You will miss Sir Keir Starmer when he has gone. I hear you say that you will do no such thing. You think that Starmer has been a disaster. He was ‘Two-tier Keir,’ ‘Sir Kid Harmer,’ ‘Free-Gear Keir’ and whatever other insults conservatives generated from their rhyming dictionaries, and that you will be absolutely delighted when he resigns.

I hear what you say. But I am afraid I don’t believe you.

You will miss him, like addicts miss their fix.

The best way to understand Starmer is as a drug. Precisely because he was so mind-numbingly tedious and so terrible at politics, he was the perfect escape from our national decline – Britain’s last diversionary tactic.

You won’t understand the extraordinary and, frankly, shameful abuse directed at him unless you grasp his role as scapegoat for a deeply dishonest political culture.

Precisely because he was so mind-numbingly tedious and so terrible at politics, he was the perfect escape from our national decline – Britain’s last diversionary tactic

Starmer has defended Ukraine and coped with Donald Trump’s destruction of the Atlantic alliance – surely the most dangerous threat to national security since the end of the Cold War. Yet no one gave him credit for standing up to Trump or for rebuilding military relationships with Europe.

On the contrary and preposterously, Starmer became more unpopular than Liz Truss – even though he never caused an economic crisis. He was more unpopular than Nigel Farage – even though the worst allegation levelled against him was that he took free suits from a friend rather than, for instance, £5 million from a crypto billionaire.

His background told against him. Starmer spent most of his life in the law. After his rapid rise to power, commentators gushed that it was marvellous to have a prime minister who wasn’t a ‘professional politician’.

They forgot that politics is a profession, as Max Weber said. You must learn the skills to manage and persuade, and if you don’t, the pressure will destroy you.

We have now witnessed the destruction of two amateur prime ministers. Rishi Sunak entered Parliament in 2015 and became prime minister a mere seven years later in 2022. Starmer entered the Commons in 2015 and was prime minister nine years later. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher wasn’t PM until she had spent 20 years in Parliament.

Starmer did not serve his apprenticeship. He did not acquire the necessary skills to take credit for his achievements, fight his opponents or advance his ideals. All he could do was become an object of abuse.

Jess Phillips made this point well when she said with evident regret in her resignation letter, ‘I think you are a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things however I have seen first-hand how that is not enough. The desire not to have an argument means…leaving opportunities for progress stalled and delayed.’

Phillips might have added that, if you don’t make arguments, your enemies fill the void and make arguments against you. Such has been Starmer’s fate. I have never seen a politician so unjustly maligned.

Every gender-critical feminist I know is convinced Starmer is in the pocket of LGBT+ activists, even though his government clearly did not follow the trans agenda.

Many Jews were convinced that he had abandoned them, even though Starmer was outraged by racist prejudices and earned the enmity of many leftists and Muslims for fighting antisemitism.

Those same leftists and Muslims lost themselves in the conspiracy theory that Starmer was an Israeli puppet, even though he infuriated Netanyahu by recognising a Palestinian state.

Meanwhile the right screamed that Starmer let immigration run out of control – even though net migration crashed on his watch.

The worst of it is the dishonest abuse was cover for a far deeper and more troubling failure to grapple with a country that desperately needs to take a critical look at itself.

By blaming Starmer millions of voters, most of the left, all of the right, and what remains of the mainstream media could avoid facing their own complicity in the national disaster.

The underlying reason for the failure is economic. Since the crisis of 2008 revealed our overdependence on financial services, real GDP per person has grown by just 0.6 per cent a year compared to 2.3 per cent per year in the previous 50 years. Add it up, and you find that our real incomes are 30 per cent lower than they would have been. No wonder we are so angry.

In any thoughtful country decline on this scale would have provoked urgent debate. Instead, we decided that hating Starmer was far easier than confronting the vested interests and half-mad ideologies that stand in the way of escaping stagnation.

Consider our options and see how every road to a more prosperous future is blocked.

Any serious project for reviving the UK would include welcoming migrants whose skills we need, and rejoining the European Union as soon as we possibly can. Right-wing voters will never agree to that.

We would also need to cut regulation along with the vast welfare budget. The left will not accept that. And, here is a sign of our cowardly times, the right will not accept cuts in welfare either if they involve ending payments to the wealthy pensioners who vote for Badenoch and Farage.

At some level most people in the UK know that we are in a land of make-believe. But because we lack the courage to face our problems, we distract ourselves by torturing our leaders instead. Better to blame Starmer for his timidity than accept that British society in the 2020s forces timidity on its prime ministers – and then hates them for doing what we tell them to do.

The smart thing to say on the left is that Starmer was doomed by his failure to deliver radical change. Leftists are right, in my view, but it will be interesting to see what radical changes his would-be successors offer, and whether the left will accept them if they do.

The next prime minister can’t borrow more without setting off a Truss-style meltdown in the bond market – which we may get anyway.

If they want to be radical and improve public services, that will mean telling leftish voters that taxing the rich won’t be enough and they must pay more too. Then, if we want growth, we must turn back to Europe.

If they find the courage to do either or both, I doubt very much that all those who sneered at Starmer’s inability to strike heroic poses and his boring, instrumentalist politics will cheer them on. The dark secret of so much of Britain is that it wants change in theory but hates it in practice.

I appreciate that I am talking about Sir Keir as if he is no longer PM. But though he may hold on in Downing Street for a while, he will be gone soon enough. And then all those who jeered at him will wake up to find themselves alone in an unforgiving world with no one left to blame but themselves.