Keir Starmer’s ageing visibly, overwhelmed by events and has no plan but to blow your money. It’s pathetic to watch. He’s finished: DANIEL HANNAN

Sir Keir Starmer seems smaller, greyer, older. Marginalised on the world stage, under siege from Labour MPs, unable to push through even the tiniest reforms to slow the growth in public spending, the PM comes across as… well, spent.

In just over a week’s time, he will mark his first anniversary in No 10. Can it be just 12 months ago that his election was hailed as a return to normality and seriousness?

I can even remember female journalists getting excited, not just over his oh-so-manly levels of imagined competence, but over his manner.

‘Every middle-aged woman I know feels, right now, kind of fruity,’ wrote one Times columnist.

‘As erotic as a British woman can feel during a wet summer.’

Twelve months on, Sir Keir has gone from being the dependable hunk who filled in your forms for you and took the bins out to being a weedy, rabbit-in-the-headlights whinger.

The biggest event in the world right now is the conflict between Iran and Israel and the United States. Where does Britain stand on it? Do we want to see the ayatollahs forcibly removed, so that they no longer export their militias and terrorist bombs across the world? Or do we believe they can be talked out of their nuclear ambitions peacefully? The answer is that we have no policy.

Not only that, but we are determined to tell the world that we have no policy. For reasons that utterly mystify me, Starmer recorded a video in which he repeated platitudes about not wanting the mullahs to get the Bomb, and then said that it was nothing to do with him.

Keir Starmer has been marginalised on the world stage, under siege from Labour MPs, unable to push through even small reforms to slow down public spending, writes Daniel Hannan

In just over a week’s time, Sir Keir will mark his first anniversary in No 10

It is bad enough to be ignored by all the main players. But why advertise your impotence? Not for the first time, I felt that Starmer could not read the room, because he was not in the room.

While the rest of the world is focused on the threat of nuclear escalation, our PM is holed up in some imaginary Doughty Street or Matrix Chambers office with his Attorney General, Lord Hermer, fretting about whether it is legal to let the Americans use the Diego Garcia base.

How can we have shrunk so spectacularly? We once defined Iran’s southern and eastern borders, for heaven’s sake. We put the democratic Pahlavi dynasty on the throne until the Islamic revolution toppled the monarchy in 1979.

Sure enough, we loom commensurately large in the minds of the ayatollahs. Officially, we are one of the two Little Satans alongside Israel, while the US is the Great Satan.

But, in regime propaganda, we are often portrayed as the real puppet-masters, pulling the Americans’ strings.

Oh, to be the country that the mad mullahs imagine us to be! Instead, we are too timorous even to express a view about what is happening.

David Lammy, our thicko Foreign Secretary, tells MPs that whether or not the UK supported America’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites is ‘not a binary question’. Luke Pollard, a junior defence minister, says it is ‘not one for me to comment on’.

Starmer himself won’t even say whether the UK would respond if the US were attacked.

From the start, Labour has been driven by domestic considerations – on the one hand, a desire to distance itself from the open anti-Semitism of the Corbyn years, on the other, fear of the electoral threat posed by the pro-Gaza independents.

It cares less about whether Iran is run by fundamentalist maniacs than about how to present its relationship with Israel to voters in marginal seats.

Daniel Hannan says the PM is holed up in some imaginary Doughty Street with his Attorney General, fretting about whether it is legal to let the Americans use the Diego Garcia base

No wonder Britain is scorned overseas. No wonder we are despised, not just in Washington and in Brussels, but in tiny Mauritius. We might think we are being responsible, but foreign governments see only our determination to apologise and appease. In a world increasingly shaped by raw power, we are still scurrying about trying to find international courts to which to surrender.

In a bid to win back Trump’s ear, Starmer announced on Tuesday that Britain would spend five per cent of GDP on defence and security by 2035: 3.5 per cent on core defence, and 1.5 per cent on infrastructure, energy independence, cyber security and the like.

Even if we were to manage it, it would amount to little in a stalled economy. Who cares whether we spend three, five or ten per cent of GDP on defence when our GDP is not growing?

But no one truly thinks that we will meet such a pledge. For it is abundantly clear that Labour cannot reduce, let alone reverse, the rise in welfare spending that is ruining us.

More than 100 Labour MPs have come out against plans to marginally slow the projected increase in universal credit and personal independence payments – making a nonsense of Labour’s reform plans.

Every month, an extra 20,000 people are signed off as too ill to work, usually on grounds of mental health conditions that are hard to verify. That increase is bankrupting the country, and the previous government had put plans in place to tackle it – plans that were interrupted by the early election.

In theory, it should have been easier for Labour to curb these payments, since it would have the support of the Official Opposition. In practice, as we have already seen in the retreat over the winter fuel allowance, and the almost certain retreat on the child benefits cap, Labour is biologically unable to cut spending.

There was talk of suspending the surrender of the Chagos Islands as it looked so dreadful to be giving money to Mauritius while removing it from pensioners, writes Daniel Hannan

As a country, we are becoming bloated, scant of breath, bent double under the weight of both a growing public sector that knows Labour will always concede its pay demands, and a burgeoning class of benefits claimants.

Is it any surprise, then, that the rest of the world ignores us? A country that spends more on debt repayments than on defence is not a serious country.

Starmer could have played his hand very differently. He might have been a great reforming Labour leader, introducing basic efficiencies into the NHS, letting people build many more homes, shifting millions from welfare into work.

As late as the start of last month, a different future looked possible. There was talk of suspending the surrender of the Chagos Islands because it looked so dreadful to be giving money to Mauritius while removing it from pensioners.

In the event, Labour decided to pay both the Mauritians and the pensioners. As always, it took what looked like the line of least resistance – higher spending. And so our taxes, spending and borrowing continue to rise, and our reputation continues to fall.

Most pundits work on the assumption that, because the opinion polls are bad for Labour, Starmer will cling on until the last possible moment before holding an election. Perhaps so.

But I can’t help wondering whether his heart is in it. It is not simply that the last 12 months have visibly aged him; it is that they seem to have snuffed out the sense of drive and energy that he occasionally exhibited as Opposition leader.

Perhaps he will decide that it is all too much and hand over to someone else. If Labour went on to win the next election, he would be fondly remembered; and if it went on to lose, his successor would get the blame.

Either way, this is becoming painful to watch. A petty man, overwhelmed by events, with no plan, seeking to prop up what is left of his support with big dollops of public money.

I feel almost sorry for him. Though not nearly as sorry as I feel for Britain.

• Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is president of the Institute for Free Trade

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