Keir Starmer's Biden moment is paving the way for an urgent reset at the ballot box - Lee Cohen

Lee Cohen
Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:08:26 +0000
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The parallels between Keir Starmer’s collapse and America’s most impotent and catastrophic president, Joe Biden’s undoing, are astonishing.

In both cases, the parties in power refused to acknowledge evident failure until denial became impossible. On the positive front, Biden’s downfall led to leadership that prioritised the interests of Americans.

Labour’s undoing will certainly lead to better leadership as well, likely in the form of Reform UK, which will enable an urgent reset.

The parallel is precise and unforgiving. Biden’s frailty was visible for years: stumbles on stage, names forgotten mid-sentence, handlers steering him from the podium like a man who had wandered into the wrong room. Democratic voters said in poll after poll that they wanted another candidate. A congressman mounted an open challenge.

A special counsel described a president too impaired for a fair trial. The inner circle - family, cabinet, media allies - insisted nothing was wrong until the June 2024 debate made further pretence impossible. Only then did they move.

The consequence was not revival but the installation of an unprepared successor and, ultimately, the return of Trump.
Starmer has replicated the script.

He sold himself as the competent manager, the prosecutor who would impose order after years of disorder. The electorate accepted the offer in 2024.

What arrived was a government marked by misjudgment piled on misjudgment. The Mandelson appointment to Washington stands as the latest exhibit.

Epstein files released in the United States confirmed the peer’s documented friendship with the convicted offender. That alone warranted scrutiny.

Yet the decisive vetting failure concerned Mandelson’s business dealings with Russian and Chinese entities - links serious enough to fail developed vetting. Starmer informed Parliament that routine checks had cleared the post.

When records contradicted him, he blamed civil servants for citing data-privacy rules, then pointed to the Foreign Office and a permanent secretary who was removed.

The formal statement he and Yvette Cooper signed for the Foreign Affairs Select Committee asserted that full clearance had been granted. The evidence shows otherwise.

This is not a single lapse. It is the governing method. Starmer’s administration has zigzagged on welfare, immigration, and energy policy. Growth has flatlined while taxes climb and capital departs.

In the Iran conflict, the Royal Navy deployed with equipment shortages and operational hesitation rooted in earlier procurement decisions.

Requests from Washington to use British bases were refused in ways that weakened deterrence. The portrait is not of steady leadership but of ambition announced and then quietly abandoned.

Any serious reckoning with Starmer’s end must still confront the grooming-gangs scandal. For more than a decade, official inquiries into Rotherham, Rochdale, and Oxford documented the systematic rape of hundreds of young English girls by organised networks.

Police, social services, and Labour-run councils suppressed evidence and discouraged complaints. The explicit reason was fear of racism allegations. Senior figures chose institutional silence.

That failure belongs to the same establishment now populating Starmer’s Government. To discuss his collapse without naming this record is to airbrush the most profound betrayal of British citizens by their own institutions.

The reluctance to address it explains why the same class cannot admit Starmer’s weaknesses until they become terminal.

The tone remains familiar. Starmer once insisted Boris Johnson resign for misleading Parliament over lockdown gatherings and lectured the Commons on honesty.

When his own statements on Mandelson’s vetting collapsed, he offered regrets for an ‘error of judgment’ while maintaining that officials had withheld the truth.

The self-righteousness matches the Biden circle’s insistence on sharpness until the debate forced their hand. Labour’s centrist and far-left factions now fracture in public, making an orderly succession unlikely. Local elections loom as another verdict.

The public need not see leaked documents to recognise the drift. Britons see stagnant wages, eroding prestige, and the memory of girls abandoned because authorities feared the wrong sort of scandal. The establishment’s habit of denial until the last moment is not oversight. It is structural.

Here, the contrast with America turns constructive. Biden’s cover-up delivered Trump II - a result the Democrats most dreaded, yet one that restored clarity and national direction. Britain stands on the threshold of its own correction.

Labour’s undoing, when it arrives, will not merely remove a failed prime minister. It will open space for leadership grounded in realism rather than narrative control.

Kemi Badenoch is an excellent opposition leader whose instincts are spot on, but the wind is against the Tories. Reform UK is already positioned as the vehicle for patriotic renewal.

A reset that confronts mass immigration, energy dependence, institutional capture, and the protection of citizens from organised crime is overdue.

The governing class’s refusal to see failure has, once again, made that reset probable rather than possible.

Starmer may stagger forward for a time. Labour’s divisions provide a temporary shield. Yet the pattern holds. What voters saw plainly for months will become undeniable.

When the premiership ends - and it will - the verdict will be harsher precisely because the evidence was always in plain sight.

The grooming-gangs scandal remains the unforgivable silence in every polite post-mortem. Britain has paid dearly for such blindness. The coming change will mark the welcome end of it.