Good riddance to Keir Starmer’s tyranny of greyness

So he’s gone. Keir Starmer has resigned. The adults are out of the room. He waltzed into Downing St two years ago to the effusive gushing of the liberal commentariat, and now he’s slinking out. He and his slack-jawed media cheerleaders promised us an era of blissful if boring stability. What they gave us were riots, division, betrayal after betrayal, and an unprecedented assault on the ancient liberties of our nation. The lesson of the Starmer epoch? Never trust a technocrat.

Few tears will flow over the death of his insipid premiership. He’ll be remembered as the human-rights lawyer who took a cudgel to the sacred right of trial by jury. The self-styled worshipper of competence who was staggeringly incompetent. The man with the great work ethic who often switched off for the whole weekend, leaving ministers stumped and the nation leaderless. The ‘details man’ who didn’t even know Peter Mandelson had failed his vetting to become our ambassador to the US. Starmer was a mirage. A hologram of competence operated by an army of the inept.

It pays to look back on the media fawning that followed his electoral victory in July 2024. There was an explosion of onanistic glee in Britain’s moneyed quarters. ‘Keir Starmer has turbo-charged my arousal levels’, said Caitlin Moran of The Times. She claimed ‘every middle-aged woman’ she knew had felt ‘kind of fruity’ upon watching Sir Keir go into Downing St. Other sad centrists wanted less to be fucked by Sir Keir than sedated by him. They made a holy virtue of his dullness. They prayed he would Make Britain Boring Again. He ‘embodies the politics of boring’, said one giddy scribe, which is just what ‘mayhem-weary’ Britain needs. After the Brexit wars, the Boris years and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Liz Truss era, we’ve had enough of ‘fireworks and political circus’, declared the BBC – now is the time for ‘vague, even boring [politics]’.

It was extraordinary the extent to which they sacralised Starmer’s blandless. His very lack of charisma was fetishised as a virtue. ‘Haven’t we had enough of charismatic leaders?’, asked one columnist. Surely what we need now is ‘someone who will manage the government in a cool and calm way’. Sir Keir’s ‘dull ordinariness’ is the best weapon we have against the ‘unchained forces of mayhem’ in British politics, said Politico. And there it was, the brutal truth about why they fell at the feet of this adenoidal personality void – they believed, they prayed, that his sheer greyness would smother the fires of dissent lit by Brexit and the broader populist thirst for a realigned, reimagined politics.

The Starmer project, at root, was a bloodless coup of bureaucratic vengeance. It was the institutionalisation of boredom as an antidote to the spirit of Brexit. The chattering classes swooned over Starmer’s lifeless, flavourless style because it was such sweet relief from the unpredictable passions of the little people. It was technocracy summed up: politics as fire extinguisher, designed less to represent the people than to tame them, less to heed our angry demands than to bury them under a slagheap of managerialism. The great hope of Starmer’s high-status backers was that he would ‘lower the temperature’.

It wasn’t long before this illiberal crusade to sanitise public life crashed against the shores of reality. The first problem was Starmer’s own shortcomings. Having won the General Election on just 33.7 per cent of the vote, he lacked moral authority. It was said by some that he won on the basis of four words: ‘I am not them.’ But that was the problem. Not being the Tories was not enough. His was a victory by default, driven more by public exhaustion after 14 years of Tory misrule than by public enthusiasm for this celebrated lacker of charisma. From Day 1, the favoured bore of the priestly class struggled to connect with your average unboring Brit.

Then there was the fact that Mr Competent was not so competent. He was rarely across his brief. He u-turned constantly. His administration lurched from scandal to scandal, from Angela Rayner’s tax idiocy to that whole installing of a pervert’s buddy as US ambassador. Starmer was a staggeringly incurious prime minister. His was a ‘passive premiership’, as that gobsmacking Sunday Times feature described it in March. People were often struck by the ‘unnatural, overwhelming silence’ in Downing St as the PM and his equally grey minions got on with things ‘wordlessly behind closed doors’. Let the fall of Starmer be a lesson to the Western elites: managerialism might be fine for a smalltown bank but it is death itself in a realm where argument, contestation, morality and noise ought to be the norm.

But the larger problem for limp, damp Starmerism was that it was so catastrophically at odds with public sentiment. You see, people didn’t want to be sedated. They didn’t want to be tranquilised into an infantile state by the halfwits and dullards of Westminster. They didn’t want to see the grey slaying of what media snobs called ‘the unchained forces of mayhem’ but which we called democracy.

So, far from being a ‘haven of peace and stability’, Starmer’s Britain became a hotbed of social conflict. There were the Southport riots, the Southampton riots, the Belfast riots. There was furious disagreement over two-tier policing and identity politics. The England flag was hoisted across the land in defiance of the haughty Europeanism and oikophobia of the Starmer classes. The rape-gang scandal bubbled up from under the crude lid of censorship forced on it for so long. Fury over our broken borders exploded into street protests. Starmer came to be hated. He became the most unpopular PM on record. At times the loathing felt almost unfair. But having been hailed by the lanyard classes as the technocratic saviour of a nation that had fallen to the forces of ‘mayhem’ (ie, public opinion), it was inevitable that hating Starmer would become the bread and butter of those of a populist persuasion.

Everything Starmer did was about ‘lowering the temperature’ of the public. His rule laid bare the calculated authoritarianism of a ruling class that considers management of the masses to be the highest goal of public life. From his attack on trial by jury to his mad insistence on bringing in a new definition of ‘Islamophobia’ to his allergic reaction to the public fury over Henry Nowak, he was always driven by a patrician impulse to subdue the popular will. To neutralise political contestation itself in order that the mythical competence of his kind might enjoy free rein. All the civil unrest we’ve seen these past two years – some of it democratic, some of it violent and ugly – is best understood as a fuming reaction against the rule of the boring and its black dream of public disenfranchisement.

And now we have the prospect of prime minister Andy Burnham, the man who edged Starmer out of Downing St with his victory in the Makerfield by-election last week. The elites want Burnham to do what Starmer failed to: quell the ‘mayhem’ of Britain’s resurgent democratic spirit. Only where they thought Starmer’s dearth of charisma might achieve that, now they hope Burnham’s much-hyped charisma will. They’ve tried boring us into submission, now they’ll try Burnhaming us into submission. They’ve learned nothing. Ten years since Brexit and we’re still lumbered with an expert class that is breathtakingly dumb.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.