The Last Days of Keir Starmer
Stylistic model: The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer
1.
There is a photograph of Keir Starmer leaving 10 Downing Street on the morning of Monday 9 February 2026. He is wearing a dark suit—we might assume it was paid for, this time, by himself—and his expression has the quality of a man who has just been told something he already knew but didn't want confirmed. Behind him the black door is still swinging shut. It hasn't closed yet, but it's closing. The whole image has that quality, actually: of a door not yet shut but swinging, of a threshold between one state and another.
I keep returning to this photograph. Not because it tells you anything particularly revelatory about Starmer—he looks roughly how he always looks, which is to say like a man who has been asked to impersonate a prime minister and is doing his best—but because of what was happening just off-camera. His chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, had resigned the day before. His communications director, Tim Allan, would resign later that same day. The leader of Scottish Labour, Anas Sarwar, was at that very hour preparing to stand before cameras in Glasgow and publicly call for Starmer to step down. The whole structure was shaking. And there was Starmer, leaving for work.
2.
Geoff Dyer wrote about Roger Federer that the interesting thing was not the moment of retirement itself but the long, complicated stretch of time leading up to it: the period in which everyone, including Federer, knows that the end is approaching but nobody can say exactly when it will arrive. The question is not will this end, but when and how. And crucially: does the person involved know? Can they feel it?
With politicians it is different, because the decline is not physical but something more nebulous—a loss of authority, of plausibility, of whatever ineffable quality allowed them to walk into a room and have people believe they belonged at the front of it. The knees don't give out. The backhand doesn't desert them. What goes is harder to name. But you can see it going.
3.
Here is what we know about Keir Rodney Starmer, born 2 September 1962 in Southwark, raised in Oxted, Surrey. His mother, Josephine, was a nurse. She had Still's disease, an autoimmune condition that kept landing her in hospital throughout his childhood. His father, Rodney, was a toolmaker—a fact Starmer has mentioned so often in speeches and interviews that it became a kind of running joke, then a kind of meme, then a source of genuine irritation to people across the political spectrum who felt they were being managed by the repetition.
"My dad was a toolmaker." He said it at the TUC. He said it at PMQs. He said it in leadership hustings. He said it the way Americans say "I grew up in a small town"—as credentials, as proof of ordinariness, as a ticket punched.
The details, as they often are, were slightly more complicated than the telling. Rodney Starmer appears to have run his own business, the Oxted Tool Company, operating from a rented workshop on an industrial estate. He was not, in other words, a man clocking in on someone else's factory floor, though the phrase "toolmaker" was always deployed in a way that let you assume exactly that. This is not a scandal. It is something much more characteristic: a small, unnecessary flattening of the truth in the service of a narrative that didn't need flattening.
4.
Starmer's brother Nick, younger by a year, was born with learning difficulties. He trained as a toolmaker himself—a nod to his father—and settled in Leeds. He died on Boxing Day 2024, five months after Keir became Prime Minister, after a battle with cancer. He was sixty.
Keir has said that his brother's difficulties shaped his view of the world. He avoids words like "thick" or "stupid" to describe anyone, he once explained, because of what Nick endured on the playground. There is something painful in this—in the image of a boy defending his brother—and something genuine. Whatever you think of Starmer's politics, this story rings true. It is one of the few things about him that does not feel rehearsed.
5.
I want to dwell on the toolmaker business for a moment, because it gets at something essential about the problem. Starmer is a man who was named after the first parliamentary leader of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie. He grew up in a Labour household. He studied law at Leeds and then Oxford. He co-founded Doughty Street Chambers. He defended activists in the McLibel trial—one of the longest libel cases in British legal history—for free, for a decade. He challenged the death penalty across the Caribbean and Africa, saving, by one account, the lives of 417 people on death row in Malawi alone. He was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions in 2008 and ran the Crown Prosecution Service for five years. He was knighted in 2014.
This is, by any reasonable standard, an extraordinary CV. It is the CV of a serious person who has done serious, often admirable things. And yet something about the way Starmer presents himself—the relentless emphasis on the toolmaker dad, the careful suppression of anything that might mark him as exceptional—suggests a fundamental discomfort with his own story. As though the story, told straight, wouldn't be enough.
6.
There is a useful comparison to be made with Tony Blair, though Starmer would probably hate it. Blair was instinctively at ease with performance. He understood, almost physically, that politics is a kind of theatre. He could project warmth, conviction, even vulnerability, and whether these projections were "real" or not was beside the point—they worked. People felt something when they listened to him. Even people who disagreed with him felt something.
