Britain’s Last Prime Minister

As I write this, Britain’s ruling Labour Party is less than three months into office after being swept home in a near record landslide victory on July 4. Yet since that epochal victory, new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has done nothing right. Indeed, a poll published in September by Opinium showed his popularity plummeting by 45% in only two months. How could this possibly have happened so fast?

The first weeks in office of such different world leaders as Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Vladimir Putin were all models in inspirational, brilliant and just plain competent, dignified and reassuring leadership. However, Starmer has been the opposite. He has not just skidded on one embarrassing political banana skin after another. He threw them all out to skid and fall upon himself.

In terms of the game of American baseball, Starmer’s First Eighty Days in power have been filled with Unforced Errors. And they have been all of his own doing.

First, as I predicted in these columns, Starmer has maintained Britain’s suicidal collision course towards world war with Russia over Ukraine. Indeed, he embraced the wicked and insane British Deep State policies he inherited from the long succession of failed Conservative prime ministers before him – David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Worse – he has even exceeded them. Starmer is now leading the charge – opposed by US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Charles CQ Brown – to send long range strike weapons to Ukraine: yet this is a move guaranteed to provoke a terrible Russian reaction.

Second, instead of filling the British people with hope and renewed spirit, Starmer immediately went out of his way to crush them. He has announced savage cuts in pensions for the elderly and the infirm: the very people least able to endure them. Yet he has not cut a penny of the sumptuous prison he himself enjoys on top of his prime minister’s generous salary as the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service.

Starmer gave no inspirational speeches when he took office. He was not capable of any. He filled no one with joy. Although reputed to be a kind and loving family man in private, in public he is the embodiment of Eeyore, the joyless, old grey donkey who is always depressed and pessimistic about everything in A.A. Milne’s classic Winnie the Pooh stories for children.

Great leaders from Franklin Rosevelt to Churchill, De Gaulle, Thatcher, Reagan, and Putin himself have radiated confidence when they took power, assuring their people that times of economic hardship and suffering, or catastrophic shame and humiliation were over at last.

Putin started out by restoring reliable salary payments to all the teachers, doctors, policemen, nurses, sanitation workers and everyone else in Russia’s public service sectors who had been so mercilessly economically raped and abused during Boris Yeltsin’s infamous decade in power. FDR in 1933 promised a New Deal to the American people. But all Starmer offered – without any moral uplift or inspirational hope whatsoever – was endless cuts for the poor along with crushing rises in taxation and vastly increased business regulation. As a result, Foreign Direct Investment has been fleeing Britain faster than water flows down Niagara Falls.

Third, on social and immigration policies it has been the same story. Britain has erupted since Starmer’s election into a fury of race riots, triggered by the horrific stabbing murder of three young white children by the deranged son of black immigrants from Rwanda. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Britain’s African, Caribbean, and South Asian communities are hard-working, admirable people who passionately love their country as the children of most immigrants tend to do. But Starmer has made clear that he is determined to further loosen the permissive tolerance of local crime, underfunding and over regulation of police forces, and complete lack of guts in handing out any kind of strong deterrent punishment whatsoever to both individuals and increasingly widespread gangs of criminal predators. Starmer has made clear he is determined to continue the castration of the effectiveness, self-respect and necessary authority of the British police – which was already decaying badly after decades of cutbacks by both previous Labour and Conservative governments.

Starmer is obsessed with gender rights and ensuring the most obscure gender and ethnic sub-minorities get their “first ever” appointments from senior generals to dog-catchers in chief.

Therefore, he has shown no conception of how to actually make public services more cost efficient and effective. This should come as no surprise. Starmer’s entire supposedly eminent career was spent as a lawyer, as a rising Labour Party politician and in debating hair splitting points of mind-numbing detail in the House of Commons, the main chamber of the British parliament. He has had no hands-on experience in business, science, administration or management in his entire life. No wonder, therefore, that less than three months into office, reports are rife of endless feuding, dysfunctionality and intrigue among his own top aides even in the Prime Minister’s Office in Number 10 Downing Street.

But then, Starmer has never even run a government department or served in one before either. His inexperience is limitless. His incompetence is infinite. And like the classic Fool in the Biblical Book of Proverbs, he really thinks he is Wise. And therefore no one can tell him anything.

Like the worst British and American arrogant elite liberal so-called Progressives whom he adores, Starmer is rigid, arrogant and inflexible. He knows that he knows best or so he imagines. Therefore, he will never back down to public protests or criticism. Starmer imagines this displays his “courage” and “principle.” Rather, they reflect his suicidal stupidity.

Churchill, De Gaulle, Franklin Roosevelt, Thatcher, and Putin all gave their demoralized and terrified peoples renewed hope, pride and security during their first weeks in office. They all succeeded so well that they enjoyed renewed and repeated power or returns to power for decades afterwards. Starmer by contrast, has squandered all of his credibility while his First Hundred Days still had 20 more to go. Therefore, in less than three months, an extraordinary reversal of fortune has occurred in Britain as the Opinium poll showed. It even gave supposedly discredited and now lame duck Conservative leader and former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak a clear popularity lead over Starmer. This is unprecedented so soon after a national landslide.

How did it happen? Is it just a flash in the pan, as it ought to be, or has something already gone fundamentally terribly wrong with astonishing suddenness and speed for Starmer and his new government?

No wonder, therefore, that the British people already long for the return of hardly titanic but welcome by comparison Rishi Sunak or, for that matter, Starmer’s extravagantly slandered predecessor as Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn most crucially would certainly have worked genuinely and hard to end the Ukraine conflict and establish decent relations with Russia. But this was precisely why Britain’s Deep State in slavish lockstep with its American Big Brother was determined always to discredit him. Instead of the dreaded Corbyn, it is the soft-spoken Starmer whose supposedly enlightened policies are already destroying the accumulated achievements of a full millennium in for-so-long law-abiding England. For his Labour Party’s domestic policies are already fast dissolving the long-fraying social contract of England as lovingly advised and described by 17th century political philosopher John Locke. And even Starmer’s childish confidence and trust in Britain’s long-established Deep State so presciently described and urged by another 17th century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his huge work “Leviathan” is now relentlessly propelling him and his entire nation to ruin. For that Leviathan, more monstrous and unaccountable than ever in this 21st century now relentlessly propels Britain – and the United States too – towards a needless but inevitably catastrophic total war with Russia, even as it systematically suppresses free speech and honest dissent at home and forces the entire nation ever further into poverty, despair and civil war.

Starmer, therefore, like George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the United States, is a dream leader for Britain’s own Deep State establishment. And like all the leading Democrats and pre-Donald Trump Republicans in the United States he really is a One World, Open Borders, liberal romantic who is determined to feel virtuous through destroying all the economic, military and immigration borders that protect his own people. He is an arrogant delusional liberal of the kind Fyodor Dostoyevsky lampooned and exposed so brilliantly and mercilessly well in his masterpiece novel, “The Possessed” or “Demons.”

But through all this, Starmer remains stubbornly in charge in London. Eeyore is driving Britain’s Ship of State onto the rocks of total, annihilating destruction: And death is riding in the driver’s seat with him.