With his departure imminent, Keir Starmer will have spent less time in Number 10 than any prime minister in the history of the Labour Party. Even Jim Callaghan and Gordon Brown, who never won an election, served for longer in the role.

Starmer’s premiership has been an extraordinary political failure. He has squandered a historic majority. He has trashed the reputation of his party. He leaves little by way of policy legacy. Trust in politics under his premiership has sunk further still. And what was it all for?

When Starmer once said “there is no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be,” he was right, except in the narrowest sense: Starmerism was always about Keir Starmer. There was no doctrine, policy program, or tradition. The Starmer project was simply an effort to make him prime minister.

After he entered Number 10, there was nothing else to do or to say. His self-repudiated “island of strangers” speech, which he claims not to have properly read before delivering, and a stuttering “meep meep” in response to Diane Abbott from the despatch box will be among the most memorable phrases of his short premiership.

Starmer brought to his leadership no vision, no sense of purpose, no real analysis of the problems facing the country, let alone the solutions. He had the misplaced self-confidence to believe that once he was in office, being a sensible grown-up who followed “the rules”, things would get better. When they didn’t, it was always someone else who paid the price. No other prime minister has been so ready to sacrifice his advisers for the sake of his own premiership.

The result was a dizzying array of U-turns: winter fuel allowance cuts, the two-child benefit cap, disabled welfare cuts, a national grooming gangs inquiry, ID cards, extending inheritance tax to farms, the Chagos Islands, allowing the US to use British bases to bomb Iran, day one employment rights, and canceling local elections. These are indicative of a man who really doesn’t know what he’s doing or who he is for, with one exception: Keir Starmer is for himself.

From the outset of his leadership in 2020, Starmer made it clear that he was prepared to do or say anything to rise to the top job. His leadership was the most authoritarian in Labour’s history. He ejected his predecessor from the party. He shut down debate. He blocked parliamentary candidates who were aligned with the wrong faction. He treated the spirit of internal debate — which is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of the broad-church coalition that historically comprised the Labour Party — with contempt.

Starmer took the Labour whip off dozens of MPs, not just for misconduct but for political dissent. This is a use of the whips’ power not seen in the Labour Party in over half a century. Yet, under Starmer, it became almost de rigueur.

He used the Labour Party as a vehicle for his own personal advancement, without any deep attachment to its traditions, principles or culture. He allowed himself to lead a vicious, internal factional fight against “the Left” of the party. In so doing, he and his acolytes ripped out Labour’s heart and transplanted it with a cold, calculating machinery that has now prematurely short-circuited.

Nye Bevan described his Fifties leadership rival Hugh Gaitskell, who led the party from 1955-63, as a “man who hates ideas”. Rather than face up to internal party debates, Gaitskell preferred to “consort with dreary people…who are always advising him to hedge and to avoid dangerous debates”. Bevan complained: “He isn’t a man you can advise. He’s too brittle for that. If he disagrees with you, that’s that, and you can’t influence him. He isn’t a man who impressed or influenced. He is just scared and runs away.” A dreary man, rooted in nothing — it’s an apt way to describe Starmer.

There are some who worry that Andy Burnham, Starmer’s assumed successor, might be another politician in this mold. There is no doubt that Burnham is an ambitious man, but ambition itself is not a problem. He has a record of flitting between policy positions as winds change. Tony Benn divided politicians into two categories: signposts and weathercocks. Burnham may well be the latter.

But, at least in comparison to Starmer, Burnham is likely to be much more pluralistic in his approach to leadership. He appears to possess a genuine love of the Labour Party — its history, traditions, and people. He can at least bring about a revival of open debate in the party, before it is too late.

The failure of the Starmer leadership offers salutary lessons for Burnham. A Labour leader cannot survive on control of machinery alone. The Labour Party has a life of its own. It is an organic being, not a robot. Andy Burnham seems to understand this, but time will tell.

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Richard Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary University of London.

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