Starmer provokes almost nothing. This was, for a while, treated as a feature rather than a bug. After the psychodrama of the Corbyn years and the chaos of Boris Johnson, here was a man who was calm, lawyerly, sensible. The grownup in the room. The boring one. But boring-ness, it turns out, has a shelf life as a political strategy. Once it stops being a relief, it just becomes boring.
7.
In July 2024, Labour won 411 seats and a parliamentary majority of 174. It was the largest Labour majority since Blair's first win in 1997. The Conservatives were reduced to 121 seats. Starmer walked into Downing Street on a wave that felt, if not like enthusiasm, then at least like exhaustion—the country's exhaustion with the Tories, which had curdled into something close to disgust after the revolving door of Johnson, Truss, and Sunak.
But Robert Ford's description of Labour's "Jenga tower" was apt. The landslide was built on under 34 per cent of the vote. A staggering 48 per cent of Labour voters told pollsters they were voting primarily to "get the Tories out." The mandate, in other words, was negative. It was a mandate to not be the other lot. This is a perilous foundation on which to build anything, and it has been collapsing almost since the moment it was erected.
8.
Within weeks of taking office, the trouble started. Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that the winter fuel payment—a benefit of up to £300 per year that had been paid to all pensioners—would now be means-tested, restricting it to those on pension credit. More than nine million pensioners lost the payment overnight. The decision was presented as fiscal necessity, a response to what Labour described as a £22 billion "black hole" left by the Conservatives.
It may well have been the right decision on the merits. But it was made with breathtaking political clumsiness: announced in the first weeks of government, without consultation, without warning, without any effort to soften the blow or explain the reasoning in human terms. It was, as Diane Abbott later put it, Starmer's poll tax—a policy that "cut through" to voters in the way that most policies never do, becoming a symbol of something larger: indifference, arrogance, the sense that these people didn't understand ordinary life.
9.
Then came the freebies. Lord Waheed Alli, a Labour donor, had given Starmer more than £30,000 worth of clothing, spectacles, and personal shopping services. The glasses alone cost £2,485. His wife, Victoria, received £5,000 for clothes and alterations. Starmer had used Alli's £18 million Covent Garden penthouse so his son could revise for GCSEs "in peace." The Labour Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, defended the donations by arguing that world leaders need to look their best—a line so tin-eared it could have been written by a satirist.
This was not corruption in any legal sense. The rules were followed, more or less. But for a government that had campaigned on integrity, that had positioned itself as the anti-sleaze alternative, the optics were catastrophic. Here was a prime minister who had just cut heating subsidies for pensioners while accepting designer spectacles from a millionaire. The jokes wrote themselves. More damagingly, they stuck.
10.
I think about Dyer's observation that Federer's genius was in making the most efficient way to play tennis also the most beautiful. There was no gap between form and function. Starmer represents something like the opposite: a man whose content and delivery are perpetually at war with each other. He says reasonable things in unreasonable ways. He has good instincts wrapped in bad presentation. He is, as someone once said of Gordon Brown, a man who could walk into an empty room and still somehow rub people up the wrong way.
11.
What does Starmer actually believe? This question has followed him throughout his career. As a young man he edited a socialist magazine, Socialist Alternatives, which later merged with Socialist Lawyer. He was involved in the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. He described himself, in those years, as being on the Left. Then he became DPP and was, necessarily, politically neutral. Then he became a Labour MP and shifted rightward. Then he ran for the leadership on ten pledges—several of which he later abandoned—positioning himself as the unity candidate who could bridge the Corbyn left and the centrist mainstream.
The pledges were ditched with the casualness of a man clearing his desk. Nationalisation of energy? Gone. Abolishing tuition fees? Gone. Common ownership of rail, mail, and water? Partially gone. Defenders say this was pragmatism. Critics call it dishonesty. The truth is probably somewhere messier: Starmer is a man who believes in winning, and who will say what is necessary to win, and who then struggles to explain what winning was for.
12.
By January 2026—eighteen months into his premiership—Starmer's net favourability rating had fallen to minus 57, the lowest recorded by YouGov for any prime minister other than Liz Truss. Three-quarters of the public viewed him unfavourably. A majority, 55 per cent, believed he should resign as Labour leader. Reform UK, Nigel Farage's party, was polling at around 29 per cent—ten points ahead of Labour's 20. The first MRP projections of 2026 showed Reform winning 381 seats at the next election, with Labour collapsing to 85. No major party in British history had experienced such a rapid reversal of fortune.
These numbers are so dramatic they almost cease to feel real. They exist in a realm of abstraction, of hypotheticals, of what-ifs projected forward across years. But they have a gravitational pull on the present. They are the numbers that Labour MPs see when they close their eyes at night.
