Keir Starmer had the lot. A historic majority and an exhausted electorate handing him the keys after fourteen years of Conservative chaos. Most politicians spend entire careers dreaming of the position he walked into in July 2024. He then spent the following two years doing something quite extraordinary with it — throwing it away like a man determined to prove a point nobody had asked him to make.

Chasing Farage’s Shadow

Faced with Nigel Farage’s ascent and Reform hoovering up disaffected voters, Starmer’s brain trust landed on a strategy with a well-documented track record of failure: become a slightly blander version of the thing you’re competing with. For instance, Kamala Harris tried precisely that in the American presidential election, and lost.

Granted, Starmer had won his election, though it is worth remembering how. The Conservatives had spent fourteen years exhausting the country, and by 2024 a moderately organised book club could have beaten them. Labour did not so much win as stand in the right place while the other lot collapsed. The mandate was real; the enthusiasm behind it, considerably less so.

Reaching rightward from that position, in a different political system and an admittedly different cultural environment, still carried the same fundamental flaw Harris had demonstrated — it only legitimises the opposition. Reform voters were never coming back, and the people who actually elected Labour watched the transformation with mounting dismay before quietly decamping to the Greens. The numbers bore this out with brutal clarity.

How Little Actually Changed

Power, in Starmer’s hands, became something to be administered rather than exercised. The fiscal imagination during his time as PM was non-existent, the political courage thinner still, and the communities that had lent Labour their votes found themselves receiving a more softly spoken version of the Conservative settlement they had just voted to escape.

For instance, the two-child benefit cap, one of the crueller legacies of the austerity years, survived intact. Furthermore, winter fuel payments were stripped from pensioners who depended on them. On immigration, the government reached for a tone of barely concealed alarm, apparently persuaded that absorbing the language of the right was a form of competition rather than a weak concession.

Yesterday morning, standing outside Downing Street for the last time, Starmer declared that he had inherited a morally bankrupt party and spent his leadership restoring its integrity. The conviction with which he told that story would be admirable, were the story even remotely true.

Throughout the genocide in Gaza, he maintained unwavering support for Israel with a steadiness that grew harder to reconcile with the images coming out of the region with every passing week.

As the civilian death toll climbed into the tens of thousands and international consensus shifted around him, people took to the streets — moved by the kind of collective moral urgency that governments are supposed to respond to, rather than suppress. His administration chose suppression, and that a former human rights lawyer oversaw all of this is not merely ironic; it is the central contradiction of his entire premiership, the thread that, once pulled, unravels everything else.

Andy Burnham and the Difficult Road Ahead

Andy Burnham, the former Mayor of Greater Manchester, is widely expected to succeed Starmer as Prime Minister following his decisive victory in the Makerfield by-election last week. Nominations open on July 9th, and barring a surprise, the keys to Downing Street appear to be heading north.

The policy direction is genuinely interesting. Burnham has spoken about bringing water, energy and transport back under meaningful public control, pointing to what he achieved with Greater Manchester’s buses as a working model rather than an ideological abstraction.

A land value tax, long considered one of the more elegant solutions to Britain’s dysfunctional relationship with property, is on the table. So is the biggest council house building programme since the Second World War and long-overdue reform of social care — an issue Burnham has been arguing for since 2006, which at least suggests the conviction is genuine.

The fiscal constraints are real, however, and Burnham has been careful not to pretend otherwise. He has committed to Rachel Reeves’ economic rules and ruled out increases to the main rates of income tax, VAT or National Insurance, which means the ambition will need to be funded creatively rather than simply. Whether the land value tax and reformed public investment can carry the weight of everything he is promising remains the central question his leadership will have to answer.

We have been at this particular junction before. Politicians in waiting are always more interesting than politicians in office, and the distance between a by-election campaign and the reality of governing is, historically, vast.

On Gaza, for instance, there has been no indication of any meaningful shift in Britain’s position. Burnham has said little that would suggest the foreign policy consensus is about to change, which means the moral questions Starmer so conspicuously failed to answer are likely to follow his successor through the same door.

The difficulties Burnham inherits extend well beyond a battered party and a fractured electorate — he takes on a country genuinely uncertain about its direction, a five-way political landscape that no modern leader has had to navigate, and expectations inflated by two years of profound disappointment. That is an extraordinarily difficult inheritance, and warm words about buses in Greater Manchester, however well-intentioned, will only carry so far.