The corrosive complacency of Keir Starmer

“Corrosive complacency” was the phrase George Robertson, a Labour loyalist and former NATO secretary general, used in a speech on Tuesday to characterise the government’s approach to national security and defence. The charge is apposite for the entire Keir Starmer premiership, which has been defined by policy U-turns, drift, backbench rebellions, dysfunction inside 10 Downing Street and catastrophic misjudgement, notably over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the country’s chief diplomat.

Mandelson was chosen as our man Washington despite his public friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex trafficker and paedophile, because of his totemic status as the ideological organiser and strategic enforcer of the New Labour project. Labour do not produce many winners from within their ranks. Mandelson was considered by Starmer and Morgan McSweeney, his former chief of staff, to be a winner, a supremely capable Machiavel whose transactional style would enable him to flourish as a negotiator and networker at the court of King Donald. They understood appointing Mandelson was a significant risk, but it was one they were prepared to take, with lethal consequences for them both.

We know now that Mandelson was appointed even though he had been denied clearance after his security vetting. The debacle over his appointment and sacking, and the fallout since, has led to the resignation of McSweeney and Tim Allan, Starmer’s director of communications. On Thursday evening, Olly Robbins, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, was sacked by Starmer, but he insists he has done nothing wrong and will defend himself during an appearance before MPs next week. The view inside Whitehall is that Starmer wanted Mandelson in Washington at all cost, at any cost - and the mandarins, although Mandelson was not one of their own, delivered what he wanted.

In recent days, Starmer has been at his most indignant, pleading innocence, blaming others. It’s almost as if the deep state itself will be called in for questioning any time soon. Meanwhile trust in politics and parliamentary democracy, already at an all-time low, continues to erode under his leadership.

Pleading for understanding even as the hangman’s noose tightens around his neck, Starmer says it is “completely unacceptable” that Robbins did not tell him that Mandelson had failed security vetting. It is indeed unacceptable, but he should ask himself this: why does he appear so detached from what is happening inside his own government? Why didn’t he as prime minister, before he faced the Commons or answered media questions about Mandelson, seek greater reassurance that nothing had been withheld from him? Why the lack of curiosity, the absence of rigour and fastidiousness? Why the repeated failure to discuss issues with close advisers or make relationships with those around him? Why the pretence of competence when his government is defined by incompetence?

When considering Starmer’s struggles I often think of Ian Blair, the former head of the Metropolitan Police, whom I knew and liked. Like Starmer, Blair, who died last year, was a well-intentioned liberal who began with noble ambitions but was brought down by his own incuriosity about the institution he ran. Blair left the Met disillusioned but always felt profoundly misunderstood. One senses this, too, may be Starmer’s fate.

McSweeney’s greatest regret is that he did not warn Starmer, in the run-up to the 2024 general election, that after 14 years of opposition Labour was not prepared for power, that the hard work had not been done. McSweeney blames himself – even though Sue Gray was chief of staff back then - but the responsibility lies with Starmer.

A lack of preparedness is the original sin of this government. A pattern has emerged. Starmer takes a position, then too often retreats. This happened most damagingly over welfare reform last summer from which his authority inside the parliamentary party has never recovered; he told my colleague Josh Glancy at the time that he didn’t to get a grip on the Labour rebellion over disability benefit cuts because he had had been distracted by foreign affairs. In other words, the work was not done, the preparation was not made.

Maurice Glasman, the Labour peer and the only parliamentarian invited to Donald Trump’s second inauguration, warned in a memorandum sent to Downing Street in January 2025 that Mandelson was “the wrong man, at the wrong time, in the wrong place”. “When you make a mistake as prime mister you’ve got to own it,” Glasman told me. “This is the most bizarre story I’ve ever been involved with. I warned them that Mandelson was going to be a disaster. Now the prime minister’s inability to own the mistake further undermines any credibility he has with the British people.”

As leader of the opposition, Starmer was the self-styled anti-Boris. He loathed what he perceived to be Boris Johnson’s entitled insouciance, his chaotic misrule and careless disregard for the truth. Recall the prosecutorial zeal with which Starmer denounced Johnson in the Commons during their clashes over Covid lockdown parties in Downing Street.

For Starmer “partygate” was personal: he found Johnson morally reprehensible and accused him of never taking responsibility for his own mistakes and errors of judgement. “Why does the prime minister think everybody else’s actions have consequences except his own?" Starmer said. [starmer-of-slandering-decent-people-in-private-but-lacking-backbone-to-repeat-it-in-public-12594355]

The same question is now being asked of Starmer himself even by colleagues who were once close to him.

After his landslide election victory, Starmer promised to lead the country into a new era of moral seriousness, administrative competence and public decency. But from the beginning of his premiership his carefully cultivated public image was compromised by revelations about free gifts and cronyism. His reputation has never recovered. “He is deeply and viscerally loathed in the country,” one Labour insider said. “It seems extraordinary - what has he done to deserve such contempt? But there is something about him that people have taken very badly to.”

The fatal weakness of many Labour politicians is their sense of moral righteousness, the conviction that their cherished “Labour values” are inherently superior to those of their opponents. It is a comforting illusion but one that sustains them even after the darkest defeats.

There are few more self-righteous politicians than Starmer, the career lawyer and former director of public prosecutions. He sees himself as an honest man, a man of rules. If he makes mistakes, they are honest mistakes. So when the leader of the opposition calls him a liar she strikes at the very core of who he is and believes himself to be.

Starmer suffers from a kind of wilful blindness: he cannot, or will not, see what others can see so clearly: that he is a failing prime minister without a governing project. Starmer, several Labour MSPs told me on a recent trip to Scotland, is “political kryptonite up here”. His unpopularity extends far beyond Scotland, where Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, has called for him to resign. Polling suggests Labour will be routed across the country in May, as opposition parties in England, Scotland and Wales turn the elections into a de facto referendum on Starmer’s premiership, with London as the party’s last redoubt.

Mandelson may not bring him down, but Starmer will never escape the taint of sending him to Washington. They are now bound together, locked in mutual antagonism. Starmer can plead ignorance – about Epstein, about the vetting process - shift blame to mandarins and the Foreign Office, or sack any number of advisers, but if he is as honest as he claims, he must accept where responsibility lies. George Robertson was correct: corrosive complacency pervades this government and its decision-making, and Labour MPs, in their anger and disenchantment, know it.