13.
The Mandelson affair was, in some ways, the most predictable of all Starmer's crises. Peter Mandelson—twice-resigned cabinet minister, architect of New Labour, veteran of more comebacks than Lazarus—was appointed as British Ambassador to Washington in December 2024. The appointment was controversial at the time: Mandelson's friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was already well known. But Starmer, or more precisely Morgan McSweeney, pressed ahead. Mandelson had contacts, trade expertise, a relationship with the incoming Trump administration. The potential rewards were judged to outweigh the risks.
This is the kind of calculation that looks rational on paper and disastrous in retrospect. When the US Department of Justice released millions of pages of Epstein-related documents on 30 January 2026, the extent of Mandelson's relationship with the financier became horribly clear. Emails suggested he had shared market-sensitive government information with Epstein during the 2008 financial crisis. Payments totalling $75,000 had flowed from Epstein to accounts linked to Mandelson. The Metropolitan Police raided two of his properties. Mandelson resigned from the Labour Party and the House of Lords.
Starmer had already fired Mandelson from the ambassadorship back in September 2025, after earlier revelations. But the damage was done. The question was not whether Mandelson was compromised—by February 2026, that was beyond doubt—but why Starmer had appointed him in the first place, knowing what he knew.
14.
On Sunday 8 February 2026, Morgan McSweeney resigned. He was forty-eight, the architect of Labour's election victory, Starmer's closest political adviser. His resignation statement said: "The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was wrong. He has damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself." The following day, Tim Allan, the communications director, also quit. That afternoon, Anas Sarwar called his press conference in Glasgow.
Eurasia Group, the political analysis firm, put the probability of Starmer's removal from office in 2026 at 80 per cent.
15.
And yet. Here we are, on 11 February 2026, and Starmer is still Prime Minister. He survived the crisis—if "survived" is the right word for what happened—by doing what he has always done: fighting. At a meeting of more than 400 Labour MPs and peers on Monday evening, he was reportedly pugnacious, defiant. "I have won every fight I've ever been in," he told them. "I'm not prepared to walk away from my mandate and my responsibility to my country or to plunge us into chaos as others have done."
The cabinet rallied around him, or at least performed the appearance of rallying. Angela Rayner, the former Deputy Prime Minister and widely assumed leadership contender, posted a message of support. So did Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, the other obvious challenger. Ed Miliband said his colleagues had "looked over the precipice and they didn't like what they saw."
16.
This is one of the peculiarities of British politics: the frequency with which parties decide not to remove their leaders, even when doing so would appear to be in their obvious interest. The calculation is always the same. The devil you know. The chaos of a contest. The uncertainty of the alternative. The Conservatives went through this repeatedly between 2022 and 2024, cycling through prime ministers with such speed that the famous Downing Street cat, Larry, was deployed as a punchline in every editorial.
Labour MPs are terrified of repeating that spectacle. And so they stick with Starmer, not out of loyalty or love or belief, but out of fear that removing him would make things worse. This is not exactly a ringing endorsement. It is the political equivalent of keeping a leaking boat because you're afraid the replacement might sink.
17.
Tim Bale, the politics professor at Queen Mary University of London, put it plainly: "It's very difficult to imagine, after the shellacking that the party will presumably face in May, him continuing to lead the party much beyond this summer." Then he added the inevitable caveat: "Though in British politics, nothing is impossible."
May. That is the next inflection point. Local elections across England. The Gorton and Denton by-election on 26 February, a four-way race in a seat Labour held with over 50 per cent of the vote less than two years ago. These are the tests that will determine whether the reprieve granted on Monday night is a stay of execution or something more durable.
18.
I want to return to the question of endings, which is what all of this is really about. Dyer's book on Federer is interested in the period when the end becomes visible but has not yet been named—when the champion is still playing but the magic is intermittent, when the body (or the party, or the government, or the idea) can no longer do what it once did. The question "when does the end begin?" is also, of course, the question "when did the beginning end?"
For Starmer, you could argue the end began on day one: that the mandate was hollow from the start, that the 2024 election was won by default, that the Jenga tower was always going to topple. Or you could argue it began with the winter fuel cut, or the freebies, or the appointment of Mandelson. Or you could argue—and this is the most troubling possibility of all—that the end began long before any of these specific events, in the slow accumulation of a public sense that Starmer had nothing particular to say.
19.
There is a wonderful passage in Dyer's book where he writes about Bob Dylan in the late period—the voice shot to hell, the songs reconfigured beyond recognition, the nightly concerts that are either transcendent or terrible depending on who you ask. Dylan doesn't care. He keeps going. The voice is ruined but the phrasing is immaculate. The songs are unrecognisable but somehow more true to themselves than the originals. It is a mode of creative survival that depends on the performer's absolute refusal to care what anyone thinks of them.
