A long piece the Guardian's senior political correspondent clearly had ready with his finger poised over "publish" - a good explainer on various things that went wrong, or didn't fit:
“Firstly, he never worked out what the job was – what does the prime minister do? Secondly, he never knew what he wanted to do, above all not on economic policy. And thirdly, he didn’t know who to appoint.
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As a precis this might sound harsh. But it is difficult to counter the wider sense of a politician adept at winning the Labour leadership and then guiding the party to victory, before becoming frozen by the endless choices of power, hiding behind an ever-expanding lexicon of missions, goals and plans for change.
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One staffer recounted asking why they had not yet seen a plan to govern, to be told that there did not appear to be one. “After the win we expected some sort of blitz of major policies. Instead, we just had the PM going round meeting mayors on a UK tour. There were a lot of people saying: ‘This can’t be it. This isn’t how you do politics.’”
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Under the guidance of McSweeney, who moved from the controversial Labour Together thinktank to the helm of Starmer’s leadership campaign and then charged with planning for an election, the party was firmly shunted away from Corbyn’s leftwing populism, the 10 pledges largely forgotten.
As a way to reshape a party, it was undeniably effective. But the zeal with which McSweeney and his allies purged, demoted, sidelined or otherwise demeaned those on Labour’s left – “punching hippies” as the parlance has it – arguably left Starmer with a sometimes shallower authority.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2026/jun/22/frozen-by-the-challenges-of-power-how-starmer-turned-triumph-into-tragedy
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