British Prime Minister Keir Starmer leaves Downing Street on Wednesday.Carl Court/Getty Images
How did it come to this? The practical-minded “fix-it” Prime Minister who was welcomed less than two years ago as a salve for a broken country now finds himself entwined in the twisted wreckage of his country’s former political order.
Britain’s Keir Starmer is currently at risk of losing his job at the hands of his own Labour caucus, facing down a cabinet that has turned sharply against him amid plummeting polls and an electorate apparently willing to vote in protest for disturbing extremists. The only thing keeping him in power is a lack of consensus around a plausible replacement.
The nature of his crisis points to Mr. Starmer’s fundamental misdiagnosis of his country’s fracture point. He has applied his political tourniquet to the wrong limb, using the wrong tools, in attempting to address his country’s crises of imagination before turning to the very real crises afflicting the democratic world.
Starmer’s leadership on the rocks as Mandelson-Epstein revelations spark a crisis
The event that triggered the current revolt was a shocking allegation of corruption and compromise by the man Mr. Starmer chose as his ambassador to Washington shortly after Donald Trump‘s re-election. Shocking, but not really surprising: Peter Mandelson is a known commodity, linked for decades to the phrase “Prince of Darkness” for what the BBC called “his reputation as a Svengali-like operator” and the lurid succession of conflict-of-interest scandals that have pockmarked his career in cabinets and backrooms.
Mr. Starmer knew this about his new ambassador – in fact, he surely saw Mr. Mandelson’s demimonde of billionaires and autocrats as a key asset, the secret ingredient that might buy Britain some favour with an American president-elect who was neck-deep in that world. Rather than working to forge a new trade and economic order with new partners, he wasted much of 2025 in a humiliating and ultimately mostly fruitless attempt to rebuild the “special relationship” on Mr. Trump’s personal terms.
He did not know, he says, that Mr. Mandelson had been such a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, well after Mr. Epstein was convicted of child prostitution in 2008, nor did he suspect that Mr. Mandelson, while in prime minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet, might have leaked sensitive government plans and documents to the corrupt financier for cash and political favours. Those allegations were only unveiled in the Epstein documents released in late December, leading to Mr. Mandelson’s sacking and criminal investigation.
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Appointing Mr. Mandelson was obviously a bad decision, in retrospect. But it also represented an earlier bad decision: Mr. Starmer’s strategic error in allying his country more closely with the Trump administration, rather than attempting to do the harder work of building economic and political alliances with new and more reliable partners, especially the 27 countries to its east and south that Britain abandoned when it left the European Union in 2020.
More broadly, the appointment signalled his decision to place a priority on the imaginary crises that animate voters who’ve strayed to the right, rather than the real structural flaws that affect their material conditions and drive them into such movements.
Britain is the original “broken” country. For more than seven decades, its politics have been animated by the myth that there was a golden age somewhere in the recent past. The phrase “broken Britain” exploded into popularity during its actual golden age, the 1990s and 2000s. That concept led directly to the mistake of holding a second EU referendum, and then the worse mistake of carrying it out.
In 2024, Mr. Starmer restored fiscal competence and productive foreign policy to Westminster. But rather than immediately addressing that one real thing that had damaged Britain, he turned his attention to what many voters had become convinced were problems. He launched a tough-on-crime program that coincideded with crime falling to its lowest historic levels in most of Britain, especially its cities – but most voters continued to believe that crime was rising. He slashed immigration so dramatically that the economy is stagnating and entire sectors are lacking vital staff – but most voters still believe immigration levels are high and rising.
While failing to change the public perception of “brokenness” in what is actually a very safe and well-functioning country, Mr. Starmer vacillated on the real threats.
Only in recent months has he seriously begun to bring Britain back to Europe – something a strong majority now desire. And only amid Mr. Trump’s threats against Europe has he taken a leading role in building a defence and economic bloc without the United States, instead of trying to be its friend and enabler.
That, in the end, is the real tragedy of Mr. Starmer’s crisis: By devoting his attention to changing muddled minds rather than changing the world around them, he wasted a lot of time.