Starmer, by contrast, cares very much. His entire career has been built on the careful management of impression. The problem is that the impression he manages to project is one of careful management. There is no Dylan-esque indifference to consequences, no willingness to be ugly or strange or inexplicable. There is only the suit, the briefing, the careful answer to the careful question. And when the crisis comes—as it always does—there is nothing in reserve. No wildness to draw on. No depth of weirdness or conviction to sustain him.
20.
Consider the trajectory. In the 2024 general election, Labour won on the slogan "Change." By January 2026, nearly three-quarters of voters said things were getting worse. Only 8 per cent thought things were getting better. In an interview with the New Statesman, Starmer suggested there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the country—that it just needed competent management after the chaos of the Tory years. This is an astonishing thing for a Prime Minister to say when economic optimism is at its lowest since 1978.
The New Statesman interview is revealing in another way. It shows a man who genuinely believes that the mere fact of replacing the Conservatives should have been enough—that the country's problems were essentially problems of personnel, not structure. This is the lawyer's mindset applied to politics: the belief that the system works, that it just needs the right person operating it. It is, to put it mildly, an inadequate theory of change.
21.
Starmer has been through two chiefs of staff, four directors of communications, and multiple lower-level staff changes in Downing Street. He has been forced into U-turns on welfare cuts, winter fuel payments, and mandatory digital ID cards. He has faced rebellions on Gaza, on economic policy, on civil liberties. His own Scottish leader has called for his resignation on live television. The man who was once described as "forensic" in his dismantling of Boris Johnson at PMQs now finds himself unable to land a punch on anyone, least of all himself.
And yet—and here is the thing that makes this story genuinely difficult to tell—he has also done things. He rallied international support for Ukraine. He persuaded Donald Trump to sign a trade deal easing tariffs on British goods. He visited China, the first British prime minister to do so since 2018. These are not trivial achievements. They are the kinds of things that, in a different political atmosphere, might have earned him credit. But credit is precisely what Starmer has run out of.
22.
Federer's last match was at the Laver Cup in September 2022. He played doubles alongside Rafael Nadal, his great rival. They lost. Afterwards, both of them wept. It was, by universal consensus, a beautiful ending—generous, shared, full of feeling. The tears were real. Federer had decided, and the decision was his.
Prime ministers do not, as a rule, get to choose their endings. The exceptions—Blair, who timed his departure with characteristic slickness; Cameron, who resigned with a certain patrician grace after losing the Brexit referendum—only highlight the general rule. Most are dragged out. Thatcher. Brown. May. Johnson. Truss, who lasted forty-nine days, which is not really an ending so much as a correction. The party decides, or the electorate decides, or events decide, and the leader is left to find words for a moment they didn't author.
23.
What would Starmer's departure look like? Under Labour rules, a leadership challenge requires a challenger to secure nominations from 20 per cent of Labour MPs and MEPs. The challenger and the incumbent are then put to a ballot of party members and affiliated supporters. If Starmer refused to go voluntarily, this is the mechanism that would force the question.
The names circulate. Angela Rayner, the former Deputy PM, who pushed for radical tax alternatives in a leaked memo. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, who was accused last November of plotting a coup and responded by saying he was not "plotting" but "planning." Ed Miliband, who led Labour to defeat in 2015 and has been reborn as a cabinet minister with soft-left credentials. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Manchester, who tried to become the Labour candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election and was blocked by the NEC.
None of them is obviously better. None of them polls dramatically differently. A Burnham-led Labour would gain perhaps five points, which is nowhere near enough. The leadership question is paralysing precisely because there is no clear answer.
24.
When Dyer writes about Nietzsche's collapse in Turin—the philosopher embracing a horse that was being beaten in the street, then losing his mind entirely—he is interested in the way a career can end not with a whimper but with an eruption, a moment that seems to concentrate all the pressures that have been building for years into a single, shattering instant. The Mandelson crisis has something of this quality for Starmer. It is not really about Mandelson at all. It is about everything else: the freebies, the winter fuel, the U-turns, the polls, the absence of direction, the feeling—shared by supporters and opponents alike—that this government has no idea why it exists.
The Epstein files were the horse in the street. Starmer reached out and the world came crashing down.
25.
There is an argument—made by Starmer's remaining defenders, and by some disinterested observers—that he is being judged unfairly. The global context is brutal: inflation, geopolitical instability, Trump, the aftershocks of COVID and Brexit. Any prime minister would struggle. The Conservatives are so diminished that there is no plausible alternative government—only the spectre of Reform, which most of the political establishment regards as a nightmare. Better, the argument goes, to stick with the flawed but decent man than to throw the country into further chaos.
