Zombie politics is the new norm and Starmer’s dying premiership is the latest instalment | Nesrine Malik

Distracted, listless and unambitious – the PM’s true form has finally emerged. But whatever comes next must end this ruinous cycle, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik

Finally, belatedly, an honest portrait of Keir Starmer has been allowed to form. It’s been a hell of a journey. At first he was sanctified as the Labour saviour, finally arrived. That gave way to pleas that he was essentially a good sort, new to politics and in need of time. Now an impression is emerging that he is, in fact, quite a bad egg. To quote a brutal recent summation from a Labour insider speaking to Politico: “Lots of people think Keir Starmer is a good man who is out of his depth. Wrong. He’s an asshole who’s out of his depth.”

The charges are now coming thick and fast. He cannot manage teams. He throws people under the bus to save his own skin. He cannot do the job. The whole Peter Mandelson affair, the latest instalment of which is the revelation that Mandelson failed his security vetting, and that Starmer claims not to have been told of this, has at least come with one silver lining. As his own ministers distance themselves from him and give up the ghost on live television, even loyal stalwarts can’t sustain their tedious, misguided speculation that he might be rebooted and come good. The broad conclusion is that Starmer is now beyond rehabilitation, and his fate only a matter of time. So what now?

The answer is drift: the state of an aimless, scandal-beset government. This had been building for some time under a diminished Starmer, and has now been accelerated by a scandal that won’t end, consolidated by his refusal to go, and locked in by the lack of appetite for a leadership election or consensus on a successor. And so we enter the zombie era, one that should be familiar to us all by now. There have been four over the past decade, some shorter than others. Theresa May clung on as her Brexit deal reached an impasse. Boris Johnson was a dead man walking for seven months between the Partygate revelations and his resignation. Twenty-seven days passed between the calamitous mini-budget and Liz Truss’s resignation – more than half her entire premiership. And Rishi Sunak, well, he was an interim prime minister from day one, tasked with the impossible role of steering the Tories away from oblivion.

A prime minister remaining in the role out of inertia and lack of options is now more the norm than that of a viable leader shepherding the country. These premierships do not just trundle along in a stable holding pattern until resolution; they result in an aimless, ruinous type of governance. One in which there is no sharp collapse in the economy or public services, but slowly accumulating hits to standards of living, and, more broadly, the loss of a sense of a shared fate under a tuned-in and responsible captain. The repetition of this pattern over different administrations contributes to a broader political paralysis, and public frustration and disengagement. A zombie government is distracted, listless, unambitious and uncreative.

The gap between the challenges in the real world and the preoccupations of No 10 is gaping. As Labour figures out what to do with itself, what is at stake isn’t just the future of the prime minister, but the fate and direction of the country. The Iran war has pushed up fuel prices and raised inflation. The International Monetary Fund has warned that Britain faces the biggest hit to growth from the Iran war of all G20 economies, and the joint highest inflation rate in the G7. The UK’s exposure to energy shocks is exacerbated by the pre-existing cost of living crisis and high food prices. To date, the prime minister does not seem to have a plan to get ahead of, or even provide reassurances about, what promises to be a prolonged crisis.

And then there are the grave challenges to social cohesion posed by the toxic Reform party that Labour has roundly failed to tackle. The cultural and political climate has been poisoned by anti-migrant hostility, and Labour has only fed into that with harsh measures and Enoch Powell-aping rhetoric, while damaging Reform not one bit. As Labour was pummelled in the Gorton and Denton byelection, Starmer had nothing but outrageously unbecoming statements about “sectarian politics”. Labour is on track for its worst ever local election performance next month, with big gains for Reform on the cards. Where is the big scramble to get ahead of this? From Starmer himself, crickets.

Zombie prime ministers take two routes when it comes to governance. The first is to try to force their relevance by announcing attention-grabbing red meat policies: take Sunak’s U-turning on net zero, and Johnson’s launch of the first version of the Rwanda deportation plan. The second is to do nothing at all, distracted by firefighting and fending off internal challenge. It was a route of this sort that Johnson took, which culminated in mass mutiny among MPs and ministers when he refused to resign.

Whichever route Starmer takes, the result is a public entirely uninvested in and contemptuous of an absent government embroiled in remote scandal or bizarre, irrelevant policymaking. Here is the sort of dysfunctional feudalism that Alexis de Tocqueville describes in his book on the French aristocracy, The Old Regime and the Revolution. He argues that the French nobility clung to their privileges long after they’d abdicated the duties that conferred their legitimacy – and it was that abdication that triggered revolution.

Starmer is a figure who represents that political nobility; he is an embodiment of something far bigger than himself. But long before his own premiership began, we had entered an age of zombie politics, one compounded by those drift eras that came before, defined by political leaders who felt entitled to power and yet failed to leverage politics for real, material ends.

He is also the culmination of a progressive politics that has failed to refashion its role in a changing Britain, where its traditional industrial and working-class heartlands have been eroded by a decades-long privileging of capital over labour. And it has not tackled the various ways in which the economy has become hardwired to benefit a diminishing number of the highly paid or generously endowed. Nor has it forged a solid sense of meaning and values in a world where increasingly savage and cynical forces, from the US to the Middle East, create a vacuum of moral leadership. Starmer’s non-descriptness made it easy for fans to project all sorts of fantasies on to him. But his vacantness was always his essential trait, qualifying him to head this empty version of progressive politics – a leader who is a vessel rather than an agent of change.

The only hope for the upcoming zombie months or years is that Starmer’s tenure will not end in another false start. What or whoever comes next must understand that Labour needs to deliver something more than simply managing the broken legacy of its predecessors. Unless challenges to the political and economic status quo are boldly embraced, then the drift will come for them too.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist