As Labour figures breathe a sigh of relief at 'having a leader who likes Labour', a new band of sceptics are born. They consist of former Special Advisors, speechwriters, and senior cabinet ministers of Keir Starmer’s government, all competing to define the Starmer project. Like most political post-mortems conducted by the culpable, the nitty-gritty of whose idea it was to appoint Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador, cut the Winter Fuel Allowance, or defend Israel’s 'right' to cut power and water supplies to Gaza aren’t mentioned. Instead the focus is devoted towards the idea that Starmer was treated too harshly, not just by MPs, but by progressive Labour voters. If blame is to be apportioned, they believe that blame principally belongs to those working to oust Keir Starmer. They are, to put it gently, delusional.
Darren Jones, the former Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister (a position now abolished) said of Starmer:
I think it would have been better to have allowed the Starmer administration to keep doing the hard work we were doing to build the foundations to win a second term. Then if nearer the next election conversations had to be had, I think they could have been had in a more respectful way… This modern approach of getting queasy and then just changing [leader] too rapidly. In the past it was normal for governments to be unpopular midterm because you’ve got to take difficult structural long-term decisions.
It is difficult, even if you are willing to be charitable to Starmer, to think of any of these foundational, long-termist, unpopular decisions. What 'hard work' did Starmer carry out beyond so successfully toxifying Labour that they lost the Gorton & Denton by-election to the Greens, and saw Starmer’s own personal ratings sink to the lowest since records began. In what would be Starmer’s final budget as PM, Chancellor Rachel Reeves ditched plans to raise income tax after spending weeks preparing the ground to do so.
The most unpopular decision taken was the cut to the Winter Fuel Allowance. Starmer’s government instead of having a serious argument about why it was necessary, dispatched Lucy Powell to make the claim that had it not been cut, there would’ve been a run on the pound.
Compare this to how Andy Burnham made his argument on the need for ending the Triple Lock on pensions in order to fund a National Care Service. What was previously regarded as the third rail of British politics became a popular policy overnight. This was a political gamble, and a long-term decision. It is not, as some commentators have suggested, 'Burnham magic', but the policy of a politician who was in parliament for Gordon Brown’s one percent hike in National Insurance Contributions to fund the NHS. In other words, it’s exactly the type of policy the public expect when they elect a Labour government.
Starmer’s former Chief Speechwriter, Alan Lockey, made a more detailed defence of Starmer’s policies on his Substack:
Never mind the Government’s straightforwardly left-wing economic agenda: the higher taxes for public service investment; the half a million children to be lifted out of child poverty; the generational advances in workers’ and renters’ rights. Forget about the long-fought for recognition of Palestine, the improved European relations, or the genuinely epochal decoupling from US foreign policy over Iran. No, this was Labour’s progressive nadir. The vibe was off.
In reality, higher taxes for public service investment were juxtaposed with an NHS cancelling hip operations to save money. Starmer did scrap the two child benefit cap in 2025, but only after suspending seven Labour MPs for voting for an amendment to scrap it in 2023. On workers’ rights, even in its watered down form, the Employment Rights Act is a significant improvement on what came before on the individual rights of workers, but has done little for collective rights. On Iran, the genuinely 'epochal decoupling of US foreign policy' came from Pedro Sanchez’s government refusing the US use of their airbases to attack Iran. While not joining the war was of course welcome, it was only surprising because it ran against Starmer’s conscious efforts to be as obsequious as possible towards Donald Trump, for few tangible benefits to the UK. Lockey’s argument on the recognition of Palestine can be refuted by simply remembering the manner it was presented to the public. Ed Miliband's first speech to Labour Party Conference as Foreign Secretary was not one of a politician proud of his party’s record on the issue of Palestine. This gutsy attempt at revisionism by Lockey betrays the fact that Starmer saw alienating Labour’s core voters and MPs as an inherently virtuous act in of itself.
It is not policy which Lockey is most interested in discussing though. He eschews in his words 'weighing the explanatory scales on welfare versus Gaza versus the winter fuel allowance' in favour of an attack on progressive voters for being 'detached, not just from material reality, but from the very idea that the purpose of politics is to change material reality'. And decries what he terms as 'expressive politics; a politics that is primarily about identity expression, about virtue-signalling, aura-farming’. Lockey seems unaware of the irony of a former speechwriter for Keir Starmer being sceptical of a leader with too much strong expression - but this formulation just doesn’t pass the smell test.
