A WHOLE host of top journalists are openly claiming Sir Keir is crap at being PM. These are the very same journalists who only months ago were saying Starmer was super at the job, so this tells us something about SW1 journalism as well as our PM.

For example, Jason Cowley had a column in the Times just before Christmas about Starmer’s first six months as PM, saying that “even Labour veterans are calling it the worst start by a government in a lifetime.” 

Cowley wrote that Labour might have had a “strategy to win the general election” but “not to govern.” Or it might be worse: Cowley thought it may be that “they did have a plan, it was incoherent and undermined by factionalism.” This is slightly generous about Starmer’s plan to win the election, as his Labour Party really came into power on a “loveless landslide,” with fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn, because the right was split between Reform and Tory. But it is an admission from a Starmer-friendly pundit that the PM is in trouble.

Cowley drew attention to Starmer’s 180-degree reversals, like saying the “Waspi women” suffered a “huge injustice” in opposition, then rejecting them once in government, and to his enthusiasm for corporate “freebies.” Cowley told us that despite their huge majority, Starmer’s government is “inspiring no-one, least of all its own MPs.”

Starmer is an uninspiring leader who will abandon leftish promises but grab corporate gifts. This is something hundreds of thousands of left-wing activists could have told Cowley years ago. But the well-connected SW1 journalist is, it seems, less well informed than the average Momentum member.

Because just six months ago, Cowley told the Times readers Starmer’s “achievement cannot be overstated,” that the new PM was “steely, relentlessly hard-working, quietly ruthless and meticulous at implementing a strategy.” Just eight months ago Cowley told Times readers that, while the left loathed Starmer for his “equivocations and supposed betrayals,” these were in fact a work of “brilliant” strategy. Cowley was editor of the New Statesman when that magazine did all it could to support Starmer’s rise.

So Starmer is a case of “The Truth Will Out.” Only for pundits like Cowley, it’s best that the truth comes out only after Labour members or voters have had a chance to do something about it. It’s a journalism that admits Starmer is a dud, but only when the remaining choices are other uninspiring centrists.

Cowley is hardly alone: the press work as a pack, so each paper is rushing out a “Starmer in Crisis” story right now. Take Isabel Hardman, who wrote in the Independent before Christmas that Starmer’s government was a “disaster,” that he was “struggling to connect with voters and some parts of his own party.” 

Hardman complained Starmer “has spent a lot of time since coming to power talking about ‘mission-led government,’ setting up ‘mission delivery boards’ (which seem to be slowing decision-making down rather than getting things done), announcing ‘first steps,’ ‘pillars’ and his latest project management concept, ‘measurable milestones’.” 

But that all this management consultancy stuff meant nothing because “Starmer was thinking more like a civil servant rather than a politician who really wants to challenge the system,” he “isn’t someone with a particularly strong vision,” so ends up with management-speak flannel or simply does what his right-wing advisers, like Morgan McSweeney, tell him to do.

But just a year ago Hardman was celebrating the “confident” Starmer: she knew he “had no vision,” but didn’t seem to think that mattered, especially as his lack of vision included abandoning Labour ideas about “redistribution.”

It also certainly isn’t true that these are purely Starmer’s failings: Rachel Reeves, Pat McFadden, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall — do any of these cry out “vision” or “inspiration,” or do they seem like more of the same management-speak misery?

So what does it mean that all the pundits who once sold Starmer as very good, if not the actual dog’s bollocks, are now saying he is simply bollocks? 

These are journalists who saw Starmer up close every day, or in Cowley’s case claim they were his “friend.” But they knew, or said, less about his obvious failings — dull, a bad communicator, no real mission, dishonest — than the average left-wing Labour member.

It shows that so much SW1 punditry, which claims to be about close character judgement, is spurious. These pundits backed Starmer, or held their fire on him, because they wanted the right wing of Labour to succeed, especially when the Tory collapse was bringing Labour into power. 

Now Starmer’s no-reform politics are proving as unpopular as we might expect, they are looking to the only solution they know — replacing him with someone even more right wing like Wes Streeting. When that advice comes, we should treat it as reliable as their original “Starmer is Great” advice turned out to be, as even they admit.