So farewell Sir Keir. It’s been... underwhelming. Who could have guessed that the man who believed in nothing beyond the fact that he should be prime minister, and had no political ideology beyond a vague notion of personal service and patriotism, would not survive long in No 10. It’s only surprising that he will go down in popular memory as two-year Keir rather than one. 

Despite all this, there is one thing that Keir Starmer believes in above all else: Jews.  

In his resignation speech last month, Starmer claimed that in 2020 he had inherited a Labour party that was politically, financially, and morally bankrupt. Putting aside the falsity of the first two points, it’s clear that the third point was referring to the Labour antisemitism crisis. 

Starmer expanded on this idea in a self-valedictory Substack post on 5 July – two years to the day after he became prime minister. He noted that “most shamefully of all, Labour was on its way to being reprimanded by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) for institutional antisemitism”, adding “I will never forget the moment of pride we felt in early 2023 when the EHRC took us out of special measures and commended the actions we took. Indeed, in some ways it remains the proudest and most important achievement of all.” 

Of course, there’s no mention of what a car crash that EHRC report was, or how utterly discredited the EHRC has become in its obsessive opposition to trans rights. None of this is relevant for Starmer, because it was “the most important achievement of all”, so it must not be tarnished by any contested politics or, indeed, evidence.  

Now, in the dying days of his administration, the period in which US presidents traditionally issue pardons, Starmer has given a fillip to his favourite minority group. 

On Monday, the same day that the Home Office proscribed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a longstanding demand of Jewish and pro-Israel groups, he also announced the “record investment” of £250 million over three years in police and security service protection of Jewish communities. This was all accompanied by a cringeworthy social media video of Starmer inviting his favourite Jews to a Downing Street garden party. Didn’t get an invite? Neither did I.

The message of all of this is that Starmer sees his efforts to rip out “the poison of antisemitism” from the Labour party as his primary success. On its own terms, the hubris is extraordinary. There will never be antisemitism in the Labour party again, he’s fixed it. Keir Hardie's antipathy to Jewish immigrant workers? The Atlee government preventing most Holocaust survivors from entering Britain after the second world war? Never again after the heroic work of Sir Keir. But he believes it: the (supposed) protection of Jews is the only thing that has given Starmer political purpose and will, he prays, secure his otherwise dubious place in history. 

Starmer’s institutional philosemitism began as soon as he was elected Labour leader in May 2020. He made restoring relations with the Jewish community his number one priority. In practice, this meant doing everything Jewish legacy organisations asked him to do, even if the requests were transparently unhinged. 

Yet Starmer also went above and beyond their demands. Party expulsions ramped up exponentially under Starmer and his then chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. An early victim of this new drive was Jeremy Corbyn, both suspended from the party and deprived of the whip following his unforgivable failure to tow the new line in the wake of the release of the EHRC report. This expulsion was not something that Jewish groups had publicly demanded up to that point.

By sanctioning him, Starmer lurched into dangerous maximalism, demanding that anyone who refused to bow to the new philosemitism orthodoxy be thrown out.  

Perversely, an inevitable outcome of Starmerite philosemitism was the expulsion of left-wing Jews. Not quite brave enough to proscribe Jewish Voice for Labour (now Jewish Voice for Liberation), he instead banned groups associated with members of the JVL steering committee, such as Socialist Appeal and Labour Against the Witch Hunt. The zenith of the campaign was the suspension of JVL’s Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi in 2022, immediately after she had been elected to Labour’s national executive committee (NEC). The irony was that she would have been the only Jew on the NEC; in the name of protecting Jews Starmer and McSweeney engineered a situation in which the committee was to have no Jews on it altogether. Defending the right kind of Jews required disenfranchising the wrong kind. 

Keir’s love of the Jews became most disastrous after 7 October 2023. First as opposition leader and then prime minister, Starmer fanatically adopted the pro-Israel cause as his own. Most notorious was the interview he gave to LBC on 11 October 2023 in which he stated that Israel had the right to deprive Palestinians in Gaza of water and electricity in response to Hamas’ crimes. He took nine days to deny that this had been his intention. 

Starmer was one of many politicians to deploy the “worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust” line; for him it seems this was significant. He implicitly felt that by giving Israel carte blanche in Gaza he was repairing the crimes of the past, atoning for the failure to save Jews from the Nazis by saving them from the supposed Nazis of the present. This “gentile saviour” syndrome was also at play in the proscription of Palestine Action which came into force in July 2026. In defending the proscription, Starmer and Yvette Cooper repeatedly claimed that PA had targeted Jewish-owned buildings, implying that the ban was thus necessary to defend the apparently beleaguered British Jewish community. The reality – that the sole relevant incident was at a building in Stamford Hill that activists believed to be the office of the landlord of an Elbit Systems weapons factory in Kent – was overlooked in Starmer’s quest to discover a moral purpose which might animate his flailing government. 

Clearly, the biggest victims of Starmer’s moral crusade against antisemitism are Palestinians. His failure to demand that Israel enter into a ceasefire in 2024, to sanction it forcefully, and to apply an actual arms embargo was catastrophic. The Palestine solidarity movement in the UK has also suffered, especially those arrested and incarcerated via his targeting of Palestine Action, essentially carried out at the behest of Israel and arms companies. 

But British Jews have also been victims of Starmerite philosemitism. He had the misfortune to preside over the first lethal antisemitic attacks in Britain for decades. While Jewish far-right attempts to blame him for them are wide of the mark, his government does bear responsibility for the climate which has led to a likely rise in hostility to Jews in Britain. 

Starmer has repeatedly conflated British Jews with Israel, framed campaigns against genocide as antisemitic and called for pro-Palestine demonstrations to be postponed or cancelled without any evidence of their connection to violent attacks. This has confirmed the Israeli narrative that diaspora Jews represent the Israeli state. The outcome is that people angry with Israel’s genocide are more likely to take that anger out on British Jews. For all Starmer’s philosemitism, his actions have arguably increased antisemitism.

I don’t believe that Sir Keir is an anomaly. The Labour right is full of unscrupulous, power-crazed bullies whose only belief is that they should be in charge and whose primary enemy is not the Tories or Reform but the left. They realise, however, that this is not a good look, that they would seem more politically attractive if they appeared to stand for something, to support some struggling group in society. In this they seek groups who are largely privileged and middle class but still suffer some lingering forms of disadvantage: sometimes women, sometimes gay people and sometimes Jews (excluding any radical members of these groups). These are then treated as the only group in need of protection and support, often protection from other oppressed people. This tokenistic approach stands to reason: the Labour right are not going to actually change underlying forms of oppression or challenge the power of capital. That was not why they came into politics. 

All of this and more applies to Starmer. His government has ended in ignominy, forced out after two years despite having led Labour to a landslide victory in 2024 (albeit on an incredibly low share of the vote). His unimaginative Labour right politics were couched in a complete lack of charisma, and he quickly attained levels of unpopularity that it had taken others years to reach. He is in search of a legacy, a cause on which he can say he succeeded, a moral project he can remember as his greatest achievement. And he’s chosen us, the Jews, and his protection of us. Aren’t we lucky?▼