How did the media class get Starmer so wrong?

‘It’s nice isn’t it. The quiet.’

These were the words tweeted by political writer Andrew Scott – aka Otto English – shortly after Keir Starmer’s election as UK prime minister in 2024. In the centrist imagination, Labour’s return to power represented a long-awaited return to ‘normalcy’ after 14 years of chaos at the hands of Brexiteers and Conservatives. Like hobbits being delivered from the fires of Mordor, the people of Britain were finally back in the Shire.

Scott’s statement sounds utterly preposterous now, as Starmer’s premiership disintegrates in the wake of last week’s disastrous local elections. So far, three of his ministers have resigned. At the time of writing, 89 MPs have called on him to step down.

In fact, those now widely mocked remarks went out of date barely a few months after Starmer came to power. Such talk of ‘quiet’ seemed risible when three little girls were murdered in Southport, sparking riots across the UK. Indeed, summer 2024 shaped up to be the biggest wave of unrest the nation had experienced in more than a decade. What followed was a series of unprecedented crackdowns on civil liberties and on free speech.

Public anger has repeatedly boiled over during Starmer’s tenure, as the PM has sought to gaslight the nation over everything from the rape gangs to the never-ending outrages linked to illegal immigration. If the 2024 election had in fact ushered in a period of peace and quiet, this was certainly over well before the rest of us could take stock.

Scott, of course, was not the only member of the media class to wildly overestimate Keir Starmer. Labour’s victory prompted a nauseating stream of gushing from the media establishment. The arrival of this mediocre, personality-free PM was treated as akin to the second coming of Christ.

‘After years of personality-driven and chaotic, shallow politics coverage across much of the media’, intoned Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy, ‘we now have a government with [a] massive majority, widespread internal agreement and no likelihood of massive instability anytime soon’. Appearing on Question Time on the day after the General Election, ex-BBC man Andrew Marr insisted: ‘For the first time in many of our lives, Britain actually looks like a little haven of peace and stability.’

‘This is how serious government behaves’, sighed i paper columnist Ian Dunt, one day after Starmer took office, adding that:

‘Know-nothings have been replaced by people with expertise. Ignorance has been replaced by specialism. Incomprehension has been replaced by deep domain knowledge.’

Such statements seem more than a little jarring in light of recent events, as Starmer – the most unpopular prime minister in UK history, no less – is defending his premiership with the passion of a wet flannel. Whatever his ‘expertise’, ‘specialism’ or ‘domain’ knowledge may have been, none of it seems to have helped him in the job.

Boldest among Starmer’s early cheerleaders was surely The Times’ Caitlin Moran, who reported gleefully that the PM’s ‘competency’ had ‘turbocharged [her] arousal levels’. ‘All my friends were watching these arrivals as if we were watching Magic Mike Live’, she wrote of Starmer’s first Cabinet appointments. ‘We were rubbing our thighs.’ Each to their own, I suppose. Many of us will be similarly tingly about seeing the back of the man.

There is a reason why Brits have grown increasingly weary of mainstream journalism in recent years, especially since Brexit. Contrasting the premature Starmer-gasm of the liberal establishment to the howls of anguish that followed the 2016 Leave vote should go some way to explaining things. For centrist media types, Starmer represented a win for the sensible, the moral-minded, the people who ‘know better’. As such, any journalistic duty to scrutinise his policies or his capabilities went out of the window. Instead, we got smug hand-rubbing at the prospect of sticking it to the thicko Brexiteers.

Let’s hope the media aren’t as quick to pull out the pom-poms for whichever lacklustre Labour apparatchik next ends up in Downing Street. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.