‘You’ll miss him when he’s gone!’ Lots of people have said this to me. It’s true I have had the dubious privilege of sketching Sir Keir Starmer for almost the whole of his career as leader of the opposition and Prime Minister. He has grown to be a constant feature of my life, a sort of perma-presence in the background, the person round which my week necessarily has to gravitate. And now, the moment for his departure has finally arrived: today was the final PMQs for Sir Keir Rodney Starmer. It was the final gentle squeal of that good Knight. Starmergeddon. Good afternoon, good evening and Meep Meep.
It managed to be both mawkish and schizophrenic
As for the performance itself it was, perhaps appropriately for the dire state of British politics in 2026, a little like watching The One Show. Starmer would flip from a gag – including one in which he basically admitted that he never did answer questions correctly – to a ‘sad voice cutaway’ about someone in the gallery with cancer. He did this in basically every answer to Mrs Badenoch’s – it has to be said, polite and dignified – set of questions. He had a whole array of people who ‘were the ones he was doing it for’.
It was a bit like when people claim they’re taking part in The X Factor for their sister or nan or gerbil. It managed to be both mawkish and schizophrenic as he had to shoe-horn some of these into completely unrelated Tory questions. Still, given how he’d been treated by them, it was hardly surprising that he didn’t spend his session thanking his Parliamentary colleagues.
