"Is this the end for Keir Starmer?" | David Starkey Talks... to Benedict Spence

Since he's entered office, every scandal that has lapped the ankles of Sir Keir Starmer has been responded to with a familiar refrain: "I wasn't to know!" The faintest whiff of moral reproach is frantically dispersed with a robust display of the former Director of Public Prosecution's moral rectitude. His righteous fury at being consistently kept in the dark knows no bounds. Cabinet ministers are wheeled out to repeat ad nauseam, "Keir Starmer is a good man!"

The force of this claim has reduced with every use. By now, as it emerges that Starmer's pick for ambassador to the US, Petey Mandelson, actually failed security vetting, its potency has finally worn out completely.

We are left with two possibilities. Either Sir Keir Starmer is lying, or he has so abdicated responsibility over his own government that his officials didn't see the point in informing him that the man whom he had installed in the most important diplomatic position of the British state, and on whom he expended huge political capital, was in fact a security risk.

Either of these options reveals enormous character flaws in the Prime Minister that make him unfit for his office. He rose to power on the back of his sanctimonious denunciations of Boris Johnson, but at least Boris Johnson lied for a purpose, at least his government achieved something, at least he has a personality.

As I discuss with Benedict Spence this week, Starmer is devoid of all these attributes. And so the British people are forced yet again to wait for their deliverance from the banality of the deep state, of which Starmer was the perfect expression, but with which even he cannot now co-exist.