Rue Britannia! (Keir Starmer, powered by A.I.)

Ok he’s managed to outlast both Liz Truss and the lettuce.

Embattled British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer swept into office on a landslide a year ago on July 5th with one of the most curious majority governments in modern history, managing to win 411 parliamentary seats out of 650 but only securing 33.7% of the popular vote. It was clear that the electorate, while fed up with Tory mismanagement (5 prime ministers in as many years) did not exactly warm to either Starmer or his team, but nonetheless because of the U.K.’s first-past-the-post system they still eked out the win.

Turns out that was the easy part.

The famous historian AJP Taylor once wrote that “Nothing is inevitable until it happens,”, rejecting the idea that history unfolds according to a plan, an unsurprising observation, given that Taylor distrusted grand visions. In the case of British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, he actually seems afraid to have one. A year into power, Starmer doesn’t act like a man chosen by history, but one hoping to avoid its glare. At the speed of which modern politics and the pace of change shifts quickly, governing as if nothing has changed is a risk. Yet Sir Keir conflates pragmatism as principle and surrounds himself with advisers fighting the equivalent of the last war, recycling New Labour-era habits: technocracy, market deference and fiscal discipline all the while ignoring what gave the administration actual momentum: Tony Blair’s charismatic leadership.

In a world of Trumpian shocks and geopolitical realignments, that strategy risks looking less like responsible government than stultifying rigidity. What once passed for prudence now borders on whistling past the proverbial graveyard. Change is happening regardless, and at warp speed; the only choice is how to meet it. Retreating to the relative safety of the global stage is no substitute for leadership. Sir Keir cuts a confident figure abroad. At home, the instincts stumble. When a rebellion gutted his own government’s disability benefit cuts, he blamed his failure to grip the issue on being “heavily focused” on foreign affairs, which sounds to a blasé electorate like the political equivalent of ‘the dog ate my homework.’ In seeking gravitas overseas, he found mutiny at home as welfare, winter fuel payments and policy u turns mark (seemingly) every government initiative.

At times Starmer seemed smaller (the incredible shrinking prime minister!) than the issues he is confronted with, more akin to a bank manager or bean counter than the leader of a nuclear-armed G-7 country. Rather than overcoming decline, he appears more like a politician suited to managing it. Instead of offering a transformative vision, his aims are to stabilize a reeling country after a decade of Conservative Party-inspired tumult. There can be no mistaking him for being a leader in the Thatcher or Attlee mold.

In the beating sun of the Downing Street garden last summer — weeks after winning an historic landslide — a downbeat Starmer warned Brits “things will get worse before they get better.” Hardly stirring rhetoric to rally people.

He is gambling is that, in a wildly chaotic time, people do not want a charismatic leader; just someone who won’t make things worse. But his year in office has been marked by churn with little clear direction. By avoiding traditional left-leaning Labour values, he has dulled the party’s voice on justice and solidarity. Furthermore, he also clearly has a tin ear when it comes to misreading where electoral threats lie. While his government obsesses over the radical right and the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, the left is regrouping, young voters are alienated, and Muslim support is fracturing. If a charismatic leftwing rival emerges, Labour’s electoral coalition could be seriously damaged.

Sir Keir has missions; the electorate has other ideas. In 2024 Britain voted for change. In a moment of rupture what cuts through isn’t often competence but conviction and the ability to summon belief, not just manage process. A leader needs more than detailed multiple-point plans, spreadsheets and processes; they need to make history (and the people who help make it) feel possible again. In a nation riven by anger, inequality and economic torpor, the prime minister offers technocratic normality and patience. But post-Covid the national mood has moved substantially past what he’s willing or perhaps able to provide.

With MPs heading off on their summer break in a matter of weeks Labour will have its autumn party conference, swiftly followed by the setting of the U.K.’s budget, which offer the first appreciable tests of whether Starmer can turn things around. His team are already eyeing the conference as a chance for a “reset,” not quite realizing that had they git things more or less right from the start that would be no need for this. Moreover, what that reset moment looks like, most observers feel that not even the government knows, but think they’ve now realized that they need one.

Perhaps the simplest strategic thing No. 10 could do is to redefine what they are and where the government is going in clear, concise fashion.

Yet those efforts to reclaim the narrative could be quickly overshadowed if the government’s spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, downgrades its U.K. economic forecast. U.K. chancellor Rachel Reeves has pledged that the government’s budget should be on course to be balanced or in surplus by 2029-2030, with debt falling as a share of the economy. The rules — meant to shore up market confidence and to show that Labour can cut its cloth accordingly — severely restrain her room for maneuver.

