Rise and fall From historic landslide to PM without a story to tell

Historians will puzzle over this one. Of the six prime ministers who have led Britain over the last decade, with a seventh now on the way, it will be the fall of Keir Starmer that will most perplex the political analysts of the future.

- Jonathan Freedland

They will ponder a man who secured a landslide victory in July 2024 only to be pushed out less than two years later, having started no illegal wars, having triggered no grave economic crises, having been accused of no scandalous act of corruption.

They will scratch their heads at a prime minister who paid the ultimate political price, even though few could point to the single, obvious political crime he had committed.

So what did for Starmer - and what legacy, if any - does he leave behind?

Perhaps most important, what does the fleeting premiership of the outgoing Labour leader portend for whoever takes his place?

Start with his undoing, which was a function of both the man and his times. Plenty will say, and have said in recent days, that Starmer’s failure was preordained, for the simple reason that he was not a politician and had no aptitude for politics. At face value, that statement is obviously absurd.

No one rises to the top of a major political party and then wins a 174-seat parliamentary majority by accident.

Nor will it do to suggest that Starmer’s success came solely from being in the right place at the right time, a lucky player of political pass-the-parcel who had an election victory land in his lap when it was Labour’s turn.

Of course, it’s fair to describe the 2024 result as a national repudiation of the Conservatives rather than an embrace of Labour, but merely to have turned the party into an acceptable receptacle for that deep well of anti-Tory feeling was itself a significant achievement.

Five years earlier, voters had handed Labour their biggest drubbing since 1935. But Starmer’s tacit promise of calm, technocratic competence - after the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss years of florid Tory scandal and chaos - the sense that he was a decent, if unexciting, man, was enough to reassure voters that Labour could be trusted with power.