Colleagues praised the Prime Minister’s record to the rafters while forcing him from office after less than two years
Daily Telegraph 23/06/26
It’s the humbug and hypocrisy that is so infuriating. When the Conservatives topple a leader it is a “psycho-drama” that endangers the stability of the country. Labour exploited this for all they were worth at the 2024 general election.
On the threshold of No 10 as he took over as Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer promised a “return of politics to public service”, implying that his Conservative predecessors had all been in it for themselves.
On Monday, as he endured the same fate as half-a-dozen previous premiers, it was Sir Keir’s turn to wonder what he had done to deserve it. Within hours of his resignation statement, he was being praised to the rafters by the very people who had plunged the knife into his back. Like Caesar, it was a political assassination by his friends, not enemies. Et tu Rachel?
A prime minister with a majority of 160-plus, the first Labour leader to win an election in almost two decades, has been removed after less than two years in office even though most of his colleagues appear to think him a cross between Clement Attlee and Tony Blair.
They were lining up to pay their “greatest respects” for the way he had transformed the party, making it electable once more, while praising his alleged achievements, from halving child poverty to bestriding the world stage like Palmerston.
Listening to this was to ask why, in that case, have you got rid of him? They have dressed up the dirty deed as a service to the nation because their great mission is to dish Reform UK and they did not think Sir Keir was up to the task.
Most of us imagined their role was to govern the country in the interests of the people but evidently not. Sticking it to Nigel Farage is the ultimate goal and Andy Burnham is the man to do it, as he showed at Makerfield last week. Well, if they think his Northern bloke-shtick which played well in a by-election will transfer across the country they are in for a rude awakening.
Moreover, they have failed to understand the lesson from Makerfield. The people there voted not to make Burnham PM but to terminate Starmer’s miserable time in No 10, just as the country in 2024 ganged up to get rid of the Tories, not give Labour a mandate.
Despite being the official Labour candidate, Burnham was the one to back if you were opposed to the Government. That should alarm Labour, not encourage it. As seen in Aberdeen South, where the Tories won because of Ed Miliband’s net zero zealotry, it is policies and their consequences that motivate voters.
Sir Keir was patently not a leader, nor even a politician, and alienated his own party with a series of U-turns and disastrous decisions, not least the appointment of Peter Mandelson to be ambassador in Washington.
He was also not averse to throwing anyone within arm’s length under a bus to divert attention from his own failings, as advisers from Sue Gray to Morgan McSweeney and Ollie Robbins will testify. Why, then, all the gushing post-regicide admiration for a man clearly not up to the job? It is not merely a demonstration of sympathy for his predicament but an expression of Labour’s innate belief in their own higher morality.
Jacqui Smith, one-time home secretary, now a minister in the Lords, spoke on Radio Four about how Starmer was stepping down for the good of the country whose interests he always put first.
Baroness Smith cited falling NHS waiting lists, lower child poverty and “generation-defining change” in workplace rights. He had, apparently, led the country through “uniquely difficult circumstances” and made enormous progress “as Labour governments always do”.
In Lady Smith’s view his defenestration was necessary to ensure that the country could still place their trust in the party because “Labour governments are precious” and must be nurtured. Do they really believe this guff? Sadly, they do. Labour’s smug piety reached its zenith under Tony Blair, who called the Labour Party the “political wing of the British people”, a phrase later adopted by Sir Keir.
It is a form of political narcissism that Andy Burnham also exhibits, a tribal belief in the innate goodness of the socialist creed. It stymies all efforts to reform welfare or the NHS because to do so risks being portrayed as heartless. Far better to let the country go bankrupt than have anyone questioning their intrinsic goodness.
They are now trying to justify what is by any measure the least democratic handover of power since Harold Macmillan when a few Tory grandees summoned the 14th Earl of Home from his Hirsel estate to be prime minister in 1963. At least when Gordon Brown usurped Blair in 2007 he had effectively been running the country for 10 years, so everyone knew where he stood.
Andy Burnham will be the first to take over a governing party without first having held one of the great offices of state. Being Mayor of Greater Manchester is not quite the same as serving as Chancellor or Foreign Secretary. He will do so, it seems likely, without a contest despite Labour in opposition denouncing the Tories, even when their leadership was contested.
Given that he has changed his views and allegiances more regularly than the Vicar of Bray we are entitled to hear him tested at the hustings rather than rely on a few set-piece speeches promised for the coming weeks. But will Al Carns (who has been in the Commons less than two years) or anyone else get the 81 MPs needed to back a challenge?
Moreover, Burnham is not going to hold a general election for the obvious reason that Labour would lose power were he to do so. Burnham showed at Makerfield that he is a gambler, but he is not a reckless one.
After all, he kept open the option of returning to his job as mayor had he lost, hedging his bets. Even if there is a Burnham Bounce in the polls, as there will be, he will not risk an election that Reform UK might win and end up as the most vilified Labour leader since Ramsay MacDonald.
Yet when Rishi Sunak took over from Liz Truss in 2022, Angela Rayner for one said: “The public deserve their say on Britain’s future through a General Election.”
On the day Ms Truss’s premiership was terminated after just 49 days, a message appeared on X, the former Twitter platform, that read “GeneralElectionNow”. The tweeter was Andy Burnham. Humbug and hypocrisy.
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