The local elections are a chance to show a leader who believes he’s above it all the anger he has wrought
Keir Starmer once tried to portray Boris Johnson as a “trivial man”. But the country knew who Boris was and why they voted for him. With Starmer, after years of watching him, the truth is still foggy – until you realise he’s not guided by principles at all. Our Prime Minister just says whatever he needs to get through the next news cycle, the next day or the next election. That’s not leadership. That’s cowardice.
The truth is that Keir Starmer is the trivial one. He merely pretends to be serious, wearing glasses paid for by another man, and spouting opinions given to him by others. He blows with the wind, twisting like a weathervane. There is no conviction, no moral core. Just performance. When faced with hard decisions, he dodges them. And he breaks his promises.
He promised not to raise taxes on working people. His first Budget did exactly that – with a punishing jobs tax that’s hurting the very businesses he claims to support. He said he was on the side of pensioners, then snatched away winter fuel payments without warning, leaving 10 million older people wondering why they’d been lied to. He claimed to back British farmers. Then he introduced the family farms tax, making it harder for family-run farms to pass their land to the next generation.
Starmer’s approach to women’s rights has been just as slippery. I’ve spent years fighting to protect single-sex spaces, to ban puberty blockers for children, and to push back against a dangerous ideology that tells young people they were born in the wrong body. Labour, by contrast, mocked those efforts. David Lammy called me a dinosaur. And Starmer hounded Rosie Duffield out of his party for saying only women have cervixes – something he now claims to believe himself.
I have acknowledged the mistakes my party made when in office. When the facts change, most people reflect. Keir Starmer doesn’t. He just rewrites the record. This week, he couldn’t even bring himself to apologise to the woman he forced out of his party for telling the truth. That tells you everything. This is not a man who defends the vulnerable. Not a man who takes responsibility. Not a man with the moral courage to say: “I was wrong.”
And it’s not just at the top. The rot runs through his party. Labour doesn’t govern. It mismanages. From Whitehall to your local town hall, the same pattern repeats: high taxes, failed services and a refusal to admit when things are going badly wrong.
Right now, Britain needs real leadership. A plan and not vague promises and media-trained soundbites. A vision. A spine.
Just look at Birmingham. Labour councillors bankrupted the largest local authority in Europe after wasting millions on a failed IT system and botching equal pay settlements. Now residents are facing a 7.5 per cent council tax hike and streets piled with 26,000 tonnes of uncollected rubbish. Rats the size of cats roam the city. This isn’t a metaphor – it’s Labour governance in action. Birmingham’s Labour MPs are more interested in Gaza than in Birmingham’s Gosta Green.
But it doesn’t stop in Birmingham. Across the country Labour councils don’t do the basics. Potholes go unfilled. Bins go uncollected. Council tax soars. Local services shrink. They talk about fairness while delivering chaos. They talk about compassion while bankrupting cities. And when challenged, they point fingers and change the subject.
The real problem is this: Labour can’t govern because it can’t tell the truth. It can’t learn from failure because it won’t admit where things are going wrong – such as rising unemployment, stubborn inflation and general decline. Starmer can’t lead because he doesn’t know where he’s going. His chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, reportedly said he “acts like an HR manager, not a leader”. I disagree. Most HR managers at least know what their values are.
Right now, Britain needs real leadership. A plan and not vague promises and media-trained soundbites. A vision. A spine.
This coming week, voters have a chance to speak. Local elections matter. Mayoral elections matter. These elections shape the services you use every day. The people you choose will be in control of budgets of hundreds of millions of pounds. But these elections are also a moment to send a message to a prime minister who thinks he’s above scrutiny. Who won’t answer basic questions. Who thinks he’s too clever to be held to account.
This article was originally published in The Telegraph
