He’s so vain, I bet he thinks this war is about him.
UK prime minister Keir Starmer certainly has looked pleased with himself in recent weeks, as he’s cosplayed as a serious statesman on the world’s stage.
First, he managed to get out of the Oval Office without suffering a Zelensky-style mauling; his own clash with vice-president JD Vance was limited to a short, passive-aggressive exchange about Britain’s slide into woke censorship.
‘We’ve had free speech for a very long time, it will last a long time, and we are very proud of that’, intoned Starmer. Which wasn’t exactly JS Mill.
Then, he was flitting back and forth between Britain and Brussels, as he and France’s Emmanuel Macron worked to put together a ‘coalition of the willing’ to provide ‘peacekeeping’ forces in a post-war Ukraine.
It is testament to what a perilous situation Ukraine finds itself in, and how little we have come to expect from this Labour government, that Starmer’s turn has been cheered to the rafters.
Rather than talk seriously about Ukraine – to ensure it can defend itself in future, now that the Americans have gone cold – we’ve had grandiose political posturing followed by witless media praise.
‘Keir Starmer, unlikely leader of the free world’, declared a Politico piece last week. The Economist even mocked him up as Winston Churchill, arguing that Starmer had ‘found purpose abroad’, if not at home.
You would have thought the PM had single-handedly driven Russia from the Donbas, rather than got a few nations to agree to maybe send troops to Ukraine, but only if the American military watches over them – something Trump has ruled out. Russia, for its part, deems the presence of any NATO troops a blood-red line.
As Tim Black wrote on spiked last week, Starmer’s pledge to send British soldiers to defend a border, on the other side of which lurks the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, is deranged on the face of it.
But it’s also totally hollow. Not only have our troop numbers fallen to record lows, we’re also having to stick some of those we do have on Ozempic, given how unfit so many of them are. Plus, Starmer and Macron have made abundantly clear that they’re only willing to shake their fists at the Russian aggressor if they are able to do so while standing behind their 10-foot-tall American friend.
Starmer has certainly displayed a degree of political flexibility that few thought he was capable of. By raising defence spending while slashing international aid, he’s delivered more wins for Shire Tories than various Tory Party leaders managed over the previous 14 years.
Indeed, it seems to be a new iron law of British politics that only left-wing governments can do right-wing things, while only right-wing governments can do left-wing things.
But the gushing headlines over showboating summits and empty gestures obscure the fundamental lack of depth, or even coherence, at the heart of Starmerite foreign policy.
For one thing, Starmer still seems intent on pursuing Net Zero, liquidating what remains of our industrial base and keeping energy prices sky-high. Which is hardly ideal when you’re supposed to be re-arming and fortifying yourself against a jittery global energy market.
More profoundly, what would the young men Starmer is desperate to feed into the meatgrinder be fighting for? Having spent decades deriding national sovereignty and promoting a divisive multiculturalism, our liberal-left leaders make for unconvincing patriots.
Starmer might like to pose in front of Union flags these days, but when pushed to define what Britain is, you can imagine him staring into the middle distance while mumbling something about the Premier League and Paddington.
His critics on the right have a point when they say that the PM – and the establishment more broadly – appear keener on defending Ukraine’s borders than Britain’s. And the same goes for freedom. For all the talk of Starmer as a would-be ‘leader of the free world’, he is presiding over an increasingly un-free Britain, in which speechcrime is punished more harshly than actual crime.
Starmer is hardly the first politician, disliked and rudderless at home, to seek plaudits and purpose in the international arena. But all this reckless war talk and delusions of grandeur feel particularly in poor taste today, with a conflict raging in the East and society fraying at home.
History has resumed. We’re crying out for genuine statesmen and women to guide us through these troubled times. And yet we’re lumbered with the same caste of shallow, technocratic narcissists who have been rattling around the corridors of power for decades.
If Keir Starmer is what leadership looks like today, then we really are in trouble.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater
