Britain's outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer inside 10 Downing Street in central London on June 25, 2026. Photo by Brook Mitchell/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Article content

In the U.K. general election two years ago today, Sir Keir Starmer led Labour back to power with 411 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons — 63 per cent of the seats though with only 33.7 per cent of the popular vote. And now he’s done. What happened?

Article content

One theory is that he managed his parliamentary caucus poorly. Some Labour MPs say he didn’t know their name — though with more than 400 of them, who can blame him? If he met each of his MPs for five minutes every month, that’s almost three working days gone right there. And he still has Donald Trump and Putin and Carney and all the rest to deal with.

Article content

Article content

Article content

I follow British politics, mainly for entertainment, through the conservative lenses of the Telegraph and Spectator. The impression I get is that Starmer’s problem was way too many U-turns. Love her or hate her, Margaret Thatcher remains the most consequential British prime minister of the past half-century. One of the phrases she’s best known for was from her speech to the Conservative Party conference of 1980, during a difficult patch in her first year as prime minister: “To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the ‘U’ turn, I have only one thing to say, ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” The speech got a six-minute ovation.

Article content

Article content

Today’s U.K. Conservative Party has a webpage dedicated to Keir Starmer’s 25 supposed U-turns. That number’s probably high. Google AI, trawling from the journalistic seabed no doubt, says only 14. But several high-profile reversals early on gave Starmer a reputation for being turned far too easily. (A professional spinner being turned too much is a dizzying image, no?)

Article content

He and his Chancellor of The Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, began by income-testing winter fuel supplements for pensioners, giving them only to the poorest. Makes sense policy-wise but it didn’t go over well with pensioners and lefty MPs so Starmer and Reeves eventually relented. Same thing for capping full child benefits at the second child. And for very modest cuts to welfare payments. When parts of the Labour caucus rebelled, Starmer caved. A drawback of party politics is that measures that would likely win big majorities in a free vote of all MPs are hostage to influential minorities in the governing party’s caucus, who don’t let them go to a vote. (See also: U.S. House of Representatives.)

Article content

Article content

A little turning here or there is not such a bad thing. It may even create an impression of reasonableness. As Keynes supposedly asked: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Margaret Thatcher did some turning herself, most importantly perhaps in her first confrontation with the miners, though her initial tactical withdrawal allowed her to build up the coal stocks that helped her prevail second time round in a long, bitter strike that effectively broke the unions’ control of Britain’s labour market.

Article content

Article content

But Starmer-style turning and turning — “like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel” — makes it look as if No. 10 Downing Street were on a large Lazy Susan. It suggests a PM who never knows the facts or doesn’t think through the political implications of what he’s proposing or won’t fight for his convictions or doesn’t have convictions to begin with — all charges that have been laid against Starmer in the past few weeks.

Article content

On the other hand, never turning can be a mistake, too. Margaret Thatcher refused to compromise on her “community charge” for local taxation and it helped drive the caucus coup that eventually turfed her.