That can only leave politically unpalatable tax rises, but this would be a challenging moment for Reeves, who has repeatedly pledged not to increase taxes on working people in Labour’s manifesto and already stretched that definition with a controversial hike in employer taxes in the government’s first few months. Pressure on her budget could also come from public sector workers desperate for higher pay awards. An unfortunate precedent was created already when Ministers swiftly settled pay disputes last July shortly after coming into office, which in turn gave the impression that the government was anxious to avoid the kind of crippling strikes which bedeviled the Conservatives and so enraged voters.

But the British Medical Association, a trade union representing doctors, is currently embarking on strike action that could last six months. If other unions follow their lead, some services could grind to a halt — hindering Labour’s aspiration for high economic growth.

Domestic Storms

After reckoning that the battered Tories under floundering leader Kemi Badenoch are a sideshow for now, Starmer has identified Farage’s populist-right Reform UK party as Labour’s key opponent. Local elections at which Reform stormed to a host of victories nationwide only bolstered that theory. Yet on a hot-button issue that animates Reform UK voters, the stakes are high.

Labour MPs in Reform-facing seats (many of them the so-called ‘Red Wall’ constituting the ruling party’s core voters) are growing anxious about what they see as little visible progress on either stemming the flow of small boats boarded by irregular migrants across the English Channel — or curbing the use of hotels housing asylum seekers. To that end, Starmer’s recent agreement with Emmanuel Macron on the latter’s state visit might be too little too late, though he did try to put the best face on it.

People coming to the UK would be detained and then sent back to France, Starmer opined. It would be a real deterrent. Indeed, he made it sound as if every irregular migrant who arrived in Dover would be on their way back to France. Not just 50 a week, and in return for each, Britain would take one legitimate asylum seeker from France. But this, he assured us, would be a major deterrent to anyone thinking of making the crossing. Above all, he definitely, definitely wasn’t in the slightest bit disappointed.

Macron, for his part, chose a more decidedly lukewarm approach. Almost as an afterthought – et une autre chose – Macron turned his attention to irregular migration. Oh that? He had almost forgotten about that in all the excitement of meeting King Charles, a topic which he seemed more gushy about. First, he wanted to let the Brits know that the French were busting a gut to stem the flow of migrants. But it wasn’t his problem if they all were dead set on coming to the UK. And he had shut down the road and rail routes, mainly because the smugglers had worked out that small boats were a great deal easier.

And herein lies the other challenges with Starmer’s approach to governance: not only does he have problems with positioning his policies, but his preference for consensual versus unilateral action reflects his legalistic (he was Chief of the Prosecution Service, after all) approach, which in turn amplifies his caution. Working with Interpol, amping up cooperation with other European countries, and investing in intelligence takes time and the public just doesn’t see results – or evidence of movement – fast enough. And the longer this goes on and the illegal migration numbers remain high it might be that that turns out to be really, really tough, the electorate ends up with the perception that Labour don’t really know how to solve this problem.

Foreign Pursuits

Addressing these issues may not even end up at the top of Starmer’s priority list. The attritional war between Russia and Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East will also continue to vie for his attention. Recently, in a weekend interview, Starmer admitted only having turned his attention “fully” to the growing welfare rebellion when he returned from the June 24-25 NATO summit in The Hague and after being “heavily focused” on foreign affairs. Under most circumstances such an admission might be regarded as a rare glimpse of the humanity under his otherwise robotic image but given the feeling that he is already out of touch with daily realities facing voters, it could be electoral poison.

While all prime ministers find themselves consumed by international affairs to some extent, Starmer already has an enormous amount on his plate. The PM is also playing a pivotal role in post-Brexit talks with the EU following his much vaunted “reset” (there’s that word again) with the bloc agreed in May. Rather than delegating to his foreign minister, the somewhat ineffective David Lamy, Starmer has so far held these negotiations close, and they will be another drag on his time away from domestic matters. Ironically, Starmer could take a leaf out of his Conservative predecessor’s book in that Rishi Sunak effectively delegated foreign policy to former Prime Minister David Cameron, who was brought back into the Tory fold and brought much-needed experience and gravitas to international proceedings.

This has brought to light another aspect of Starmer’s technocratic personality in that he clearly loves tactical detail versus strategic visioning and is therefore unlikely to loosen his grip on his international role. With the help of National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell — a Tony Blair-era veteran — it’s the sphere where he feels he has achieved tangible success, keeping up European support for Ukraine and managing relations with the ever-mercurial Donald Trump, with whom he has an undeniably solid relationship (at least more so than most other world leaders, as Mark Carney, Shigeru Ishiba and Lula DaSilva have found out).

