Keir Starmer's leadership vacuum exposed by assisted dying legislation

Here is a major piece of legislation which Starmer previously declared he supported, then went silent. It underlines why his premiership fell apart so quickly

Park what you think about assisted dying. A major piece of legislation is to be voted on by MPs on Friday. And Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the country, has gone silent on the issue, leaving a vacuum which has been filled by others.

From what we know, Starmer is in favour. Back in 2015, he voted in favour. In the parliamentary debate, he set out his experience as former Director of Public Prosecutions in which he decided not to prosecute a family after they took their young son - a rugby player paralysed after an accident - to Dignitas. Last December, he declared “I personally do think there are grounds for changing the law.” And nearly 8 weeks ago, he said “I think my views are pretty well known”, and “obviously I’ll look at the detail.”

Since then, silence. He has rightly made this a free vote: the polling shows that 73% of Britons believe assisted dying should be legal in principle, with 13% opposed, but here is a clear-cut example of a matter of conscience, and several MPs are genuinely struggling with the implications either way. The legislation is being introduced as a Private Members’ Bill by backbencher Kim Leadbeater: here is a well-trodden path, with the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales and the Abortion Act both being introduced this way in 1967 under the Labour government of Harold Wilson.

But while former Tory prime minister David Cameron made equal marriage a free vote (wrongly, given that was about minority rights rather than life and death), he still came out swinging in support. There was a cost to that, and Cameron later reportedly said privately: “If I’d known what it was going to be like, I wouldn’t have done it.”

Yet we are now in the curious position in which even David Cameron is showing more leadership than the current prime minister, who today came out to support the legislation.

But while Starmer has been silent, his cabinet ministers have not. The current Health Secretary Wes Streeting - who covets Starmer’s job - has run a very public campaign on the issue, variously warning the legislation could lead to coercion and impact other NHS services. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood have also come out publicly against. The Starmer ally and Labour peer Charlie Falconer attacked the latter, declaring she was driven by her “religious beliefs” and that “they shouldn’t be imposed on everybody else.” Here he singled out the sole Muslim politician, even though Streeting, Phillipson and Reynolds are very open about their Christian beliefs.

But notably, the Cabinet secretary told ministers that the Government was staying neutral and therefore ministers should simply reiterate that “this is a question for Parliament, on which the official Government position is to remain neutral”, and they should avoiding taking part “in the public debate”.

Clearly Streeting in particular has not done that, and he has felt emboldened to defy such instructions. As Bloomberg note, Starmer is being “undermined” by his cabinet - and by government aides who are briefing against it, declaring their hope it will not pass. Bloomberg also reports that Starmer arranged a private meeting with Streeting to express his displeasure at the Health Secretary’s interventions.

But here is a saga which underlines the central structural problem with Starmer’s leadership.

The Labour leader, of course, notoriously won the support of the party’s membership after committing to retain his predecessor’s core radical policy commitments - like public ownership, hiking taxes on the well-off, scrapping tuition fees - and then abandoning them. He made a pact with “the most rightwing, illiberal faction in the party”, as former Labour MP and Blair aide Jon Cruddas put it, and set out to crush the left: this intensified after Labour was routed in the Hartlepool by-election defeat of May 2021.

But while Tony Blair had a clear political vision, Starmer does not. Those who have worked closely with him have emphasised to me his lack of politics. Rosie Duffield is a Member of Parliament whose views on trans rights I strongly disagree with, to say the least, but when she resigned from the Labour party, her devastating letter made a series of inarguable points. Attacking his scrapping of the universal winter fuel payment and retention of the two child benefit cap, she noted his “promotion of those with no proven political skills”, his “managerial and technocratic approach, and lack of basic politics and political instincts”.

Starmer believed he would make a good prime minister on the grounds of “competence”, relentlessly highlighting his experience of having run a large organisation, the Crown Prosecution Service. But a leader, regardless of party or factional affiliation, needs a clear vision for the country to succeed. Their ministers can then clearly understand the defined aims they are all working towards. Starmer instead outsourced the politics to a deeply authoritarian faction who are driven, above all, by vengeance against the left, rather than . The result: a government with no clear political direction to hold it together.

Starmer was handed the last election as a gift-wrapped treat, with the Tories having self-immolated more catastrophically than any government in British democratic history. When the general election was called in May, his party consequently had a whopping polling lead, and even taking into account the polling industry once again getting it wrong, Labour haemorrhaged support during the campaign, despite the Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak having disaster after disaster. Labour won the predicted landslide in terms of seats, but with just 33.7% of the vote, little more than it won in the rout of 2019, less in terms of numbers, and much less than the 40% secured by Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. The turnout, too, was the lowest since the advent of universal franchise. Although this was presented by Starmer’s allies as an achievement - because the party wasn’t piling up votes where it did not need them - it is an insult to our collective intelligence to believe they were genuinely satisfied with a ‘Jenga tower’ landslide which could easily topple over, and which depended on Nigel Farage’s Reform party splitting the right-of-centre vote.

What the result meant is that the new Labour government began with a transparent lack of public enthusiasm. Starmer then spent the period since his election win underlining his lack of leadership skills, approving of the politically disastrous decision to scrap the universal winter fuel payment and being embroiled in scandal over freebies from wealthy donors. Starmer’s approval ratings have frankly imploded since, with worse favourability ratings among British voters than Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, and lower than any previous prime minister at this point.

There is no attempt by the government to set out its vision to the country, to give the electorate a clear and coherent sense of its direction and purpose. That is simply because Starmer doesn’t know himself. And as the phrase goes, a fish rots from the head down.

The structural problem is that the right-wing faction have no clear vision for the crisis-stricken Britain of the 21st century. That’s why Corbynism emerged in the first place, and the Labour Right then had years in political exile to create an alternative vision: but that never happened, and the cupboard remained bare.

Some on the Labour Right clearly saw Starmer as a placeholder, never expecting him to win an election after the rout of 2019, and believing he was the bridge to someone regarded truly as one of their own, like Streeting or Phillipson. But the structural problem will remain. This faction of the Labour party simply do not have answers to the Britain of today. They won the last election by default, and with no public enthusiasm. Nonetheless, as the assisted dying saga shows, Starmer is simply not fit to be prime minister. He lacks clear politics, is devoid of meaningful principle, and as the memory of the election win fades and public hostility grows, his premiership is set to descend into turmoil. The vultures - otherwise known as his cabinet ministers - are already preparing to circle.