A protester’s anthem, a party’s long knives, and the summer Westminster learned to ignore the voters.
The Machine Finishes the Job
As Keir Starmer surrendered the Labour leadership at the lectern outside Number Ten this morning, a lone protester on the public street drowned him out with the anthem of the European Union. Ode to Joy, Beethoven’s hymn to the brotherhood of man, played at full volume over the very morning a party set about devouring one of its own. The man with the speaker was mourning the Europe this country voted to leave ten years ago this week, and refusing, even now, to accept the answer.
He could not have scored the scene better if we had paid him. The refusal to take no for an answer is the founding reflex of the class Starmer rose to lead, and it was born in that same summer of 2016. On the street it became the long sulk against Brexit. Inside the party it became the coup against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader the members had elected and would re-elect, whom his own frontbench set out to remove regardless.
Sir Keir Starmer was one of them. This morning, at the same black door, the machine he helped to run came back for him.
He had spent weeks swearing he would never say it. Now he has, and with a careful caveat: he stays in post until a contest is settled, so that power passes in an orderly fashion. He has already spoken to the King. He accepts the verdict of his own MPs, in his words, “with good grace.”
Good grace is the language of the defeated who wish to look dignified on the way out. There is no shame in that. There is, however, a story underneath it that no amount of grace can tidy away.
In July 2024, Labour won one of the largest Commons majorities in its history. Two years on, that majority has bought the party almost nothing. It won the machinery of the state and then lost faith in the man pulling the levers. A landslide, it turns out, is not the same as a mandate. You can hold every lever in Whitehall and still command the loyalty of no one, because authority is not a seat count. It is trust, and trust was the one thing this government never managed to manufacture. An Ipsos poll on Friday found a majority of the public already wanted him gone.
The trigger was Andy Burnham. Until last week he was the mayor of Greater Manchester, safely exiled from Westminster. Then a Commons seat fell conveniently vacant in Makerfield, Burnham won it handsomely, and a simmering crisis became a live succession overnight. The choreography was almost too neat. A seat opens; the heir returns; the leader falls. We are invited to call this democracy. We should at least be honest about how little of it the public was ever asked to approve.
Watch, too, who goes down with him.
Rachel Reeves has spent months as the lightning rod for Labour’s fiscal misery, the Chancellor whose name became shorthand for every U-turn and every squeezed budget. A new leader who wishes to draw a line under the Starmer years will want a new face at the Treasury to draw it with. None of this is confirmed. All of it is logical. When a captain goes overboard, the question is never only who takes the wheel; it is who else is quietly handed a lifejacket and shown to the side.
There is one grievance his allies raise that holds up. He did not lose a general election; he won one. A scandal of his own invention felled him; his own benches finished the job for fear of their own seats, and a parliamentary party demanding a coronation it dare not put to the country is not a pretty thing to watch.
That much is fair. The rest is not. Do not let the manner of his going launder the manner of his governing, because from the first day Keir Starmer treated the highest office in the land less as a duty than as a perquisite.
This was the Prime Minister who accepted clothes for himself and for his wife from a party donor, multiple pairs of designer glasses, premium seats for Taylor Swift and Coldplay and Arsenal, more gifts and hospitality than any other member of Parliament, some of it declared late. He dressed for a life most of the people he governed will never touch. He did it while the cost of living ground on for the rest of us, while the two-child benefit cap stayed exactly where he found it, while the winter fuel payment was stripped from millions of pensioners by a decision that appeared in no manifesto anyone had voted for.
He found billions for Ukraine while our own armed forces were told the tin was empty; his own Defence Secretary resigned over it. He declined to call the slaughter in Gaza a genocide, even after a United Nations inquiry and the major human rights organisations had used the word without flinching. Note this well: on that exact word, Andy Burnham has refused it too. The man arriving is not the antidote to the man leaving.
So spare the violins. Starmer was not ambushed by fate. He was holed by the Mandelson affair, a friend of Jeffrey Epstein installed in Washington by his own hand; then he was finished by the only judges ever allowed near the case, the voters, who turned Labour out of town halls the length of the country at the first chance they were given.
Starmer’s admirers will call this a tenure of service. They will speak of duty, of a serious man doing a hard job in hard times. Let them. Five centuries ago, a Florentine who spent his life watching powerful men rise and fall wrote the only epitaph this premiership needs.
It is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles. – Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy
Starmer held the grandest title in the land. He did not honour it. He wore it, the way he wore everything else that was handed to him.
Which brings us back to the coronation, and to why that one fair grievance cuts both ways. If Burnham is installed without a full vote of the membership, let alone the public, then Labour will have done to itself the very thing it spent a decade condemning in the Conservatives: leaders fitted and refitted by the people who run the party, while the voters who lent it power are informed of the result after the fact. Wes Streeting has already said he will stand if there is a contest, which at least raises the prospect of an argument rather than a handover. Whether Labour permits that argument, or smothers it for the sake of a tidy headline, will tell us everything about what the party has become.
Reform has already seen its opening. Within minutes of the resignation, Nigel Farage was demanding “a general election at the soonest possible date,” wrapped in his familiar charge that the Westminster class takes working people for granted and abandons them the moment it has their votes. His party leads the polls and would win a contest called tomorrow, which is precisely why he wants one. On the narrow question of legitimacy, he is not wrong. A governing party that swaps the occupant of Downing Street between elections owes the country an explanation, not a press release.
There is an uncomfortable echo in it for us. Farage sneers that the party means to hand Burnham the country on the strength of a single by-election win. That is very nearly the charge we have made on this page. When the demagogue and the democrat reach for the same sentence, the left has a problem, and the problem is not the sentence. It is that we let him say it first.
The coming week is not really about Burnham, or Reeves, or even Starmer. It is about the one question Westminster keeps refusing to put to the country. Who governs us, and by whose leave?
He came in by the machine, and the machine has spat him out. So let them have their psychodrama, acted out in the mist of those corrupt and crumbling walls of Westminster. The only people never consulted, from the first day to the last, were the public in whose name it was all supposedly done. The question that matters now is not which courtier inherits the crown. It is who, beyond those walls, will carry a vision of a nation that belongs to the people who live in it, now that the party that borrowed their name has shown how little it ever meant by it.
Government of the people, by the people, for the people. That promise was never Westminster’s to keep or to break. It was always ours to make good, and it still is…one day…
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