As Politico has noted in the context of Labour MPs rebelling against Keir Starmer:
Keir Starmer heads an army of 402 MPs. There's one problem: some of them have never met him.
“I met him on the day we had our group picture taken — in the sense he moved through the crowd,” Neil Duncan-Jordan, a new MP, told POLITICO by WhatsApp.
“I've never had a conversation with him. He's never sent me a note congratulating me on my amazing victory etc. The public can't believe it, but it's true. I doubt he knows who I am.” A second backbencher told POLITICO they had never met the PM in their life.
A man who can't be bothered to work out who he is demanding respect from, or to talk to them, is not a leader.
No wonder he is in trouble. You cannot treat people like that and expect loyalty in return. It is not going to happen.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
Agree entirely. And pretty disgraceful really given there’s absolutely loads of literature on how important this aspect of management is to any organisation (remember when ‘management by walking about’ was a big thing). Certainly in the few management positions I held in universities, whether as course/module leader, programme director, or director of postgraduate research, I always made a point very early on of meeting up with staff for a chat, etc. Ok, so there were never 400, but in the party political environment Starmer exists in gaining some affinity with your MPs is surely crucial. Then again, Starmer has no politics, and now it turns out he doesn’t have much of a grasp of the essence of management either (despite his time as a senior civil servant), so is it any wonder that so many Labour MPs feel able to ‘rebel’ when it comes to the crucially important vote of the Labour government. Ditto McSweeney. Then again, anyone who actually believes there can be something called ‘Blue Labour’ (apart from it being an oxymoron) is always going to end up in deep shite, eventually.
I should do a post or two on leadership, I think…
It was reported that when Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions 80% of the people working there did not rate his leadership.
Very true.
No steer is in trouble. Failure to be human, say hello, how are you, thanks etc means no backing in what has the potential to become a crisis in his “leadership” and the axe falling on him.
Neal Duncan-Jordan voted against the winter fuel cut. No doubt he received the normal unpleasant “how dare you” treatment by the LINO whip’s office.
Expect the main stream media to go hard against the “rebels” and promote “garage” as the only alternative government.
It is important that the MMT explanation of how the world of money creation really works is spread far and wide so that the general public understand and not be swayed by the economic garbage promoted by the elite etc.
Throwing out internal opposition and politics by numbers has lead us to here. Labour opposition was always there among the backbenchers. It was just a matter of time for them to grow in confidence. It has taken them a year. In the Blair years, it took them 4+ years and illegal invasions. They know that the public is on their side and not the prime minister’s.
Correct, absolutely correct – Stymied is like a modern CEO who is only interested in his investors – the shadow people who really run things.
It was suprising that this ‘no discussion’ ‘no exchange of ideas’, ‘no conversations’ , /no recognition’ surfaced so clearly from Labour MP’s.
Starmer/Reeves have now been forced to ‘engage’, but the avoidance of engagement with any ideas beyond ‘there is no money’ seems so deeply embedded in their psyche as to define what they are.
BBC keeps pointing out they only looked at reducing PIP because they were faced with an unexpected £5bn shortfall by 2029 – but never ask if there wasnt another way of making up that shortfall – such as not paying interest to banks on government’s own created money as if it had been ‘borrowed’?
All they have ended up with is a botched compromise which introduces new contradictions between existing and future claimants.
It would have been the mark of a decent governemnt to postpone the Commons debate and look at the whole thing again.
As expected, this is by no means the end of Starmer such is his obsession with clinging to office . But this will obviously not be matched by any resolve to open himself up to ideas , such as there ‘may be money somewhere ‘ , which makes the outlook for us all pretty dire.
I find this quite incredibly. 402 is not a large number of people to engage with and they are all at Westminster for 4 days/week. He has staff who could help send messages and it would not be hard to host small drinks sessions for all the new intake. Surely this is basic management? But Starmer does seem more interested in engaging externally than spending much time at Westminster.
I worked for a CEO in the 90s and early 2000s who somehow knew the names and something personal about 3000 members of staff spread between the far north of Scotland and London.
Two way communication is a basic leadership skill.
I always tried to know everyone in companies, even when I was a very part time director. I walked around and talked to people. It was always worth the time. I learned so much.
When I was a new undergraduate at Peterhouse, the Master invited us all to lunch, in groups of ten or a dozen. It impressed me.
Starmer could have done something similar; it would have taken just a few months and given him a huge insight into the hopes and ambitions of the team he was working with. Not doing so is both amateur and arrogant.
Agreed
My thoughts exactly. I’m not sure it’s arrogance though. He seems really awkward with people and not very interested in them. Really bad qualities for a politician let alone a PM.
I was pretty shy and awkward as a teenager. One of the best bits of advice anyone gave me was my mother’s: “remember that many people are probably feeling worse than you are. Always try to make them feel better.” Only an arrogant person would think that it wasn’t worth the effort to learn to put others at their ease.
Agreed
Since Starmer has no hopes or ambitions he is unable to empathise with others who do and so he just comes across a a manager going through the motions of behaviour out of the ‘manager manual.’ But someone without hopes or ambitions will also be, or at least appear to be, lazy because there is no drive or energy. He comes across as a man who cannot wait to be free of the role he has been shoehorned into. He is deeply uncomfortable with the whole idea of democracy, negotiation, collegiate team working, persuasion, and so on. He’s not quite human ……
They say people quit their managers rather than their companies. If he can’t be bothered to meet his MPs then he opens the door to them defecting. After all, there will be a number in locations where the Liberal Democrats are in second place. Ed Davey going out of his way to engage with them and confirm that he’s on the same page with regards disability benefits and social justice could go a long way to showing that he’s more of a leader than Starmer. Greens could aim for the same, although with few locations they’re in second place.
Don’t forget that he must have known quite a few of them already, the ones who helped him to oust Corbyn, who worked for the zionist groups, like Labour First and We Believe in Israel(BICOM).
Quite a few of them were on the NEC, and parachuted each other into safe seats. He must have know them.
It used to be called “working the tea-room”.
It’s gone out of fashion.
Prime Ministers who neglect it, don’t run good governments and it catches up with them in the end.
I saw him in person at the Bristol leadership hustings, when he was lying his way through his 10 pledges, as the “forensic” Corbyn continuity candidate. They should have handed out anti-emetic pills at the door.
I also went to an earlier Corbyn general election campaign meeting in Filton, N Bristol prior to the 2019 election.
They are very very different men.
More than the tearoom neglected here. The whole of the north east, the area with most of the redwall seats, and the greatest proportion of children in poverty and disability. Trying to put it right when reminded of us just made it worse for them.
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2025/06/27/dwp-consultation-newcastle/
And the SW plus anywhere outside of the SE and London. To my knowledge, he’s never been to the SW since the election visits.