IT APPEARS that, in the course of the last two, interminable years, we were all living in a different universe to the one inhabited by the now mercifully exiting prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer.

There will be plenty of analysis on these pages about Starmer’s legacy, which will languish in the mire of his own making. But what was so spectacularly evident in his resignation speech is how deeply he has been drowning in self-delusion.

In the six-and-a-half minutes he used to say “goodbye” outside Number 10 Downing Street, a dwelling he should have vacated many months ago and never deserved to occupy, Starmer laid out a series of myths and blame shifting breathtaking in their blindness to reality.

Even US President Donald Trump, a man who views Starmer as fit only to pick up his scattered papers, has never packed that many falsehoods into such a short speech.

In the world according to Starmer, he transformed the Labour Party (that much is true), for the better (that part isn’t.)

He claimed the Labour Party he inherited from its previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, whom he proverbially knifed in the back, “was politically, financially and morally bankrupt.”

And yet, under Corbyn, the party membership soared, going from 190,000 to well past half a million in the space of 18 months. After that, between endless Starmerist purges and people voluntarily departing as the Labour Party moved rightward, at least 200,000 people quit membership.

Starmer then boasted that he was responsible for winning a “landslide” election, when fewer people voted for Labour in 2024 than in 2019 when Corbyn was leader.

Somehow, Sir Keir forgot to mention these inconvenient statistics. Instead, he bragged during his resignation speech — and without a hint of shame — that the question of “who was best placed to change the Labour Party, to take us into power, and to begin the vital work of improving the lives of millions of people,” had been resoundingly answered. It was he and his able leadership, a leadership that he had been asked to relinquish by his own party for weeks if not months.

Starmer also congratulated himself for “ripping out the poison of antisemitism” from the Labour Party, even though it was disproportionately Jews themselves who were targeted for expulsion.

Some of the defections among white working-class Labour Party voters were to Reform, exposing just how thoroughly wrong Starmer’s claim was that his government had “improved the lives of millions of people.”

At least 2.5 million British pensioners weren’t so sure after Starmer stripped them of their essential winter fuel allowance days after gaining power, the first of his draconian measures that he was later forced to reverse.

Another of those “improvements” was lifting the two-child benefit cap, a move Starmer congratulated himself on personally, even though it took him more than a year to do it, with the change only coming into effect 18 months into his tenure, another reversal forced on him by immense public and political pressure. He had even suspended seven MPs in his own party for voting for this very same change that he now claimed was his doing.

Another triumph was “the biggest uplift in defence spending since the Cold War,” actually one of if not the biggest contributors to the continued unsolved problems of homelessness, the struggling NHS, affordable housing, youth unemployment and child poverty.

Other items on Starmer’s achievement list, in yet another nod to Reform, were “small boat crossings falling, asylum hotels closing.”

During those early days at Number 10, Starmer said he was reminded “time and again my party was finished, that we were consigned to history.” Which is probably exactly where he would have consigned it had he stayed on a moment longer. And maybe has, since few on the left have any faith that Andy Burnham will do anything nearly radical enough to resuscitate it.

“We proved people wrong because we changed our party,” Starmer insisted. Arguably, that’s one of the few true statements he made. He just forgot to change the name, because the party that he reshaped pandered to oligarchs and arms manufacturers, not working people.

As if to prove that point, one of Starmer’s final engagements before announcing his resignation on Monday was to attend a lavish party hosted by right-wing media baron, Lachlan Murdoch, who controls his father Rupert’s press empire.

All the usual entitled peers, former svengalis and fascist friends were there — Kemi Badenoch, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Piers Morgan, Morgan McSweeney, and Wes Streeting among them. No doubt the champagne was flowing. But hey, we stopped the small boats.

“Keir Starmer could have ended child poverty, homelessness and the grotesque levels of inequality in this country,” wrote the man he replaced, still known as “the people’s prime minister,” and who wouldn’t be caught dead at a Murdoch party.

“Instead, he abandoned those in need, destroyed our civil liberties and facilitated genocide in Gaza,” Corbyn wrote. “That is how this Prime Minister will be remembered — and that is the legacy of moral and political bankruptcy he leaves behind.”

After Starmer finally goes, watch for the corporate red carpet to roll out. The millions he cares about are not the British people, they are the pounds that will assuredly flow his way. But when, like Tony Blair before him, he makes his speeches for exorbitant fees, no one in the audience will be singing “Oh, Keir Starmer!”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland, and the author of No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War, published by Pluto Press.