The prime minister of the United Kingdom is a technocrat who is inept, a would-be despot who doesn’t believe in anything, and a career politician who lacks all charm and political skill.
That is, Keir Starmer was the man for the U.K.’s dreadful moment.
Starmer is resigning. He had no grand fatal flaw. He was not brought down by any failed undertaking or risky mistake. He was simply utterly charmless. Nobody liked Starmer because there was nothing about him to like. His Labour Party is tossing him for the further-Left Andy Burnham.
But again, Starmer’s political weakness wasn’t being insufficiently Left. It was being nothing.
Consider Starmer’s nearly Soviet assault on opinions that violated the U.K.’s dogma.
Posts that caused distress were enough to land one in jail under Starmer.
But here’s the oddest part: If these opinions were dangerous enough that someone ought to go to jail for holding them, you would think Starmer would have angrily denounced them. But no. Starmer always just calmly and coldly enforced the rules. His heart rate never elevated as he locked up dissidents.
He is the perfect bureaucrat, as described by Hannah Arendt: “In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”
That was Starmer. He never took the lead on anything. He never bore responsibility for anything. He wasn’t really a tyrant. Starmer was merely the turgid executor of tyrannical rules.
Starmer didn’t make the rules. He merely enforced them. When the rules changed, he changed. When the rules, for instance, stated that a woman can have a penis, Starmer maintained that women sometimes have penises. When that absurdity shriveled up and died, Starmer calmly reversed himself.
Rarely has a great nation been led by such a follower.
KEIR STARMER TO RESIGN AS BRITISH PRIME MINISTER
But again, this was fitting for today’s United Kingdom. When you look at the U.K.’s acceptance of mass immigration, at the state’s cowardly response to Islamic terrorism, and at Starmer’s implicit apologies for Brexit, it’s tempting to accuse the Brits of self-loathing. But “loathing” connotes strong emotion. Something more moribund than self-loathing is dragging the U.K.
The U.K. simply doesn’t believe in itself. That’s why Starmer was its man.