Britain is also in a bind when it comes to Chinese matters. It wants to drum up foreign investment in its pursuit of growth — but must rely on a deeply China-skeptical U.S. leadership team as its key security and defense partner. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (instrumental in pushing through a Bill that bans US companies from sourcing goods made by forced labour in China’s western Xinjiang region), Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (who has accused China of building a military dedicated to defeating the US) and CIA Director John Ratcliffe (has labelled China the biggest national security threat to the US) would not see a planned Starmer visit to China in the coming year favorably. It’s no secret that Australian PM Anthony Albanese’s recent jaunt to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping is unlikely to net him a White House Oval Office invite anytime soon, not to mention tough-on-China language in the U.K.-U.S. trade deal the two sides agreed earlier this year.

Starmer will also face renewed calls from his own party backbenchers to take a tougher stance with Israel amid its continued campaign in Gaza — a divisive subject among many of his MPs, some of whom face losing their seats at the next election because of it. And they have been emboldened by his recent U-turn over welfare reform which saw his government essentially gut its own bill in an effort to avoid an embarrassing defeat in parliament, nothing less than unprecedented for an administration with such a vast majority.

Buyers’ Remorse

While Britain’s next general election is likely years away, after a drubbing in the local elections earlier this year, two big tests are coming up that will keep Starmer’s government in perpetual campaign mode, diverting resources and focus.

Scotland and Wales will have elections soon for their devolved assembles in 2026 which will be closely watched to see if Starmer is managing to recover lost ground — or opening up new vulnerabilities. A YouGov poll in May put Plaid Cymru, the center-left Welsh nationalist party, in the lead for next year’s Welsh Senedd election, while Ipsos polling put the Scottish National Party in pole position in Scotland this week.

Both votes take place amid real frustration among voters. While the government has made mistakes, the level of patience among voters has become non-existent, which leads people wanting simple and immediate-sounding answers, a fertile breeding ground for Trumpist wannabes like Nigel Farage and Reform who are good at capitalizing on such feelings. And the wily survivor of so many protest parties he’s created and destroyed has already taken steps to move Reform at least verbally more to the left, sensing widespread anger over Starmer’s stumbles over welfare and winter fuel payments.

The Empire Strikes Back (?)

Whatever else he might be, Keir Starmer is an obviously intelligent man. Indeed, interviews around his first anniversary as PM have shown him to be in a reflective mood.

He admitted his Downing Street Garden warning had “squeezed the hope out,” adding: “We were so determined to show how bad it was that we forgot people wanted something to look forward to as well.”

Another salient quality of his as evidenced in his swing from Jeremy Corbyn supporter when he was a shadow minister to his purge of left-wing supporters after attaining party leadership, is Starmer’s iron-willed ruthlessness and opportunism, qualities which could save his political skin more than any “reset” could.

He and his team now know their likely enemy for the next general election: It’s not the Tories anymore (the Conservatives, always excellent at relentless internecine warfare, seem keen on tearing themselves apart under Badenoch’s hapless leadership) — it’s the forces of populism, and not just Reform. It might even be whatever comes after Reform, assuming (and it’s a BIG assumption) that Farage or his party peaks or self-destructs. Meloni, Milei, LePen, the rise of the AFD have shown that these forces are hydra-headed and can gain power with all the suddenness of a summer squall when the ‘establishment’ least expects them to.

Starmer can reinvent himself as a bulwark against populism and division, calling for unity, consensus and dialogue and making the new Battle of Britain a contest between populism versus delivery, competence versus protest.

Keir Starmer is a serious and cautious politician, favoring incremental, risk-mitigating steps, but a structurally and emotionally broken Britain requires more than moderate gradualism. The recent Labour backbench rebellion has left both the party and the populace at large regarding him as simultaneously detached from the mechanics of leadership and exposed as being uncomfortable with the demands of the intraparty politics so necessary for governance. There’s a small and ever shrinking chance that he is the right leader for a damaged but fixable Britain, though the dismal polls suggest he is instead on course to be the last steward of a disappearing post‑Blairite order. Starmer is neither a flippant, nor obviously cynical man. He is a serious man for serious times. But nor is he the man many imagined when he ran for Labour leader. To be successful he must fight his own inherently cautious instincts and once and for all banish the question of authenticity which so continuously shadows his obvious pragmatism.

To paraphrase no less an effective politician than Ronald Reagan, Britain is at a ‘time for choosing.’ After a prolonged period of austerity, stagnant living standards and eroded institutional legitimacy, the country Starmer leads feels no longer patient – or stable – enough for the kind of politics he believes in. Whether he can change that or is already being shaped by forces out of his ability to control, remains to be seen.