Keir Starmer resigned this morning.
Less than two years after entering Downing Street with one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern British history, the man who was supposed to restore stability to British politics became yet another casualty of it.
Many will spend the coming days arguing about the moment his premiership collapsed. They will point to poor election results, falling poll numbers, economic stagnation, internal Labour revolts or the rise of potential successors. They will all be looking in the wrong place.
The weaknesses that ended Keir Starmer’s premiership were visible from the very beginning. The irony is that the first people to recognise them were British Jews. Not because we possessed some unique political insight, but because we were the first to experience the consequences of a leadership style that would eventually affect everyone else.
For a long time, very few people cared. When British Jews warned that antisemitism was becoming normalised within sections of public life, we were dismissed. When we warned that institutions were failing to take our concerns seriously, we were told we were exaggerating. When we warned that political leaders were increasingly willing to treat Jewish concerns as negotiable if doing so made life politically easier, we were accused of seeing problems that did not exist.
The response was often not hostility, it was something far more damaging, indifference. After all, if the consequences appeared confined to Jews, why should anyone else concern themselves with it?
The answer, as it turned out, was that these were never uniquely Jewish problems. They were symptoms of something much bigger. A failure of leadership, of institutions, of political courage, a failure of vision.
When Starmer became Labour leader, many Jews desperately wanted to believe in him. After the Corbyn years, they needed a reason to believe once again in a party traditionally aligned with our values as a community, yet even then there were warning signs. This was, after all, the same Keir Starmer who had spent years serving in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. The same Keir Starmer who had praised Corbyn and described him as someone who would make '‘a very good Prime Minister." The same Keir Starmer who, when antisemitism was metastasising throughout Labour, appeared remarkably reluctant to acknowledge the problem.
Eventually he acted, eventually he helped remove Corbyn from the party, but even then there remained a lingering question. Was this conviction or was it calculation?
The events of October 7th provided the answer, because October 7th demanded something very simple from political leaders, moral clarity. Not political sophistication, not electoral triangulation, not focus groups, simply clarity.
The largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust should not have required complicated analysis. Yet throughout the months that followed, Starmer’s instinct was repeatedly the same, to manage, balance, calculate, react, but never quite to lead.
The same pattern emerged over and over again.
A failure to confront the reality of antisemitism on Britain’s streets and campuses.
A reluctance to challenge the increasingly extreme rhetoric emerging from the progressive left.
An unwillingness to acknowledge that many British Jews felt abandoned by our national institutions that were supposed to protect them.
An unwillingness to robustly support Israel’s campaign against Hamas whilst simultaneously offering little meaningful pressure on those responsible for October 7th.
A continued refusal to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood and years of hesitation over the IRGC despite repeated promises and mounting evidence of attacks on our shores.
The same instinct could be seen in policing. Week after week, British Jews watched laws enforced robustly in some circumstances and interpreted creatively in others. They watched hate marches takeover Central London most weekends, behaviour that would have been deemed intolerable had it been directed at almost any other minority treated with extraordinary deference.
Whether one agreed with that assessment or not is almost beside the point, the perception took hold that there were different rules for different groups. Perception, as Starmer repeatedly failed to understand, is often every bit as important as intention.
Then came perhaps the most revealing decision of all. The extraordinary spectacle of a British government choosing to advance recognition of a Palestinian Arab state at precisely the moment when pressure was finally mounting on Hamas to reach a ceasefire agreement and release the remaining hostages.
Reasonable people can disagree about Palestinian Arab statehood. What is harder to understand is why a British Prime Minister would choose that particular moment. At the very point when the United States and regional actors were attempting to increase pressure on Hamas. At the very point when the return of hostages remained one of the central objectives of international diplomacy. At the very point when Hamas was facing growing questions about what it had achieved and what it had destroyed.
Instead, Britain handed Hamas a political victory and not because recognition itself changes realities on the ground, but because symbols, narratives and perceptions mattered more to Starmer than anything.