The most successful Labour politician is also the most quotable, for good reason. Tony Blair was the epitome of expressive politics. Blair was not shy about making an unapologetic defence of his party on progressive terms. His argument against the Labour left of the 1980s: that they believed the electorate were stupid, applies conversely to Starmer. Blair said the Left believed that people voted for Margaret Thatcher because they actually wanted a left-wing Labour Party. Starmer, by contrast, governed as if he believed the electorate were stupid. In a time of heightened voter volatility, with fewer and fewer people feeling loyalty towards one political party, Starmer’s government pursued a strategy of 'hippy punching' from the off.
Starmer, and seemingly Lockey, believed those who voted for a Labour government did so to see it cut disability benefits, cut winter fuel, or the Labour Prime Minister announce that immigration had caused 'incalculable damage' to the UK. Lockey should address the reality: the contempt he and others within the Starmer project felt for progressives was evidently reciprocated.
Paul Ovenden is perhaps the most toxic of Starmer’s holdouts. Ovenden has been writing opinion pieces for The Times since January 2026, following his resignation as No. 10 Director of Strategy after messages were leaked which showed him making sexually explicit remarks about Diane Abbott. The broad thrust of each of his articles is that not enough hippies were punched, and Starmer’s war on progressives and progressive causes was not allowed to be victorious, because of the 'stakeholder state' of 'campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and well-networked organisations'.
In an article arguing against an early election and tax rises, Ovenden states:
Rather than tackle the post-Covid culture, where the state is increasingly treated as a cash machine to dish out entitlements to everyone from people arriving on boats to rapidly medicalised layabouts, too many around the Labour Party instead want to take the easy route: higher taxes for the remaining people who actually create some wealth.
It’s tempting not to take this venom seriously, however, it should be noted that Ovenden’s claims are simply untrue. Asylum seekers are housed in hotels, and now old army barracks, because they have No Recourse To Public Funds (NRPF), and are banned from seeking employment during the initial stages of their asylum application.
Regarding 'rapidly medicalised layabouts', behind this hateful phrase is again untruth. The DWP’s published report into fraud in the benefit system lists the PIP fraud rate as 1.6%, 1.4% of which comes from those in receipt of PIP who 'failed to report improvements in their functional needs'. Anyone who understands PIP knows that these needs are decided by DWP assessors, who are not specialist medical professionals. This leads to people with long-term health conditions living under biennial threat of having their benefit withdrawn. Some testimonials are truly shocking in the DWP’s capacity for cruelty.
Ovenden admits Labour supporters 'will not have enjoyed that last paragraph'. One such Labour supporter is Alan Milburn, the former New Labour Health Secretary who in his report into the rise in young people who are Not in Education, Employment, or Training, said:
Young people are different from those who came before them. Not worse. Not lazier. Not less intelligent. But different in ways that have material consequences. They have grown up in a digital world that has rewired how they communicate, how they form relationships, how they manage stress, how they spend their time. They have less experience of workplaces. They present with higher levels of anxiety and depression. They are more likely to disclose health conditions. They expect flexibility. They value purpose. They are less willing to tolerate poor treatment. Much of it reflects the world they were given, not the world they chose. And some of it, their insistence on purpose, their refusal to accept poor treatment, their openness about mental health, reflects values that the workplace would do well to learn from rather than resist.
Ovenden’s ignorance is unsurprising, previous Prime Ministers have been unaware of specific policies like NRPF. It is, however, emblematic of the kind of uninterrogated arrogance that each of Starmer’s holdouts possess. All have a different range of unconvincing excuses and explanations for why Starmer failed, none of them want to talk about the actual failures, take any responsibility of their own, and – like the disciples of the failed leader they defined themselves against – all are unshakable in their belief that Starmer himself was hard done by. It remains unclear what their actual politics are beyond their disdain for progressives.
When asked to define this new group of ex-Starmer loyalists, Darren Jones said 'We would describe ourselves as the people that want to win power and to modernise the country'. A banal line which would not have sounded out of place at any time pre-2024; however, Jones held two separate senior cabinet positions within a government that did win power, and failed to 'modernise' the country by any meaningful metric. For Jones, Lockey, and Ovenden, it is time to face what the Starmer project actually was: a six-year experiment in externalised self-hatred. The long-term legacy they can lay claim to is that this Labour government may be the last.
Ciaran McGurdy is the former Editor of The Social Review, and can be found on the Substack Utter Woke Sense.