The Rise : A Careful Man for an Exhausted Country

Starmer’s ascent was built on discipline rather than charisma. After taking over a Labour Party left for dead by the 2019 election wipeout, he spent four years methodically dragging it back to the centre, purging the factionalism of the Corbyn years, and presenting himself as the safe, serious alternative to a Conservative Party that had gone through Brexit chaos, Boris Johnson’s scandals, Liz Truss’s mini-budget, and Rishi Sunak’s steadying-but-doomed caretakership. By July 2024, after fourteen years of Tory rule, the country wasn’t so much voting for Starmer as voting to be rid of what came before. He offered competence as a value in itself.

It worked spectacularly at the ballot box, Labour won a 172-seat majority, one of the largest in the party’s history. But the underlying numbers told a more fragile story : Labour took just 33.7% of the vote on a turnout of only 59.7%, meaning roughly one in five eligible voters actually backed the party that would go on to govern with a crushing parliamentary majority. It was a landslide built on a shallow pool of enthusiasm, magnified by the first-past-the-post system rather than reflecting any deep public embrace of Starmer himself. That, in hindsight, may have been the trap.

The Fall : Self-Inflicted Wounds

To be fair to his critics, Starmer made real, serious errors of his own.

Nobody ever quite knew what he stood for. Boris Johnson, whatever his flaws, was instantly legible : “Get Brexit Done” was a slogan you could repeat in a pub. Starmer never found his equivalent. He rebranded his own project multiple times, without any of them fusing into a story voters could tell about him. Andy Burnham, the countries new prime minister, is building his image around devolution. It’s a lesson in political communication that Starmer, for all his lawyerly precision, never absorbed.

The U-turns became the story. Few single decisions damaged Starmer’s standing more than the winter fuel payment cut, announced within weeks of taking office and reversed under pressure less than a year later. It was Labour’s first serious loss of authority, and it set a pattern : announce a difficult, unpopular decision in the name of fiscal discipline, absorb months of backlash, then partially or fully reverse it anyway ; getting the worst of both worlds, the pain of the cut and the humiliation of the climbdown, without the credit for either conviction or compassion. Welfare reform followed a similar arc. Each reversal chipped away at the one asset Starmer was supposed to have in abundance : seriousness.

The Mandelson appointment was a genuine failure of judgment. Appointing Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States, given his long, well-documented, and previously public friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, was a risk Starmer’s own team should never have taken, and when it blew up, first with Mandelson’s sacking in September 2025 and then, more damagingly, with revelations in 2026 that Mandelson had failed his own security vetting before being waved through anyway, it exposed something worse than bad luck.

Starmer told Parliament plainly, “I should not have appointed Peter Mandelson,” and admitted the fault sat with his own judgment. His chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, resigned over it. Whether it reflected genuine ignorance of the risk or a leadership culture too insular to raise the alarm, it was precisely the kind of unforced error a prime minister trying to project competence could not afford.

Layer on top of that a brutal set May 2026 local election results, in which Reform UK surged at Labour’s expense, and the pressure inside his own party became unsustainable. A chief of staff’s resignation, a health secretary’s exit, ministers walking out over a defence funding row, and finally a by-election engineered specifically to bring Andy Burnham back into Parliament so he could challenge for the leadership. By the time Burnham won that seat with a commanding majority, Starmer’s position was no longer really in his own hands.

The Case for More Sympathy

And yet. Strip away the noise, and Starmer’s actual record is not one of scandal or chaos. He wasn’t chased out by a lie about a party during lockdown or a market-crashing budget dreamed up overnight. His worst crime was a bad appointment that he owned up to and reversed. Compare that to the government he replaced : a revolving door of prime ministers undone by personal scandal, economic self-harm, and outright dishonesty. Starmer’s failures were failures of communication and conviction, not of character.

He also inherited an economy still bruised by the pandemic and the energy shock, a public realm - the NHS, prisons, local government - genuinely on its knees after over a decade of underinvestment, and a media environment that had spent years rewarding provocation over substance. Some further key wins include raising the minimum wage, strengthening renters’ rights and renationalising the rail franchises.

Reform UK’s rise wasn’t a verdict on Starmer alone ; it was part of an anti-incumbent wave crashing over governments across the democratic world, largely driven by the same cost-of-living anger that fuels populist movements everywhere.

He was, by nearly every account, boring. He struggled to inspire. He let the vacuum where a compelling story should have been filled instead by his opponents’ louder, simpler ones. Those are real failures for a politician. But boring is not the same as bad, and competent-but-uncharismatic is not the same as dishonest or corrupt. History’s early draft on Starmer has already curdled into mockery. He probably deserves criticism. However, he may not deserve quite as much contempt as he is currently getting for it.