The Spectator has published an article headlined “Keir Starmer is an even worse PM than Boris Johnson,” turning the former Conservative leader into the yardstick for judging his Labour successor. The piece says Sir Keir Starmer was sold as the anti-Boris: methodical, truthful, modest, dutiful and boring. It also says Starmer has ended up looking like a leader who, like Johnson before him, has struggled to escape the habits that damaged the office.
The comparison is blunt because Johnson remains a vivid political reference point. The article describes him as slapdash, easily prone to fibs, boastful, ambitious and charismatic, but also as a man who was quickly mired in feebly venal freebie-snaffling scandals. It says a senior adviser once likened him to a “wonky trolley,” and that he built a dysfunctional inner circle of feuding courtiers while routinely blaming everyone but himself when things went wrong. Starmer, the piece argues, has already been caught filling his boots within days of taking power and has also accumulated his own circle of feuding courtiers.
That matters today because Starmer is still trying to define what his premiership is supposed to be. The article says he intended to be in Number 10 for a decade, using the same kind of long-view language Johnson used in 2022. Johnson said almost exactly the same thing that year, before lasting only weeks after declaring he wanted to remain in office for a long time. The contrast gives the piece its sting: the language of renewal, endurance and discipline is being tested against a record that looks uncomfortably familiar.
Johnson’s period in power also remains the backdrop to the judgment. The article says both men made noises about committing to Brexit, yet neither made a success of it, and both clung to power long after people on their own sides were desperate to be rid of them. That places Starmer not just in comparison with a political predecessor, but against a warning about what happens when a leader’s promises, style and inner circle stop matching the job. Johnson once described himself in biblical language, saying, “The darkness and light are both alike: I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” The Spectator piece suggests Starmer now risks becoming the latest prime minister to discover that slogans about renewal are easier to sell than to sustain.
