RIP New Labour?

There are no sudden endings in Downing Street — only delayed ones. The collapse comes first and the resignation speech is delivered later.

Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership ended in exactly that way, with the outgoing PM finally stepping aside after weeks of mounting pressure. His resignation marks a grim milestone in modern British politics, making him the sixth prime minister to leave through the revolving door of No. 10 in just a decade.

The truth is that there was very little Starmer could have done to change his fate. The seeds of failure were there from the start — in his character, his instincts and worldview. Starmer was the twilight figure of the New Labour project, and his departure closes that book.

Love it or loathe it, Blair’s government achieved much of what it set out to do. It revolutionised the British constitution through devolution and the Human Rights Act, while embedding political correctness into our laws and institutions.

Starmer, however, inherited a very different country from the one Blair inherited in 1997. Living standards had flatlined, trust in institutions had collapsed, and voters had heard every promise under the sun — only to be betrayed time and again. 

Yes, Labour won an impressive 174-seat majority in 2024. But that — as was predicted in these pages — was a castle built on sand. The result said far more about the state of the Tory party than it did about any genuine enthusiasm for Starmer. 

After fourteen years of failure, the public wanted retribution. And in a two-party system, Labour was the natural choice to punish the Conservatives. That left Starmer with a problem he never quite escaped: the sense that his majority was little more than a mirage. 

Indeed, it was. The Tories had spent years governing as the “heirs to Blair”, and Starmer’s answer was to push further. Vote Labour for ‘change’? Forget it. “Fixing the foundations” of the economy? Not a chance. 

The results have been disastrous, and with that failure comes the final nail in the New Labour coffin, even if some of its architects survive politically. Part of that legacy will be dismantled by Andy Burnham. The rest will be swept away when Labour eventually loses power to a centre-right government.

That process will play out over the next decade. But it begins here. Starmer’s resignation is the inflection point. 

New Labour sleaze will give way to a demand for political authenticity; its old deception tactics will give way to a more adversarial politics; and its obsession with globalism will give way to competing populist visions.

New Labour sleaze

New Labour’s defining trait was the habit of preaching morality while failing to live up to it. The Blair-Brown years were steeped in sleaze, from the “dirty” donations of F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone to the slow-burning scandal of Cash for Honours.

Blair and Brown were openly deferential to wealthy businessmen, whom they courted aggressively for donations and access. Like the Conservatives, New Labour also treated office as a chance to indulge in lavish gifts and questionable expense claims.

Sir Keir Starmer cast himself as a model of probity. He attacked Boris Johnson over lockdown breaches and promised to “clean up politics”. No more “VIP fast lanes”. No more “revolving doors”.

Yet within weeks of entering Downing Street, the promises began to unravel. Lord Alli, one of Labour’s biggest donors, was forced to apologise in the Lords after failing to declare gifts to senior MPs, including Starmer and his wife, Lady Victoria. He was also given a temporary pass into No.10. No proper explanation was ever given for why a party donor was granted such access, or what he did with it.

Then came the resignations. One by one, ministers fell, each raising fresh questions about Starmer’s judgment. Tulip Siddiq resigned amid corruption allegations in Bangladesh. Rushanara Ali stepped down over claims she had improperly evicted tenants. Angela Rayner, the self-styled champion of standards, resigned after a breach of the ministerial code.

More damaging still was the Peter Mandelson affair. A New Labour grandee with a reputation for sleaze and skulduggery, Mandelson was brought back into government as the U.S. ambassador. 

This was done despite Mandelson’s links to the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. And it later emerged he had not even passed security vetting. 

Return to authenticity

Like Blair before him, Starmer remained entangled in the sleazy networks that so enraged the public in the 2000s. His former Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, spent years in the orbit of Mandelson, who was never far from the action — acting as a confidant and tactical mentor.

Andy Burnham is unlikely to fall into that trap. One reason he commands respect within Labour is that he donates 15 per cent of his salary to a homelessness project in Manchester. The project itself has had mixed results. But the donation sends a signal: Burnham is not the proverbial pig with its snout in the trough. 

Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, has earned similar praise for donating his parliamentary salary to charity. Lowe is a wealthy man and can afford the gesture. But that is precisely the point. It reinforces the impression that he is in politics for something other than personal enrichment.

Future party leaders will have to be relentlessly vigilant against any suggestion that they are using public office to enrich themselves. Online investigators such as tax expert Dan Neidle have also shown how quickly politicians’ financial affairs can be picked apart. 

There are now very few places left to hide. The age of the political chancer is drawing to a close. The politicians who thrive will be those the public believes are in politics for the right reasons.

New Labour lies

The other hallmark of the New Labour project is a shameless ability to lie straight to the public’s face. Think back to the “dodgy dossier” manufactured to drag us into the Iraq war, or the shocking manipulation of NHS waiting time targets. 

At the heart of this was New Labour’s embrace of “bait-and-switch” politics — a tactic pioneered by President Woodrow Wilson. The strategy is simple: say one thing in opposition to win power, then do something quite different in office, betting that delivery will eventually excuse the lie.

Starmer took the formula and ran with it. He looked voters in the eye and swore he would not raise taxes or “turn on the spending taps”. Once in office, his Chancellor of the Exchequer — the hapless Rachel Reeves — did both. Taxes rose by £40 billion, borrowing increased by £36 billion, and the groundwork was laid for another £76 billion in public spending over the decade.

But the biggest lie of them all was about something far more fundamental: freedom itself. In September 2025, Starmer insisted he was a defender of free speech after the Trump administration accused Britain of authoritarianism.

The Prime Minister’s claim was laughable. Starmer has long been an enemy of a free society. As Director of Public Prosecutions, he authorised Operation Elveden, unleashing a draconian crackdown on press freedom. In Downing Street, he showed the same authoritarian instinct by backing measures designed to criminalise criticism of Islam.

