in building Singapore-on-Thames. Consistently, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has leaned more to the Right on economics and more to the Left on culture than many of its new voters.

More from this author

The Tories must capture forgotten England

By Matthew Goodwin

This explains why the reformist, if not revolutionary, premiership that many of these voters expected — one that saw Brexit not as the final destination but as a gateway to wide-ranging reforms of the entire system — never materialised. Establishment liberals, Conservative elites, and the donor class were never aligned with the more radical aspirations of the voters Johnson mobilised. Repeated resets in No 10 routinely prioritised changes to personnel over the more ambitious changes to political philosophy which might have better positioned the party in line with its new electorate. Meanwhile, the widening gulf between the Liberal Leaver vision of Brexit and the far more culturally conservative vision that unites many Conservative voters was never addressed or even understood. Even today, this tension continues to sit at the heart of the party, like an unexploded bomb from the Second World War, waiting to detonate unexpectedly in the face of Johnson’s eventual successor.

More from this author

What's the point of Boris Johnson?

By Matthew Goodwin

While many Conservatives will today breathe a sigh of relief that the Johnson regime is finally coming to an end, they will be forced to operate within the context of the realignment that he has mobilised. There is now simply no way forward for the Conservatives, no way they can retain power, that does not involve repairing their relationship with the people who voted for Johnson less than three years ago and who certainly do not want to return to the neoliberal conservatism of the Eighties and the 2010s. Whether any of the potential successors to Johnson can hold and retain this territory remains an open question.

Many of these voters will today be feeling disappointed, despondent, disillusioned, and despairing. And, in the days ahead, it is they who will come to remember Boris Johnson not as a maverick who changed the direction of the country but as the man who was given a once in a lifetime opportunity to fundamentally reshape his party, politics, and the country but who, in the end, squandered it. And for a large chunk of the country, it is that which may yet become the one thing that defines Boris Johnson.

No one in living memory can have squandered such a far-reaching and revolutionary mandate for reform through such petty and absurd personal failings. Never the quasi-fascist wrecker of the constitution our more hysterical liberal commentariat still make him out to be, he was, as the phrase has it, simply a messy bitch who lives for drama, brought to these humiliating depths by the penumbra of chaos he carries swirling around him. Long presented as a threat to Westminster’s hallowed traditions, the charge against him is in truth far graver: if he is the best leader our political system can throw up, almost any other system of governance would seem an improvement.

It is the failings for which he is now condemned — the contempt in which he held Westminster’s institutions, his urge to override the sterile norms and petty taboos which have sunk British governance into a tar-pit of torpor and incapacity — which won him office in the first place. The people wanted him to break our failing state, and rebuild it in a way that finally worked for all the nation. With a historic majority in parliament, Johnson had almost unlimited power to drive through the Meiji Restoration our collapsing country so desperately requires. That he survived so long, and won such a parliamentary mandate for total change, is a reflection not on his personal qualities, about which no one ever had any doubt, but on the sheer disgust the vast majority of the country feels for his political enemies.

In all the long litany of failures he now drags around behind him, this is the bitterest draught for his voters — for us — to swallow: that there is nothing to show for any of it, for any of the turmoil and vitriol that has defined Britain’s politics under his tenure. The nation was used and discarded like any other of his brief, dramatic but doomed dalliances: our dignity alone demands a decisive end to this pointless drama.

Fate had granted Johnson an appointment with History: but he missed it, lost in a diary clash with wallpaper merchants, lobby courtiers and the endless need to flush away the squalid mess he was compelled to smear around the highest offices of the state. The governance of a nation is a sacred task: in a secular age, it is perhaps the only sacred office remaining. But whatever strange daimon brought Johnson to power also made him entirely unfit to wield it: his story is a cautionary tale for all of us. That is his only gift to History.

More from this author

On the frontline with the Right Sector militia

By Aris Roussinos

Johnson was — we can say was now — a creature born from chaos, thrust to power by the same inchoate demands for political revolution that are roiling every western democracy. Yet instead of embracing meaningful reform and wielding power to transformative ends, he embroiled the nation and mired the entire governance of the country in his own domestic strife. The chosen agent of creative destruction entirely lacked a vision, a philosophy, or any justification whatsoever in his legislative record for the position he clings to so desperately, even now. He saw Brexit through, though not well; his support for Ukraine, self-serving though it may have been, inspired primarily by a craving for Zelenskyy’s reflected glamour, helped the country survive up to now, though he will not now be around to see Ukraine and Britain through the hard months ahead; but there is nothing else to add to his slim credit sheet.

Like Trump, Boris set himself up as the tribune of the proles, and like Trump, Boris frittered it all away through an absolute unfitness for the role. The Brexit vote afforded an extraordinary opportunity to reform Britain’s sclerotic institutions, and steer us out of the state’s ongoing death spiral. But the longed-for burster of the Westminster bubble turned out to be its worst avatar yet. Instead of breaking Britain’s governance free from the witless rigmarole of the lobby, he dived headlong into it; instead of breaking the power of the Blairite para-state, he let its tentacles wrap around him until all the life and energy he brought into office was crushed out of him. Surrounded by a court of fawning hacks, too distracted by his own domestic drama to run the country, Johnson presided over what has become a state of permanent crisis.

More from this author

The truth about Ukraine's far-Right militias

By Aris Roussinos

Though he now claims the mandate of the people to prolong his rule, it is Johnson’s betrayal of his base that makes his removal an urgent necessity. Under his tenure, law and order is a distant memory, the NHS barely functions, and home ownership and family formation is an impossible dream for an entire generation. The state cannot control its external borders, nor guarantee its survival from break up by separatists. The economy is a disaster and social harmony is more or less non-existent. Instead of winning our imported Culture War and consigning it to history, its arcane disputes now infect almost every aspect of British life. In resigning, Sajid Javid applauded Johnson for saving the country from the Corbynite menace, but it is difficult to see how worse-run the country could possibly be. Perhaps an elderly Communist of limited intellectual ability may have left us with at least a housebuilding programme and state support for vital national industries. Whatever base pleasures were to be derived from Johnson’s clownish owning of the libs, he owned his own voters far harder.

Johnson failed to live up to the demands of the moment, but those demands still remain, more pressingly than ever. Perhaps, like Trump, the failures of the first wave of populist revolt will reach their conclusion in the accession of a more competent reformer. Where America has De Santis waiting in the wings, to progressive fears and conservative anticipation, we still possess a thin sprinkling of talent on the front benches, aware of the challenges we face and willing to undertake the reforms necessary to see us through the hard years ahead. Of the few capable politicians the party still possesses, the best have either resigned today or are still waiting in the wings, outside the room where Johnson still pleads for his survival, waiting to deliver the nation’s judgment on the errant jester king. For the nation’s sake, it is time for them to unsheath the knife and put Johnson and the country out of our unwillingly shared misery.