Dan Allman

The reaction to Keir Starmer’s resignation has been ugly. You can think he was a bad Prime Minister. I do. You can think he got a great deal wrong. He did. I’ve said as much often enough myself. But if you watched a man stand there, visibly broken, resigning after less than two years in one of the most brutal jobs in the country, and felt nothing but glee, mockery or spite, that does not make you insightful. It makes you emotionally stunted. Some of you are so tribal, so nasty and so utterly lacking in grace that you watched a man being brought down in public and treated it as entertainment. It is a very ugly look, and a very small one. And the really stupid part is that many of you still haven’t grasped the bigger point. Keir Starmer was never the real problem. Labour is. The ideology is. Remove the man at the top and the machine remains. I wanted him gone too. But wanting him gone and behaving like a pack of sneering little yobs when he finally falls are not the same thing.