You’ll miss Starmer when he’s gone

Wes Streeting’s tanks are on his lawn - and like the Germans in 1945, he’s beset on both his left and his right with no way out.

For all the cheers that you’ll hear from political opponents when he gets the lectern out for the last time, I would like to pose something that many should bear in mind in the coming weeks and months: you’re going to miss him when he’s gone.

Starmer’s cardinal sin was to be in hock to his own backbenchers.

He told us what we were getting. Right from the get-go, Sir Keir warned the hardworking men and women of Britain that it would get worse before it gets better. Many scoffed at a lack of optimism, said he was “talking the country down”, and those babbling children should be derided.

If you’re a voter who thought within two years that everything would be fine and dandy, then you are fundamentally unserious. And one problem that Starmer has faced is an electorate divorced from reality and a political opposition more than willing to peddle fantasies for their own ends.

These delusions are coming from all sides: from Reform and the Tories, who are selling the same sunlit uplands snake oil: Vote us in and everything will be brilliant!

And it is also, perhaps more damagingly, coming from the scores of Labour MPs who’ve decided to build their profile on the back of stifling the very government to which they owe their political life.

As they sharpen their daggers, these wishy-washy fantasists who sit behind Sir Keir have demanded a government focused on delivery. All while blocking the difficult trade-offs that must be made to bring about the change the country voted overwhelmingly for just 22 months ago.

Welfare reform? Watered down after backbench rebellion.

Winter fuel payment means-testing? Reversed after MPs' whining.

Anything that remotely resembles good governance? Not Labour enough.

No matter how you slice it, the Government’s slate of U-turns, for which the public has rightly chastised them, lies squarely at the feet of those who care more about their political fortunes than the right decisions for the country.

And now those people are going to install another leader in the hopes that they can wipe their slate clean and make them feel good about themselves at the expense of the country.

But when Prime Minister Streeting, Rayner, or Miliband proves just as ineffective, maybe then will be the time to reflect on their own role in handing Nigel Farage the keys to Number 10.

When the dust settles and they have their shiny new figurehead to blame, these idealists will find that, without Starmer to hate, the country will wake up, figure out who the true blockages are in the government pipeline, and flush them out for good.

A new leader’s best hope for effecting anything approaching proper change: call the blockers out, tell the public their names, and make them the poster-children for obstructionism.

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Chay Quinn is a journalist at LBC.

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