Newspaper Reader.
Feb 09, 2026
Headline: Britain Needs So Much More Than a New Prime Minister
By Adrian Wooldridge
February 9, 2026 at 4:50 AM PST
As a long time reader of The Economist when Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait held political sway, via one of their many their Best Sellers ‘The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America’ featuring the toxic politics of Bush The Younger, and his masters Vice President Dick Cheney and the long forgotten Karl Rove Mr. 1 % !
The resignation of Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, on Sunday brings the Starmer era in British politics to an end. The precise timing and mechanism of the prime minister’s defenestration is unclear. But his authority is shot to pieces, and his government has lost what purpose it had.
There is only one subject on the Labour Party’s mind: Who should replace him? The pros and cons of the two main candidates are endlessly debated. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is a deft media performer. But is that a strength rather than a weakness in the post-Peter Mandelson era, with the party’s former spinmeister now in disgrace? Angela Rayner, the ex-deputy leader, is a charismatic champion of the left. But what about her tax affairs? Al Carns, the armed-services minister and former special-services officer, has made a well-publicized visit to NATO’s northernmost border on Norway’s Russia border. At least this relative unknown is free of political baggage.
But Labour needs more than a new leader. It needs a new sense of direction. The problem with Starmer’s leadership is not simply that he isn’t very good at politics. It is that he has never known what he wanted to do with power. He occasionally flirted with silly ideas — “mission-driven government” one day and reviving the spirit of Harold Wilson the next — only to abandon them. He never had an answer to the basic question: What am I here for?
Ideas are essential to politics because they give you both a sense of direction and purpose. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair were successful prime ministers because they knew where they were headed and were willing to make sacrifices to get there. Starmer made up for his absence of ideas by over-relying on political operatives, most notably McSweeney, and their standard tools of spin, manipulation and “out of the box thinking,” culminating in the appointment of Jeffrey Epstein’s “best pal” Mandelson as British ambassador to the US.
Where can the Labour government get new ideas from at this late stage? Not from the Blairite right. The Mandelson affair has reminded us of everything that was wrong with the clique of insiders who ran the country during the Blair era. Not from think tanks such as the Resolution Foundation. Clever policies cannot deliver unless they are linked by a guiding philosophy. And not from the big-spending left, whatever Rayner’s political talents. Liz Truss’s disastrous Tory premiership has limited the slack the bond markets will grant the country.
…
Editor: When dose it become utterly transparent that Blair and his cadre, not to speak of whole of the British Political Class, that made a protraced war against Jeremy Corbyn, while Blair nourished the political ambitions of an utter mediocratiy of Starmer! Yet some how the greater of too evils is the very definition of what Stamer manifested?
Newspaper Reader.
StephenKMackSD's Blog 