Remember when Sir Keir Starmer was sold to us as, effectively, the anti-Boris? Where Boris was slapdash, Keir would be methodical; where Boris fibbed as easily as breathing, Keir would be truthful as a boy-scout; where Boris was boastful, Keir would be modest; where Boris exuded ambition, Keir would exude dutifulness; where Boris was charismatic, Keir would bore the pants off us; where Boris mumbled schoolroom Latin, Keir would mumble courtroom Latin.
The thing about Boris is that you sort of knew what you were getting
For those of us who thought Boris Johnson – like him personally though we might – ill-suited to being put in charge of so much as a round of drinks, let alone the country, Keir Starmer looked like an agreeable alternative.
Well. Look how that has panned out. Boris had not long been in power when he was mired in a series of feebly venal freebie-snaffling scandals. Keir, too, was caught filling his boots within days of taking power. Boris was famously likened by a senior adviser to a “wonky trolley”, taking off in unexpected directions at a whim; Keir, too, has U-turned left, right and centre. Boris accrued a dysfunctional inner circle of feuding courtiers; Keir, too, accrued a dysfunctional inner circle of feuding courtiers. Boris was notorious for blaming everyone but himself for his difficulties; Keir, as has become clear, is also not such a man as you would wish to turn your back on at a bus stop.
Even on the two country-dividing issues of Brexit and immigration, where you’d expect at least to be able to get a cigarette paper between them, the upshot of their premierships has been rather similar. The same people complaining now that Keir is failing to stop the boats were the same people complaining then about a “Boriswave”. Both made noises about committing to Brexit but neither of them, to say the least, seems to have made a success of it.
And both, long after everyone within a hundred miles of them, even and especially the people on their own sides, were desperate to be shot of them, clung to power like a blood-gorged tick on the wedding tackle of the body politic. Cigarette ends, tweezers, Vaseline, nail varnish, fingernails – these availed us not at all in either case. In both cases we have seen nothing but drift, paralysis, incompetence, fibs and blame-shifting: Sir Keir has come to look not so much like the anti-Boris as a less entertaining tribute act, the sort of band that tours small pubs under a name like “Inspiral Lino”. As the version of Psalm 139 that I imbibed at a young age (via the Marvel comic Cloak and Dagger, since you ask) puts it: “The darkness and light are both alike: I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
It seemed specially fitting, then, that even as the vultures were nibbling on his earlobes, in yet another of those I’m-getting-on-with-the-job-in-the-national-interest pronouncements, Sir Keir said that he intended to be in Number 10 for a decade, helming a “ten-year project of renewal”. Which, coincidentally, is almost exactly what Boris Johnson said when the vultures were nibbling at his own earlobes back in 2022. He lasted, in the event, weeks.
But the parallel does encourage the thought: which of the two has been the bigger shambles in office? It’s an academic question (not academic academic; i.e. not something professors of politics or historians are likely to take much of an interest in), but we take our laughs where we can get them. We can leave it to those academics to ask the more high-minded and more systemic questions, such as: “Is it possible they both came unstuck in the ways they have because being Prime Minister is now literally an impossible job, and no amount of grip and determination could make anything but a pig’s ear out of Brexit, immigration and the day-to-day running of government?”
It pains me to say that I think Sir Keir has it by a nose. The thing about Boris is that you sort of knew what you were getting. He’d be a Heineken politician – reaching the parts other Tories couldn’t reach (or like Chris Pincher, would get in trouble for reaching). He’d be a Marmite politician – salty and usually spread thin. But anyone paying attention to his life and career knew before they went to the ballots that he was a bit of a rogue. He never pretended more than half-heartedly to be otherwise. All that stuff was, as is sometimes said, priced in. And some of the real fiascos, such as Covid, would have clobbered anyone.
Keir Starmer, though, came to us clad in robes of sanctimony. He led us to believe that his eyes were on the horizon and his mind on the job, that he would be steady of attention and fastidious in procedure, and that his ego was folded neatly in an inside pocket. Yet in office he has demonstrated all the characteristics that made Boris so ill-fitted to the top job, and then some.
Though there will, of course, be some who say preeningly that they knew Starmer was hopeless long before he took power, they are normally people who were ideologically disposed to loathe him on principle. As the electoral mandate he’s trailing demonstrates, yours truly isn’t the only mug to have bought the whole anti-Boris thing.
But, like I say, it’s an academic question. The real answer to “Who’s been more of a shambles as Prime Minister: Johnson or Starmer?” is “Liz Truss”.
