Starmer is collapsing and bringing a broken political system down with him

The age of the Centrist Dad is over. Now the Right must gear up for a real battle of ideas with the extremist Left Daily Telegraph 22/04/26 Goodbye, Centrist Dads: you shall never be forgiven for ruining our country, splintering our society, trashing our economy and eviscerating our Armed Forces. Adios, Blairites, technocrat-kings and aficionados of the Third Way: you claimed to be driven by a commitment to social mobility and justice, but you turned Britain into a land of indolence and welfarism, rationing and penury, ignorance and alienation, sectarianism and rising anti-Semitism.

It is not just Sir Keir Starmer, our worst-ever Prime Minister, who is finished, a spent force waiting to be ejected from the office he disgraces. The entire managerialist ancien régime that spawned his idiocracy will also be swept away, terminating a catastrophic 30-year experiment in centre-Leftist, “expert-led” rule. Every election from now on, starting with May 7, will be a disaster for the “extreme centre”, and a triumph for anti-system outsiders. Ideology, red or blue in tooth and claw, is about to make a return, for the better if Britain embraces a proper-Right wing government, or for the worse if we end up with a Leninist, pro-Scottish and Welsh independence, Zack Polanski-led coalition of chaos. It doesn’t matter which stop-gap Labour second-rater replaces Starmer: they will neither last long, nor prevent an inevitable revolution. This Government represents the reductio ad absurdum of extreme centrism, the Platonic form of post-ideological governance, with Starmer’s incompetence, selfishness and cowardice and Peter Mandelson’s mendaciousness and rapaciousness case studies in depravity. Members of the Left-wing elite who agree on everything – they hate Brexit, they love lawfare, they crave higher tax, they despise cultural conservatism – are tearing themselves apart not over vital intellectual disagreements, but over-bureaucratic conventions. Starmer and Sir Olly Robbins should be Rejoiner comrades-in-arms, not enemies. What passes for affairs of state are in fact internal personality squabbles within the ruling class, a student union-style bust-up, not an open clash of visions. Holier than thou Labour politicians and advisers turned out to be congenital liars who care only about power, titles, freebies and money, even (in Mandelson’s case) at the cost of fraternising with a monstrous paedophile. Britain is in crisis, and yet the rows are not about solutions but about who ticked which box, which part of the processology was swerved, who swore at who. It’s a disgrace, but it represents the natural end product of Blairism, the logical conclusion of a system that rejected the battle of ideas and true democracy and embraced instead a fake moderation, consensualism, feelings over reason and a gradualist socialism. Starmer's government is the natural end product of Blairism Starmer’s disgraceful government is the natural end product of Blairism Credit: Stefan Rousseau/PA The Blairite project began as an attempt to reconcile a hardcore socialist Labour Party with reality (after the collapse of communism and the Thatcherite boom) and the electorate’s aspirations (law and order, mass home ownership and foreign holidays). But Blairism was never merely a form of wet conservatism, though that was the way it was marketed to naive floating voters: it was principally a Left-wing utopian project to socially engineer Britain into a “modern”, “unstuffy”, multicultural, more European society with a larger welfare state. This involved weaponising devolution, waging war on tradition, extremely high levels of immigration, massive stealth taxation and the stoking of a monetary bubble, forging a new “progressive” class through the expansion of university education, shredding ancient liberties, handing massive powers to Brussels, and turbocharging quangocrats, activist civil servants and human rights lawyers. After the Iraq war, the Project’s residual populism (“the political wing of the British people”) vanished as Blair became hated. The MPs’ expenses scandal was a seminal moment, after which Blairism (in which I include Brownism) mutated ever more explicitly into “extreme centrism”, a technocratic, elite rule characterised by a vengeful anti-democratic bent. Triangulation, originally a vote-winning strategy, had become an end in itself; the elites developed a class consciousness as guardians of the nation, tasked with battling the lower middle class’s “reactionary” views. The Project’s partial support for capitalism, captured by Mandelson’s quip that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”, was jettisoned by Gordon Brown during the financial crisis; after that, chancellors lost interest in how economies grow and assumed GDP simply appeared, like manna from heaven, regardless of incentives or regulations, its proceeds ready to be shared. Radical centrism, a product of prosperity, dynamited its own foundations by re-embracing the socialism of the past. Sir Keir Starmer speaks with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at an event following the death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 Sir Keir Starmer speaks with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at an event following the death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 Credit: AFP The electorate became increasingly angry as living standards stagnated, and the pathologies of a system based on ever higher levels of immigration, tax, spend and handouts became harder to deny. The elite’s reaction was to make hatred of democracy a defining feature of their world-view, especially after the ultimate affront of Brexit. The Project’s ultimate triumph was its takeover of the Tory party: the Cameroons doubled down on neo-Blairism, embracing command and control environmentalism, higher taxes, gender ideology and critical race theory, devolution to mediocre apparatchiks, class warfare and membership of the EU and ECHR. Endless delays before implementing Brexit, the party’s rejection of free-market economics, its incompetence and lack of principles over Covid and endless squabbling eventually obliterated the Conservatives. The electorate gave Starmer a last chance to prove that there was still life in Centrist Daddism. His failure means that there is now only one question: will we shift to the Right, or to the far-Left? The two mainstream Right-wing parties have become less differentiated in policy terms, and are now competing more on trust and competence than ideology: Nigel Farage’s Reform has adopted a much more sophisticated, professional Right-wing approach and hired great people, but will they be ready to govern? Kemi Badenoch has upped her game, ditched her predecessor’s technocratic nostrums and embraced thoughtful anti-system thinking, but will secret Blairites in her party stymie her? Reform and Tories could easily destroy each other, allowing the far-Left in. The SNP will triumph in Scotland, blowing up the post-2014 consensus on independence; Plaid Cymru could lead a coalition in Wales. The Lib Dems have lost the plot. The Greens hate the West, believe in Third Worldist, neo-communist and woke ideology, and are soft on Jew-hatred, Islamism and crime. They could end up the biggest Leftist party. The Right-wing parties cannot merely focus on finishing off the managerialists: they must make a strong moral and practical case for why only conservatism, not neo-Marxism, can save Britain. There would be only one thing worse than a Centrist Dad in No 10, and that would be Polanski.