At the tail end of the Covid lockdowns, Keir Starmer’s office briefed that the then-Leader of the Opposition was to make a speech announcing a “1945 moment”. It would, they told an excited press corps, meet the mood of unprecedented times. Just as the extremities of the Second World War demanded a turning point in our politics, the Covid pandemic did too. The set-piece policy proposal was something called “British Recovery Bonds” — a new Government scheme for savers — that was forgotten as soon as it was announced. To call it an incremental tweak would be an overstatement. Briefing it as a new Beveridge Report, or a “1945 moment”, was too stupid for satire.

This dissonance between the lofty promise and the actual delivery, between the diagnosis and the prescription, set the tone for the next five years. We’re still living in Groundhog Day, with the PM as the hapless Bill Murray.

It’s no secret that Starmer is not a good communicator. He is no JFK; he’s not even a Gordon Brown. Without him somehow transforming into a completely different person, there is no speech that Starmer could have given today that would have saved his pointless premiership.

Listen to the Prime Minister’s words this morning. Not only is there an absence of style, there is no underlying substance. The pained, adenoidal delivery reminiscent of a supply teacher begging a class to behave does not disguise any operational competence. The layers of tired cliché and confused, weary signalling are an apt match for a directionless government with no guiding philosophy or sense of its own purpose.

This speech was billed as a potentially career-saving moment for the PM after the worst set of election results for Labour this century. He needed something to “meet the moment” and “turn things around”. In the event, we got some reheated policies on nationalised steel and youth employment, along with woolly nods towards a new era of Labourite Europhilia. These were limp, incremental half-measures, listed robotically, just seconds after the automaton-in-chief told us that incrementalism wouldn’t cut it. The Parliamentary Labour Party will have been listening on tenterhooks. But only someone who had never heard a Starmer speech could have expected any different. Waiting for the Gettysburg Address, or a genuine policy zeitenwende, would be akin to giving a murderous XL Bully one last chance to whistle Beethoven’s Ninth.

The mutiny is in full swing now, and has gathered a momentum of its own. Over 40 MPs have publicly called on the Prime Minister to resign, and many more say much worse in private. One Labour MP who hasn’t asked for him to step down texted to say: “My gut is telling me the Labour Party is finished.” Catherine West’s oddball stalking horse impression could open the door for Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner to begin collecting their required 80 names.

Downing Street could buy time if it announced a timetable for a dignified departure, perhaps giving Andy Burnham the chance to return to the Commons. Consistent polling shows the Great Manchester Mayor to be the most popular Labour politician among the general public. But, as another backbencher tells me, “the Labour Right seem to hate Burnham so much” that “they’d rather burn the whole house down” than propel him into No. 10.

We’re therefore witnessing what could be the terminal decline of the second of the two great parties that have dominated Westminster and provided all our PMs for over a century. Starmer could make a speech every day for the next decade, and he still wouldn’t make one that lived up to our moment. Soon, it’ll be over to someone else to give it a try.

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Jonny Ball is a Contributing Editor at UnHerd. He formerly wrote under the name Despotic Inroad.

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