Keir’s logorrhoea

“Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivers speech,” the headline said on Sky News. This is, sadly, about as good as his record of delivery gets. Speeches he can generally manage. Other things, it’s less clear. He is a man of words, not deeds.

This was, in the jargon of political scribbling, going to be a make-or-break speech that would reset the prime minister’s embattled leadership. There was a strong chance that it would be deeply personal. Maybe, if we were lucky, the gloves would come off.

Journalists — though not sketchwriters — had been summoned to a small windowless room somewhere in London, where Starmer’s remaining supporters had been prepped to clap and cheer as though there were a lot more of them than there are. 

The prime minister was introduced by Jade Botterill, a West Yorkshire MP elected in 2024, who listed the great things that previous Labour governments had achieved. If she’d been able to add a couple of things that the current one has managed, things might not be so desperate. 

Still, she was honest about the problem facing her party: “Too many places and communities are feeling left behind, feeling as if the state cares more about those trying to take from our country than those trying to contribute to it.”

There to offer a solution was the prime minister, tie off, sleeves rolled up, ready to get down to business, if by that you meant making a speech. Last week’s election results had, he said, been “tough, very tough”. Losing seats “hurts, and it should hurt”. All this was aimed at Labour MPs, and as job-saving approaches go, it was a more plausible strategy than, say, Boris Johnson’s approach, which could be summed up as “you scum are nothing without me”.

Starmer insisted he took responsibility. Not in the “losing his job” sense, obviously. Other people had been doing enough of that over the weekend. “It’s about taking responsibility to explain how as a political and electoral force, we will be better and do better.” Ah, he was taking responsibility for making more speeches. The explaining will continue until polling improves.

Not the old kind of explaining, though. The prime minister had been doing some soul-searching over the weekend, and wanted to share his conclusions: “Analysis matters, but argument matters more. Evidence matters, but so too does emotion.” This was one of those lines that was at once unarguable but also make you wonder what the hell the speaker had believed up to now. How do you become prime minister without realising that, as Starmer put it, “stories beat spreadsheets”?

The reality is that one of Starmer’s problems is that the spreadsheets are all awful. It’s true that a lot of this is not his fault, but a story that he failed to tell was about the terrible mess that he inherited.

Quite the opposite in fact. “We need a bigger response than we anticipated in 2024,” he said, attempting to explain away the last two years. A more honest answer would be that Labour didn’t want to engage with the scale of the problems they faced during the 2024 election, and so pretended they could be solved with a change of government and a couple of quick tax rises. The prime minister was elected promising to do very little, and he has delivered on that. This is not, unfortunately, how the country sees things. 

So what were the solutions the prime minister offered? First, a plan to nationalise a steelworks in Scunthorpe. While this may be welcomed in Lincolnshire, and it may indeed be, as the prime minister said, a strategic asset, it wasn’t clear what the rest of us were supposed to do with the information. It is the Labour equivalent of the Tory promise to regenerate high streets by putting up hanging baskets: nice, but inadequate to the challenge. Seizing the commanding heights of the economy it really wasn’t.

The superficially bigger offer was a promise to put Britain “at the heart of Europe”. But this too was classic Starmer: specific enough to upset people who already don’t like him, but too vague to satisfy those who want actual action. Does it mean rejoining the EU, or the customs union, or the single market, or something else? Any of these would have been meaningful. We got no answer in the speech, and Starmer declined an invitation to expand afterwards. Words, not deeds.

At least here we got an attack on a political opponent, a conscious effort to tie Nigel Farage to the decision to leave the EU. As the prime minister noted, the Reform leader is rather coy about his role in all that these days. “He’s not just a grifter,” Starmer said. “He is a chancer.”

(In past months, Farage would have delighted in holding his own press conference against the prime minister’s, but he has become rather coy since we learned about the secret £5 million gift he received from a crypto billionaire, so is avoiding the kind of forum where people can ask about it.)

If the goal of the speech was to settle Labour MPs, then it largely failed. Afterwards, Catherine West, who had previously said she wanted to stand against Starmer if no one else would, de-escalated to saying she was organising an open letter calling for him to go. Part of the problem is that no one in the party knows what they want any more than the leader does. Different deeds or different words? They’ll have to get back to you.