The tears of Keir’s

There goes another one. Keir Starmer’s departure as prime minister was, characteristically, anticlimactic. It was the opposite of a shock, somehow having over the weekend become so inevitable that reporters simply piled into Downing Street to see if they could, by doing so, manifest a resignation. It was, again, characteristic that it worked.

We knew it was on when his staff came out into the street to wait for him. In the front row were David Lammy and Darren Jones.  If those are the last two men in your foxhole, that’s surely a clue it’s time to surrender. I couldn’t even see Peter Kyle, the loyalist’s loyalist. Perhaps he was already in a broadcast studio somewhere professing his lifetime love of chips and gravy. Loyalism is a transferrable skill.

We are all now connoisseurs of these events. David Cameron toddled off humming a happy little tune, aware that he’d left a bit of a mess, confident that was someone else’s problem. Theresa May choked up, broken personally and politically by her effort to deliver something she believed to be a terrible idea. Boris Johnson seethed with resentment at the unworthy backstabbers who had betrayed their glorious God-King. Liz Truss seemed in shock at the suddenness of it all, which was fair enough. Rishi Sunak, with typical sure-footedness, announced an election from the inside of a car wash.

Starmer? His rhetorical range was, as ever, “headmaster disappointed about Year 10’s antics in the science labs”. 

He came out with his wife Victoria, and they exchanged brave smiles before he approached the cameras. “Walking up this street two years ago was the proudest moment of my life,” he said, perhaps hoping that we would all think about what we’d done. 

“Look at what we’ve achieved in just two years,” Starmer went on, although we have done, and that’s the problem

In the background, the sound of Ode to Joy was carried in from Whitehall. Steve Bray, the “protestor” who tours events with a loudspeaker, may be the Worst Man In British Politics — a very competitive field. He is supposed to be campaigning against Brexit, but with his habit of drowning out every event in Westminster with the same four tunes, it’s possible that MPs have decided to stay out of the EU simply to avoid giving him the satisfaction. 

“Look at what we’ve achieved in just two years,” Starmer went on, although we have done, and that’s the problem. “The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election,” he went on. “I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace.” Does he? This is very much not what we’re hearing from inside the tent, but perhaps we should pretend it’s true. 

It was only at the end, as he talked about his wife and children, that this intensely buttoned-up man choked a little. One of Starmer’s tragedies as a politician was that he struggled to sound passionate even when we knew he cared deeply. Finally we had a little hint of the deep waters running beneath the stillness. 

It was time for others to pay tribute. Jeremy Corbyn, with characteristic kindness and gentleness, issued a statement denouncing Starmer’s “legacy of moral and political bankruptcy”.

“I’m not frightened of Andy Burnham,” Nigel Farage wrote in an online essay. Questions about his finances, on the other hand, clearly terrify him. We know this because even on this momentous day, he remained in hiding, avoiding journalists and instead issuing another proof-of-life video. Perhaps fearing that the empty field he usually uses has been geolocated by Guardian staff, this one was in front of a natty blue background. Starmer’s resignation was the kind of thing you’d expect “in a banana republic”, Farage said. Given what happens to politicians’ bank accounts in such places, you’d think Farage would welcome that. Instead, having fought the local elections on the slogan “Get Starmer out”, he was now complaining that it was happening. Some people are never happy.

Farage did have one good point, which was that oppositions in these situations usually demand a general election. The Conservatives, on the other hand, actually put up Alex Burghart, their leading sophist, to explain that such an event would be quite unnecessary.Possibly faith in the Keminaissance isn’t quite as deep as the party likes to pretend.

By lunchtime, it seemed clear that Andy Burnham will take over in Number 10 next month without a contest. His train hadn’t even arrived in London. He too seems to have manifested the result he wanted: a result that feels inevitable but that political studies textbooks will struggle to explain. Perhaps this time it will all work out well. Fingers crossed!