STEPHEN GLOVER: Starmer's cowardly U-turn exposes the truth about him... he's a man without principle

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Sir Keir Starmer is an intelligent 62-year-old man who occupies the highest political office in the land. You would expect him, at his age and in his position, to have a settled opinion on the great issues of our time.

But the extraordinary thing is that he doesn’t. He chops and changes with dizzying rapidity. More than any prime minister in living memory, he lacks abiding principles.

Mary, the Tudor Queen, said Calais would be ‘lying in her heart’ when she was ‘dead and opened’ – a reference to France’s capture of the port in 1558, which England held for 200 years. If Sir Keir has anything lying in his heart after his death – assuming such an organ can be found – it will be the word ‘change’.

The latest example of his amazing capacity to lurch from one opinion to another is his about-turn on what constitutes a woman. I don’t believe the enormity of this volte-face has fully sunk in.

He declared in 2022 that ‘trans women are women’ having said the previous year it was ‘not right’ to claim only women have a cervix. In 2023 he vouchsafed that ‘99.9 per cent of women… haven’t got a penis’.

That meant, bearing in mind there are some four billion people of the female sex in the world, that there are about four million of them knocking about with penises, according to the Prime Minister.

How could he have been so stupid to say such a thing? He can’t have believed it. He thought it would satisfy the lunatics in his own party who maintain that if a man with a penis believes he is a woman, he should be allowed to identify as one.

More than any prime minister in living memory, Sir Keir Starmer lacks abiding principles, writes Stephen Glover

Following last week’s Supreme Court judgment that a woman is defined by biological sex, Sir Keir executed one of his famous pivots. Mind you, it took a while.

After several days he grudgingly agreed that ‘a woman is an adult female’ and left it to his official spokesman to clarify that the PM no longer believes that ‘trans women are women’.

There was no apology. No regrets, for example, that he had failed to defend Labour MP Rosie Duffield – who was shouted down and shunned by male colleagues after speaking up for female-only spaces before she resigned the party whip. My God, what times we live in.

The author JK Rowling was right when she wrote on X: ‘Imagine being such a coward you can only muster the courage to tell the truth once the Supreme Court has ruled on what the truth is.’ In a similar vein, Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch yesterday accused the PM of lacking ‘moral courage’.

Incidentally, don’t forget Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said in 2023 that women can ‘quite clearly’ have a penis. Will he now recant? He’s the self-anointed clown addicted to electoral japes, the latest seeing him scream like a demented idiot with council candidates on a rollercoaster in Devon.

I doubt that Sir Keir has pronounced views about gender issues. He was pulled one way by Labour MPs and the other by the Supreme Court. But he doesn’t want to embrace common sense too eagerly for fear of offending party colleagues.

This is the seesaw pattern of his ten-year political career. Billed as a moderate in 2015, he served loyally and uncomplainingly in Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-Left Shadow Cabinet, making little or no protest about extreme economic policies and pervasive anti-Semitism.

When he stood as leader in 2020 he did so on a Corbynite platform, advocating wholesale nationalisation and the abolition of Universal Credit. But he soon jettisoned this programme. Corbyn, whom he had called his ‘friend’, was driven out of the party. Erasing anti-Semitism suddenly became a crusade for Sir Keir.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said in 2023 that women can ‘quite clearly’ have a penis. Will he now recant?

These changes happened quickly. It is reasonable for politicians to change their views over a long period of time – the PM, though, has rebranded himself as swiftly and effortlessly as a chameleon changes colour.

One transformation that took longer was his attitude to the monarchy. In 2005 he let slip that he previously wanted it abolished. Once he became party leader, and started to woo Middle England, he wrapped himself in the Union Flag. The 2022 Labour Conference induced delegates to sing the National Anthem for the first time in the Party’s history.

Where is principle? In 2016 he found Donald Trump ‘absolutely repugnant’ and couldn’t imagine inviting him to dinner. Now he is friendly towards the US President to the point of sycophancy and boasts their dinners together. Another unappetising lurch.

Some will say this is mere pragmatism – politicians must adapt to the realities of power. The trouble is that Sir Keir appears to have no enduring centre of belief that defines him as a politician. His policies are built on shifting sands.

There are two main types of leaders: one group, quite small, contains conviction politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, who fight for their principles; a larger group is made up of pragmatists who have a set of firm beliefs but are seldom governed by them. Rishi Sunak is an example.

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Sir Keir is in a category of his own. It’s impossible to know where he really stands – he can turn on a sixpence. His overriding calculation is how best to gain or hold on to power. Yesterday’s enemy can become today’s friend. A policy can be dumped in favour of its exact opposite.

Another way of describing the Prime Minister is to say that he is a cynic. In December 2023 he wrote a newspaper article praising Margaret Thatcher for bringing about ‘meaningful change’.

His purpose, probably fulfilled, was to persuade disgruntled Tories to vote Labour. Yet one of the first things Sir Keir did on entering No 10 was to remove her portrait. That was the true measure of his feelings.

The PM’s lack of core beliefs explains why this Government veers around like a runaway supermarket trolley. Naturally, it has some policies, as set out in Labour’s manifesto. Cabinet Ministers, such as Angela Rayner and Bridget Phillipson, pursue them doggedly (and wrong-headedly).

But the man on the bridge, Captain Starmer, doesn’t have much idea where the Government is going because he hasn’t set a course. Or, if he has, it could be changed in an instant.

I’d like to find out what has happened to the politician who championed a second referendum on Brexit, which he appeared to think the greatest disaster ever to have befallen this country. Does he want us to rejoin the EU? He may be the last person to know.

We live in turbulent times and I don’t believe a leader who can change his mind so quickly and so often is ever going to win back the confidence of apprehensive voters.

In Sir Keir’s contemptible turnaround over the definition of a woman, we should see him for what he is – a man without principle. At the heart of our Prime Minister lies a political vacuum.