This argument has the virtue of being partially true and the defect of being deeply uninspiring. "Better than the alternative" is not a slogan. It is not even a strategy. It is the last refuge of a political project that has run out of positive reasons for its own existence.
26.
Starmer plays football every Sunday. He describes himself as a "box-to-box midfield general," though teammates are said to offer a more modest assessment. He supports Arsenal. He is a vegetarian. He was, for a time, a decent amateur footballer and a decent amateur human being who happened to end up in the most exposed position in British public life.
There is something almost poignant about the Sunday football, about the idea of this beleaguered man running around a park in London with his mates while Reform UK leads the polls by ten points and the commentariat sharpens its knives. The normalcy of it. The determined ordinariness. Even now, with everything falling apart, you sense that Starmer would rather be on the pitch, making a late run into the box, than standing at the dispatch box trying to explain why he appointed Peter Mandelson.
27.
Dyer writes about late style—the concept, borrowed from Adorno, of what happens to an artist's work in the final period, when the conventions of the form can no longer contain what the artist is trying to express. Beethoven's late quartets. Turner's paintings of dissolving light. The work becomes stranger, more difficult, more itself.
Politicians don't have a late style, exactly. They have a late period, but it tends to involve less art, not more. The late-period prime minister becomes rigid where they were once flexible, defensive where they were once bold. They repeat themselves. They retreat into formula. They give speeches that sound like press releases and press releases that sound like nothing at all.
Starmer's late period, if that's what this is, has been characterised by exactly this kind of narrowing. The messaging is tighter but emptier. The defiance is real but directionless. "I will never walk away from the mandate I was given to change this country," he said on the day after the crisis. But what change? Change into what? The sentence has the cadence of conviction without any of its content.
28.
Here is what I think will happen, though I may be wrong. Starmer will survive until the May local elections. The results will be terrible—worse, perhaps, than anyone in the Labour Party is currently willing to admit. Reform will make dramatic gains. Labour will lose hundreds of council seats. The Gorton and Denton by-election will be a bloodbath, whoever wins. And then the pressure will become irresistible.
By summer, Starmer will go. Not in a dramatic coup—Labour is too cautious for that—but in the way these things usually happen: a series of conversations, a growing consensus, a moment when the leader looks around the room and sees that the room has decided. He will announce that he is standing down to spend more time with his family, or to reflect on his contribution, or some other formula that allows everyone to pretend this was voluntary. The cabinet will thank him for his service. The leadership contest will begin. And within a few weeks, the man who was Prime Minister will become a figure of historical curiosity—a transitional figure, a footnote, a name that future students will struggle to remember.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps he will cling on, the way leaders sometimes do, sustained by stubbornness and the absence of a credible alternative. Perhaps the crisis will pass, the polls will stabilise, and by the time of the next general election in 2029 the whole Mandelson affair will be a distant memory. British politics is volatile enough to make any prediction look foolish within months.
29.
The human rights lawyer who saved 417 lives in Malawi. The DPP who reformed the Crown Prosecution Service. The man who fought the McLibel case for free for a decade. The son of a toolmaker—or a tool-making business owner, if we're being precise—who made it to Oxford and then to the Bar and then to the pinnacle of British public life. The man who defeated Corbynism, won a landslide, walked through the door of Number 10.
These things are all true. They all happened. And they will, in time, be obscured by the ending, whatever it turns out to be—because endings, as Dyer knows, are what we remember. Not the career but its conclusion. Not the achievement but the way it dissolved. The final image: Beethoven shaking his fist at a thunderstorm, Federer weeping beside Nadal, Starmer leaving Downing Street for the last time, the black door swinging shut behind him.
30.
There is one more detail from the Monday night meeting that I keep thinking about. After Starmer gave his fighting speech—after the defiance, the refusal to walk away, the invocation of mandate and country and love—the mood in the room, which had been sceptical, became supportive. Lawmakers who had gone in expecting a wake left feeling something closer to solidarity. "It was clear he was up for the fight," one of them said afterwards.
Up for the fight. It's a good phrase. It suggests energy, determination, the refusal to accept defeat. But it also reveals something. When the best thing you can say about a prime minister is that he's up for the fight to remain prime minister, the argument has already been lost. The fight is no longer about the country, or about change, or about the future. It's about survival. And survival, however admirable, however tenacious, is not the same as governing.
The door is still swinging. It hasn't closed yet. But the light is narrowing, and the gap between inside and outside is getting smaller all the time.