This was entirely consistent with the New Labour era. Both Blair and Brown talked about “liberal democracy” while dismantling the very foundations of freedom. They misled the public, again and again. 

Return to adversarial politics

Alas, New Labour authoritarianism is a bit like Japanese knotweed — it will not be fully eradicated within the party. Andy Burnham is not a libertarian socialist, nor a natural defender of freedom.

But future governments on the Right are likely to roll back many of New Labour’s more draconian laws. Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch have both made that clear. That will pave the way for a freer, more adversarial politics — chaotic, ill-tempered, but never tedious.

What about the “bait-and-switch” strategy itself? Of course, you can’t eradicate lying from politics, any more than you can eradicate manure from farming. But I do believe the bait-and-switch is becoming far more dangerous than it once was.

Partly, that is because trust in politicians has collapsed. But the bigger change is social media. Platforms like X have created a decentralised, real-time army of amateur sleuths. Every Tom, Dick and Harry can stitch together old speeches, forgotten tweets and awkward video clips exposing political double-dealing. The best of them go viral. Some become memes. Once that happens, they are almost impossible to kill.

I suspect the communications model of the future will look much more like Zia Yusuf’s or Rupert Lowe’s. The two men may loathe each other, but they share one important trait. They do not ask, “What can I get away with?” They ask, “Is this message robust?” They are obsessed with making every argument harder, cleaner and more viral.

The odour of dishonesty and authoritarianism certainly hurt Starmer, as it did Blair

That instinct does not come naturally to Andy Burnham, who has spent much of his career reinventing himself. But if he becomes Prime Minister, he will have to nail his colours to the mast and keep them there.

The old New Labour tricks no longer work.

New Labour ideology

The odour of dishonesty and authoritarianism certainly hurt Starmer, as it did Blair. But they were only symptoms. The real disease was ideology. Starmer was not principled on every policy decision. But when he did stand on principle, those principles proved ruinous. 

Like Blair before him, Starmer was a post-national Prime Minister, more concerned with international law than Britain’s national interest. It is no surprise that he is now being tipped for a cushy job at the United Nations. (After all, Starmer once said in an interview that he felt more at home in Davos than in Westminster.)

The dirty fingerprints of globalism are etched all over Starmer’s record in office. Just think back to the now-defunct deal to pay Mauritius to take back the Chagos Islands, or his decision to edge Britain back into the EU’s orbit.

One of Starmer’s first acts as Prime Minister was to scrap the Tory plan to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda. In its place came the pledge to “smash the gangs” — a transnational, counter-terror-style crackdown on the smuggling networks.

Starmer, being New Labour through and through, has long believed that transnational cooperation is the answer to every national security problem — an instinct he developed during his time at the Crown Prosecution Service. It also sat comfortably within Gordon Brown’s call for “global solutions” to “global problems”, and Tony Blair’s internationalist framework set out in his 1999 Chicago speech. 

But the results of globalism have been disastrous. More than 73,000 illegal crossings have taken place across the Channel since Labour took power in 2024.

Starmer also reached for almost any impractical solution — including the “one-in, one-out” deal with France — to avoid touching the Human Rights Act, a law enacted by Blair in 1998. His lifelong devotion to that Act has left his Home Secretaries powerless to clear the legal obstacles that prevent mass deportations.

Just as damaging was handing the keys of energy policy to Ed Miliband. A committed Net Zero hardliner, Miliband has blocked new North Sea oil and gas developments, choking off domestic supply. Flagship projects like Rosebank and Jackdaw are stuck in limbo.

None of this emerged from a vacuum. As Energy Secretary in the Gordon Brown years, Miliband introduced the Climate Change Act 2008 — the framework that locked Britain into legally binding decarbonisation targets. 

Return to adversarial populism

Will New Labour’s globalist project come to an end? In short, yes — but not in one clean break. It will unwind in stages, under different governments.

Andy Burnham will not abandon environmentalism. But he will take a more pragmatic approach to fossil fuels. Ed Miliband will be given a senior role in his Cabinet, but he will not retain the energy brief.

Meanwhile, Labour’s right-wing opponents have already broken with the Net Zero consensus entirely. They will go further than Labour in reindustrialising Britain.

On immigration, Burnham will do very little to stop the rot beyond token gestures—– perhaps reopening detention centres or staging an “enforcement drive” to create the impression of “action”. You’ll have to wait until Labour are out of power to see Britain leave the ECHR and the Human Rights Act repealed.

The New Labour era did not end when Gordon Brown lost to David Cameron in 2010 … It ended with Keir Starmer

Economically, Burnham will almost break with the New Labour globalist settlement. Expect a greater emphasis on the mixed economy, tighter controls on capital, higher taxes on the wealthy, and a renewed push for major infrastructure projects. As a localist, Burnham will lean towards protectionism of regional markets.

How all of this will be funded, and how the inevitable consequences will be managed, is another matter entirely. But Burnham will likely call an election before the contradictions fully surface.

Conclusion

The New Labour era did not end when Gordon Brown lost to David Cameron in 2010. Cameron proved remarkably effective at keeping much of the settlement alive. Nor did it end during the long years of Tory rule that followed. It ended with Keir Starmer.

After fourteen years of Conservative failure, voters were desperate for something different. Instead, they got the last exhausted incarnation of a political project that had already run out of steam.

That is why Starmer matters. His premiership was not merely another government that failed. It was the government that finally broke the spell of Messrs. Blair and Brown. What comes next, however, may be even more unsettling. Keir Starmer may have buried New Labour. But Andy Burnham could yet bury what remains of the country.