For much of the past decade, Sir Keir Starmer was presented as the solution to Britain’s political troubles. A Member of Parliament since 2015 and leader of the Labour party since 2020, following a distinguished legal career culminating as Director of Public Prosecutions, here at last – we were told – was a serious and competent man to restore order to public life. After the drama of Brexit, the turmoil of Boris, the flash-in-the-pan of Liz Truss and the dull inutility of Sunak, Starmer was meant to bring professionalism back to government. The adults would once again be in charge.

Soon after his move into Downing Street in June 2024, reality began to expose this misunderstanding of the nature of politics. Reports spread that Starmer was surprised the Civil Service did not have plans ready to go for a responsible course of action. Civil servants explained they were there to implement his plans, not the other way round. Too often, establishment liberals spoke as if Britain’s problems were merely managerial and it was just those wicked bad Tories in charge who were mucking things up. Government ceased to function only because it had unserious people running it. Replace them with sensible professionals – how about that well-spoken head of the Crown Prosecution Service? – and the machinery would begin working again. The task was not ideological or even that political: merely administrative. Britain did not need statesmen so much as competent managers.

No figure embodied this vision more perfectly than Starmer himself. Unlike many of his predecessors, his rise had come with a noticeable absence of decades of political combat. He had neither built a faction nor mastered the arts of parliamentary intrigue. (His one true skill was using the internal processes of the Labour party to deselect and expel Jew-hating ideologues who had reached the level of MP – for which the public should be grateful.) There were no years spent forging alliances within the Labour movement: his reputation rested solely upon his distinguished legal career and his service as head prosecutor. There is nothing wrong with these accolades: they made him a respected public servant and fully deserving of his knighthood. But they belonged to a world very different to and removed from real politics.

There is an aspect to law that is fundamentally hierarchical. The law is passed, judgements are made and lawyers debate the manner of its implementation or the guilt or innocence of those charged with transgressing it. Competence at running a team of prosecutors is indeed valuable.

Politics, meanwhile, requires the management of competing interests – within your own party and in the wider parliament, civil service, and state apparatus – and balancing the loyalties, ambitions and principles of political actors. Law and politics both involve conflict conducted under rules, but no amount of technical legal expertise can exempt a leader from the essentials learned from the bearpit of party politics. Nor can the Catholic view of politics as a purposeful defence and pursuit of the common good be reduced to mere technique at the hands of an operator.

Starmer’s early difficulties over welfare reform were not a mere disagreement over policy, but revealed his irritation and surprise that elected representatives would not simply support his measures under instructions – like his CPS colleagues presumably did. Resistance emerged (ostensibly principled, if essentially unwise), support for his necessary reforms to the bloated welfare bill evaporated, and Starmer’s ministry was forced into beating the retreat. The episode established a pattern from which it never really recovered.

That episode also proved a helpful reminder about how necessary actual political disagreement is in a representative parliamentary democracy. The attitude – never much expressed with clarity, more often intuited through behaviour – that politics is a technical exercise rather than a contest over power and principles is widespread amongst metropolitan liberal elites and their provincial proxies. Their consensus – expressed in the liberal wing of the Conservative party as well – is that the important questions have largely been settled and what remains is just the task of good administration. Competence is held up as the supreme virtue (short in supply though it is) and expertise replaces the ability to act from fundamentally sound first principles. The ideal leader, then, is not an experienced political bruiser but a professional manager like Sir Keir.

The experience of Britain and other European countries has a tendency to expose the weakness of this attitude to politics. A nation is neither a private company nor a law firm, nor a university, a regulator or a prosecuting authority. Citizens do not behave like employees and the Members of Parliament they elect serve as representatives, not subordinates. Party discipline is necessary to parliamentary politics, but Starmer did not seem to make much of an effort either to ensure his own whopping great majority actually backed his policies or to seek to implement them before he explained the necessity and brought them alongside.

Political authority in a parliamentary democracy must be continually won, held and re-won. Many of the kind of party barons and politicians we now think of as old-fashioned understood this far better than the technocrats who looked down on them. They understood that politics is not an unfortunate obstacle standing in the way of good government: politics is the means by which good government occurs.

For decades, the appearance of seriousness and competence has been held up as a qualification for high office, with a certain respectability mistaken for proper authority. But fundamentally, the ones who have spent their professional lives appearing as, believing themselves to be and being believed by others to be the adults in the room have been exposed as hollow simulacra of that desire. To paraphrase Logan Roy in Succession, these are not serious people. Starmer’s failure in government has exposed a very important truth: there are no adults in the room.