Never Err Keir: The Rise and Fall of the British Prime Minister

“Politics is the art of betraying your friends in order to govern your enemies.” — Georges Clemenceau The rise and fall of Keir Starmer reads less like a political biography and more like a particularly bleak Restoration comedy—one where the hapless protagonist spends decades building the gallows, only to cheerfully skip to the trapdoor and ask […]

“Politics is the art of betraying your friends in order to govern your enemies.” — Georges Clemenceau

The rise and fall of Keir Starmer reads less like a political biography and more like a particularly bleak Restoration comedy—one where the hapless protagonist spends decades building the gallows, only to cheerfully skip to the trapdoor and ask for a blindfold.

The true architects of Starmer’s rise were never in his own shadow cabinet. They were instead the remnants of the New Labour machine: Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, and the formidable party operative Morgan McSweeney. The political relationship between these three figures has endured for decades. McSweeney began his career in a junior party role under Blair and has long been regarded as a protégé to the “Dark Lord” Mandelson.

After Corbyn’s shock victory, it was McSweeney who, presumably under Mandelson’s guidance, picked Starmer as the ideal candidate to ingratiate himself with the Left while steadily moving the party to the center.

For McSweeney, Starmer was a container — a moderate, presentable vehicle to bury Corbynism and return Labour to the Blairite embrace. For Mandelson, he was a malleable Prime Minister who could place old allies in every crucial crevice of state. The men who actually ran the government were not in Number 10’s top office, but in the orbit of Blair’s alumni, a reality Starmer discovered only when it was far too late to extract himself.

Edging Out the Mayor: The Suppression of Andy Burnham

Perhaps the clearest foreshadowing of Starmer’s doom was his camp’s treatment of Andy Burnham. Long before the current meltdown, the Manchester mayor was the obvious candidate to unite the party’s soft left and challenge Starmer’s brittle authority. The Starmer apparatus thus did everything in its power to keep Burnham out of Westminster. When Burnham sought to stand in Gorton and Denton earlier this year, the National Executive Committee—dominated by Starmer loyalists—blocked him. Starmer himself was asked directly whether Burnham should be kept out of Parliament and refused to give a straight answer, allowing the whispers of a fix to circulate. The strategy was to suffocate a rival before he could even be nominated. The brutal irony is that the tactics which kept Burnham down ultimately accelerated Starmer’s own collapse, as it left the leader with a resentful party and no internal allies when the wolves finally came calling.

Keir Starmer never errs

And yet, through it all, Keir Starmer has never once entertained the possibility that he might be the problem. Watch any press conference from the past eighteen months, and you will see a man physically incapable of looking inward. It is always the civil service’s timidity, the Treasury’s intransigence, the media’s double standards, or—his favourite—the “unfinished business” of the Corbyn years that hobbled him. He blames the voters for not understanding his ten-point plans. He blames Andy Burnham for being too popular. He blames Wes Streeting for leaking against him, as if Streeting were not a viper Starmer himself had invited into the nursery. In private, allies report that Starmer responds to every setback with the same four words: “That wasn’t my fault.” He is a man who spent decades as a barrister defending others, yet has never learned to defend himself with honesty—only to deflect. The posture is always defensive, the hands always shielding, the mouth always finding a new scapegoat. It is the tragic flaw of the tragic hero: Keir Starmer never errs. Everyone else simply fails him.

Civil War and the “Bleeding from the Inside”

The political infighting within Labour has always been brutal, but under Starmer it became septic. The right wing of the party, those Blairites Starmer thought were his shield, began treating him as a disposable asset. The fatal wound was inflicted by the man Starmer had trusted most: the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington.

It was a decision that reeked of cronyism and catastrophic judgment. McSweeney, Starmer’s consiglieri, had pushed for Mandelson’s appointment despite warnings over Mandelson’s close personal relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. When the Epstein files were unsealed, the scandal did more than dirty Mandelson; it demanded a scapegoat. McSweeney was forced to resign in February, taking “full responsibility” for the advice he gave, while allies quietly pointed fingers at other Blairites in Number 10. Starmer was left politically naked, caught between a disgraced mentor and a party demanding blood.

Thrown Under the Bus: The Rise of Wes Streeting

Yet the ultimate betrayal was always being prepared behind the scenes. The Blairite faction that had propped up Starmer never viewed him as a leader, merely as a placeholder until the “right” candidate emerged. That candidate is Wes Streeting, the 43-year-old health secretary and former protege of Peter Mandelson.

In a masterclass of political extraction, Streeting resigned from the cabinet on May 15th, accusing Starmer of presiding over “a vacuum” where vision should be. He immediately confirmed he would stand for leader, declaring, “We need a proper contest with the best candidates on the field”. Despite Streeting’s own ties to Mandelson — he has been forced to publish private WhatsApp messages with the disgraced peer to prove he was not “close” — the Blairite machine has coalesced behind him. According to allies of the former ambassador, Mandelson has privately described Streeting as the only contender “with anything new to offer or the ability to connect with voters”.

Starmer, in short, has been thrown under the very bus he helped build. The lawyers, the fixers, and the Blairite kingmakers who needed a vessel to destroy the Left have now discarded that vessel. As this article goes to press on Monday, the 18th of May, the whispers in Westminster suggest the transition is already in motion, with Streeting expected to take over within days. The man who once prosecuted governments has discovered that he was always, in the eyes of his creators, merely a defendant awaiting sentencing. The judge’s gavel was held by the very people who had placed him there, and with a final, quiet knock, they have ensured that the most disastrous premiership of the modern era will now end exactly as it began: not with a battle for the nation, but with a knife fight in the dark.