The perception created was unmistakable, that October 7th had worked, that terror had delivered political progress and that the rape, torture, murder and kidnapping of civilians had produced diplomatic gains that years of negotiation never could. The message received by Hamas supporters was not one of failure, it was one of vindication. Not a reminder of all that Palestinian Arabs had lost as a consequence of Hamas’s actions, but an opportunity to point towards what had supposedly been gained because of them.
That may not have been the intention, but leadership is judged not only by intentions, it is judged by consequences. Once again Starmer appeared unable to distinguish between a gesture that felt politically useful in Westminster and the message it would send to those watching far beyond it.
The result was entirely consistent with the wider pattern of his premiership. A triumph of political management over strategic thinking, an exercise in optics rather than leadership and this is where the story stops being about Jews.
Because exactly the same pattern can be seen everywhere else, in economic policy, immigration, policing, foreign affairs, in leadership itself. Britain did not elect a Prime Minister with a vision, it elected a manager.
The tragedy for Starmer is that it took fourteen years of Conservative mistakes, scandals, divisions and failures to create the opportunity that carried him into Number 10. An opportunity many politicians spend entire careers waiting for and never receive.
The 2024 election was not a Labour victory in the traditional sense, it was a national protest. Britain had simply exhausted its patience with Conservative rule. Starmer’s achievement was not inspiring voters, but making himself sufficiently unthreatening that voters felt comfortable using him as a vehicle through which to punish somebody else. Britain did not vote for Keir Starmer, Britain voted against the Conservatives.
For a moment, that was enough, it usually is, until governing begins. Yet it took less than two years for the country to reach the same conclusion. That removing a failed government is not the same thing as replacing it with a capable one. That caution is not leadership, management is not vision and that a politician who spends his career avoiding difficult choices eventually discovers that leadership consists almost entirely of making them.
Starmer’s rise was built upon public exhaustion, while his resignation was built upon public disappointment. The danger now is not his departure, his departure was inevitable, the danger is that Labour learns the wrong lesson.
That it concludes Starmer failed because he was insufficiently progressive rather than insufficiently courageous. That it responds by moving further towards the politics represented by Zack Polanski, Mothin Ali and others who increasingly define modern progressive activism.
Polanski is perhaps the perfect symbol of this temptation. So perfectly assembled for contemporary progressive politics that one suspects he was grown in a laboratory beneath a university sociology department. Passionately anti-Israel, gay, Jewish, a former hypnotist…The only thing more remarkable than his politics is the fact that anyone mistakes them for a route to government.
The fragmentation of British politics is already here, the horse has already bolted, the question is whether it becomes permanent. Whether the parties of protest come to define Britain’s future or whether Labour and the Conservatives rediscover the confidence to reclaim the political centre.
Every step Labour takes further to the left will encourage the Conservatives to take a step in the opposite direction. The result is not victory, but escalation. A country increasingly defined by political tribes that know exactly what they oppose and progressively less about what they are trying to build.
For a long time, the warning signs could be ignored because they appeared to affect only Jews, then they began affecting everyone else and suddenly they mattered.
That is the real story of Keir Starmer’s premiership, not simply that he failed, many Prime Ministers fail. It is that the flaws that ultimately brought him down were visible from the very beginning to those willing to see them. The country chose not to look, now it has no choice.
Keir Starmer is gone, but the failures that defined his leadership remain. The instinct to avoid difficult truths, the temptation to substitute management for leadership, the belief that principles can always be deferred until tomorrow.
It took fourteen years of Conservative failure to create the opportunity that carried Keir Starmer into Downing Street. It took less than two years for Britain to realise what a poor bargain that was.
The real question now is whether Britain understands why, because the warning signs were there all along.
The country simply chose not to pay attention while they affected someone else.
Leo Pearlman is a London based producer and a loud and proud Zionist. His most recent film about the Oct 7 Nova Music Festival massacre, ‘We Will Dance Again’ has won the 2025 Emmy of the 46th Annual News & Documentary Awards for most ‘Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary’.