Starmer has just reminded us why he has to go

Cometh the hour, cometh Keir Starmer?

It was trailed as the speech that would rescue his ailing premiership. The PM, facing deafening calls for his resignation following last week’s pasting in the local elections, had vowed to win over his detractors and turn around his bleak fortunes. It was supposed to be an intervention so bold and brilliant that it would convince the wavering among the Labour flock that he deserves at least a decade in No10.

Needless to say, this was never something that Keir was going to be able to pull off without a full personality transplant. Yet it is nevertheless striking that, even at this moment of maximum peril for his career, the speech he delivered this morning in central London was bad. Really bad. Even by his usual dismal standards.

As ever, Starmer’s speech was light on policy, principles and details. And it was very, very heavy on trite slogans and banal clichés. The PM promised ‘strength through fairness’, without much elaboration on what that means. He told us that ‘incremental change won’t cut it’, without saying much about what fundamental change he was going to offer instead. He said that ‘stories beat spreadsheets’ in the battle for hearts and minds, but failed to tell any inspiring stories. He promised to ‘make the big arguments’ and ‘make the Labour case’ for his policies and leadership, but arguments came there none. The prime minister may have been fighting for his political life, but he was punching with all the force of an eight-year-old schoolgirl.

I only detected two passages of the speech that seemed to animate the PM.

One was his opening salvo, warning that Labour faces ‘dangerous opponents, very dangerous opponents’. When insulting Reform UK and the masses who flocked to them last week, Starmer was briefly in his element.

The other brief moment where he seemed vaguely serious was in (re-)announcing his Brexit reset. Starmer seemed to genuinely believe that closer regulatory alignment with the EU would provide an answer to the ‘despair’ that’s driving voters to Reform – and that forging closer ties with Brussels is what is needed to stop Britain from going down a ‘very dark path’. Proof, if nothing else, that Europe is the last refuge of the knackered, rudderless politician with no real answers.

The speech designed to save Starmer’s career, then, only served to remind us why even those in his own camp are now so desperate to see the back of him. I would say that ‘strength through fairness’ should appear on Keir’s epitaph, if only it weren’t destined to be forgotten by teatime.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.