Once Keir Starmer had beaten the left, he had no plan for government

As a candidate for the leadership of his party, Keir Starmer’s pitch to Labour voters was this: keep most of Jeremy Corbyn’s policies but present them with a suit on and a tie done up.

The people behind his campaign to replace Corbyn, which began months before the 2019 election in which the veteran left-winger was dispatched by Boris Johnson, saw Starmer as the best person to deliver this message. 

With the backing of Morgan McSweeney, Peter Mandelson, Roger Liddle and other figures on the right wing of the Labour Party, Starmer became leader. He made ten left-wing pledges to the Labour Party members who elected him. All were subsequently abandoned or watered down.

First as Labour leader, then as prime minister, Starmer kept the appearance of managerial, suit and tie professionalism, while abandoning the policies he said he’d carry over from Corbyn, the man he had described as a friend. 

“The door is open, and you can leave,” Starmer told left-wingers, who he disparaged as antisemites.

But, according to civil servants, former legal colleagues and Labour Party sources who spoke to Middle East Eye, Starmer, who has resigned as the most unpopular prime minister the UK has had in decades, also failed when it came to being the grown-up politician who knew how to get things done.

This, they said, was evident in how he governed, and evident in the UK’s approach to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, where the norms of international law were abandoned.

'Rubbish on all metrics'

According to people who know him - including those who play football with Starmer close to his home in Kentish Town, north London - the prime minister is defined by his ambition and competitive spirit. He hates to lose. But having got to the top, he did not know what to do, and lost it all in less than two years.

“He was rubbish on all metrics, apart from the fact that he isn’t a liar or a cheat – but really that should be an entry requirement,” one civil servant, who worked with Starmer and his former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, told MEE. 

'Height, voice, inspiration, achieving anything: he was rubbish on all fronts'

- British civil servant

“Height, voice, inspiration, achieving anything: he was rubbish on all fronts.”

The British official said that McSweeney, a Labour operative and close friend of Peter Mandelson’s who is credited with masterminding Starmer’s ascent to power, “had no idea what to do with the control he had once he was in government”. 

“He was a campaigner,” another civil servant said of McSweeney, “and he just stayed in that mode once he was in government. He didn’t look to get things done.

“Leadership at this moment needs three things: vision, a clear sense of where we are taking the country and why,” Labour MP Clive Lewis told MEE. 

“It needs empathy, a real grasp of how people are living and what they are up against. And it needs a plan equal to the scale of what we face. Keir had none of these. 

“Even so he would not be the first PM to be guilty of such failings. But these are not normal times. Facing us is the spectre of the far right and such failings become catastrophic as opposed to just electorally problematic. That could not be allowed. Hence his early departure.”

Starmer against the left

With over £700,000 in undisclosed funding – some of it from staunchly pro-Israel business figures like Trevor Chinn – McSweeney’s Labour Together organisation took back control of the Labour Party for its right wing, with Starmer as figurehead.

A source who has known McSweeney and his family since his childhood in County Cork, Ireland, described to MEE a man driven by his hatred of Corbyn and the Labour left, which he had clashed with as an organiser in different parts of London. 

'Keir Starmer ends as he started: with lies'

- Jeremy Corbyn

“He’s a neoliberal,” the source said of McSweeney, who tends to be described as economically left of centre, but socially conservative. “He joined the Labour Party because he knew he had a chance of doing well there… The contempt he and his wife [Imogen Walker, who became a Labour MP in 2024] have for Corbyn, is visceral.”  

This contempt was present even in Starmer’s resignation speech. In fact, it was front and centre. 

The outgoing prime minister said he had inherited a Labour Party “that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt”. He said he had ripped out “the poison of antisemitism, restoring trust on the economy, defence, and national security”.

Responding, a spokesperson for Corbyn told MEE: "Keir Starmer ends as he started: with lies. Corbyn turned Labour into the largest party in Europe, built and funded by half a million people who believed in social justice and peace.

"Starmer swapped political principles for corporate donors – and leaves behind a legacy of broken pledges, grotesque inequality and complicity in genocide. If that isn't moral bankruptcy, then what is?"

Starmer and Gaza

On Monday, the day of Starmer’s resignation, Corbyn will formally re-present his bill for an independent inquiry into the British government’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Madeleine Rees, a British human rights lawyer who worked closely with Starmer in the 1990s, pointed to Starmer’s position on Gaza as a key failing. 

'He capitulated on things he really shouldn’t have. The biggest of these was Gaza'

- Madeleine Rees, human rights lawyer

Another lawyer, who also worked with Starmer in his early days as a liberal barrister, said that there were now very few colleagues of the prime minister’s from his days at Doughty Street Chambers who would still defend him. 

“I didn’t think his reign would be so short. It shows how important optimism is,” Rees told MEE. “He capitulated on things he really shouldn’t have. The biggest of these was Gaza. Abetting a genocide. He could have taken a legal stand and called it a crime.

“I feel sorry for him because he is a decent man, despite all this, and this will be super hard for him,” she said.

Away from Gaza, an Indian foreign policy adviser and analyst asked MEE: “Have you an inkling of what UK policy on Afghanistan, Pakistan, southeast Asia, Hong Kong and India is? I have no clue what the UK stands for anymore.”

The adviser, who participated in negotiations over the UK-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA), said that this deal would “make rich UK wallahs richer. What is the UK but land around the City of London?”

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“Starmer’s foreign policy was foreign to the UK’s interests,” the Indian source said. “The development aid is gone. The BBC has no support from them. British universities in India are all shops, with no research and development angle.”

Andy Burnham is now expected to replace Starmer. One left-wing Labour activist said he feared the “king of the north” would be “Starmer 2.0”. 

Josh Simons, who replaced McSweeney as chief of Labour Together before becoming the MP for Makerfield in 2024, gave up his seat for Burnham and was a very visible presence during the by-election campaign. 

Wes Streeting, preferred candidate of Labour’s right wing, has thrown his support behind Burnham, having resigned as health secretary last month. If he gets a top job, the party’s left will face a struggle for relevance.

John McDonnell, shadow chancellor under Corbyn, has called for Labour to return to being a “broad church”, “in which the views of the full range of traditions, left, right and centre, are respected and engaged with”.

Asked by MEE if this broad church was likely to appear, McDonnell said: “We’ll see, but if the broad church is not re-established, any administration will fail.”