Keir Starmer is now viewed as an “asshole out of his depth” — so runs a brutal verdict from a Labour insider, quoted recently, that cuts through years of careful stage management and misplaced hope. The portrait of the Prime Minister that has finally emerged is not that of a well-intentioned novice who merely needs time, but of a leader who actively mismanages teams, deflects blame onto others, and appears unable to do the job for which he campaigned. The charges are no longer whispered in private; they are being shouted by his own ministers, and the conclusion is stark: Starmer is beyond rehabilitation, his fate only a matter of time.
The Mandelson Affair and a Leader Under Siege
The most damaging episode to crystallise this perception is the Peter Mandelson affair, the latest instalment of which revealed that the Labour peer failed his security vetting for the post of UK ambassador to Washington. Starmer has acknowledged that appointing Mandelson was a “wrong judgment”, but he has largely deflected blame onto Foreign Office officials, specifically top civil servant Olly Robbins, for allegedly failing to inform him of the failed checks. Starmer insists he would not have proceeded with the appointment had he known. The timeline, however, raises awkward questions: Starmer made the decision to appoint Mandelson on 11 December 2024, announced it on 18 December, and vetting began only on 23 December — a sequence that Number 10 has defended as standard practice for direct ministerial roles. The UK Security Vetting agency recommended denying Mandelson clearance between 23 and 28 January 2025, yet the Foreign Office approved it the following day. The precise reasons for the recommendation have not been disclosed.
Mandelson was sacked in September 2025 after emails surfaced showing his continued friendship with Jeffrey Epstein following Epstein’s 2008 conviction, with further correspondence suggesting he may have passed privileged and market-sensitive information to Epstein. In February 2026, Mandelson was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office; he denies criminal wrongdoing and has not been charged. Starmer, facing calls for his own resignation from opponents and anxiety within Labour over the party’s poll ratings, has insisted the “vast majority” of Labour MPs support him. He sacked Olly Robbins over the revelations and ordered a review of vetting procedures. But the damage to his authority is already plain. As his ministers distance themselves on live television, the notion of a Starmer reboot has been abandoned even by loyal stalwarts.
The Zombie Government: Drift as a System of Rule
With no appetite for a leadership election and no consensus on a successor, the Starmer premiership has entered what is now a familiar phase in British politics: the zombie era. It is a state of aimless, scandal-beset governance — not a stable holding pattern, but a slow corrosive drift that produces neither sharp economic collapse nor sudden public service failure, but rather a steady accumulation of hits to living standards and, more broadly, the loss of a sense of shared fate under a tuned-in and responsible captain. A zombie government is distracted, listless, unambitious and uncreative. The gap between the real challenges facing the country and the preoccupations of Number 10 becomes gaping.
This is not the first time Britain has experienced such a phenomenon. Over the past decade there have been four zombie premierships. Theresa May clung on as her Brexit deal reached an impasse. Boris Johnson was a dead man walking for seven months between the Partygate revelations and his resignation — a period that culminated in mass mutiny when he refused to go. Liz Truss spent twenty-seven days between her calamitous mini-budget and her resignation, more than half her entire premiership. Rishi Sunak was, from day one, an interim prime minister tasked with the impossible role of steering the Tories away from oblivion. The repetition of this pattern across different administrations has contributed to a broader political paralysis, and to public frustration and disengagement. Trust in politicians and political institutions is notably low; research points to widespread cynicism, disassociation and a sense of powerlessness among the electorate.
Zombie prime ministers typically take one of two routes. The first is to force relevance by announcing attention-grabbing red-meat policies — Sunak’s U-turn on net zero, Johnson’s first Rwanda deportation plan. The second is to do nothing at all, distracted by firefighting and fending off internal challenges. Johnson took that second route until his party forced him out. Whichever path Starmer chooses, the result is a public entirely uninvested in and contemptuous of an absent government embroiled in remote scandal or bizarre, irrelevant policymaking. The dynamic echoes Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of the French aristocracy in The Old Regime and the Revolution: a nobility that clung to its privileges long after it had abdicated the duties that conferred its legitimacy. Tocqueville argued that it was that abdication that triggered revolution. Here, the political nobility — Starmer among them — feels entitled to power yet fails to leverage politics for real, material ends.
Broader Implications for Labour and Britain
The consequences of this drift extend far beyond one man’s career. The International Monetary Fund has warned that Britain faces the biggest hit to growth from the Iran war of all G20 economies, and the joint highest inflation rate in the G7. The OECD has forecast UK inflation to hit 4% in 2026; the IMF expects it to remain above 3%. The Fund cut its UK growth forecast for 2026 to 0.8%, the largest downgrade among G7 nations, while the EY Item Club warns the economy is on the brink of a technical recession. The UK’s exposure to energy shocks is exacerbated by the pre-existing cost of living crisis — the worst in a generation, with inflation peaking at 11.1% in October 2022, food prices rising nearly a fifth in a single year, and energy bills more than doubling. Low-income households have been disproportionately affected, and despite some easing, cumulative price increases mean living costs remain elevated. To date, the Prime Minister does not appear to have a plan to get ahead of, or even provide reassurance about, what promises to be a prolonged crisis.
Meanwhile, the toxic rise of Reform UK poses grave challenges to social cohesion. The party has positioned immigration as an existential threat to British culture, identity and values, and its platform includes a freeze on immigration, offshore asylum processing, immediate deportation and strict new settlement rules, including proposals to deport up to 600,000 asylum seekers. Its rhetoric exploits hostility towards migrants, turning human lives into a political weapon. Labour, far from tackling this, has been accused of feeding into anti-migrant hostility with harsh measures and rhetoric that echoes Enoch Powell — damaging Reform not one bit. In the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour came third behind the Greens and Reform, a devastating loss in a historically safe seat. A Labour post-mortem found the party lost white working-class voters to the Greens, and Reform is expected to make big gains in next month’s local elections, which Labour is on track for its worst ever performance. Starmer’s response was to speak of “sectarian politics” — an observation that did nothing to address the underlying alienation.
Starmer is not merely a failed leader; he is the culmination of a progressive politics that has failed to refashion its role in a changing Britain. Traditional industrial and working-class heartlands have been eroded by decades of privileging capital over labour. The economy has become hardwired to benefit a diminishing number of the highly paid or generously endowed. And no solid sense of meaning and values has been forged in a world where increasingly savage and cynical forces — from the US to the Middle East — create a vacuum of moral leadership. Starmer’s non-descriptness made it easy for fans to project fantasies onto him, but his vacantness was always his essential trait, qualifying him to head this empty version of progressive politics: a leader who is a vessel rather than an agent of change.
The only hope for the zombie months or years ahead is that Starmer’s tenure will not end in another false start. What or whoever comes next must understand that Labour needs to deliver something more than simply managing the broken legacy of its predecessors. Unless challenges to the political and economic status quo are boldly embraced, then the drift will come for them too.
