ON FRIDAY Keir Starmer will leave the leadership of the Labour Party, having debased and disgraced the office over his six-year tenure.

Whatever hopes and fears there may be concerning his successor, Andy Burnham, it would be near impossible for the new leader to be as bad as the outgoing one.

Starmer was elected on a fraudulent prospectus, posing as a supporter of Jermey Corbyn with added “competence” when he was no such thing.

He soon revealed himself to be an entrenched rightwinger, who discarded all the policies and commitments on which he had stood for election.

He also discarded the coalition of voters that Corbyn’s leadership had assembled in 2017 and secured even fewer votes in 2024 that Corbynism did at its 2019 nadir.

Instead he handed the party over to the most bitter and malicious rightwingers, thirsting for revenge against the left.

The most authoritarian Labour leader ever, his tenure was marked by expulsions, witch-hunts, the withdrawal of the whip from dissenting MPs and the marginalisation of the membership.

His initial mendacity and deceit shaped everything that happened since, marking him out as untrustworthy and politically incoherent.

His predilection for falsehoods stayed with him to the end. At his last Prime Ministers Questions in the Commons he smeared Labour under Corbyn as having been found “institutionally antisemitic.” No such finding was ever made.

Just two weeks ago he claimed he had inherited a bankrupt party. False again.

Having failed so spectacularly as prime minister, it seems that Starmer can only find consolation in smearing his predecessor, who was everything he is not in terms of principle and conviction.

Nor was he competent. It is now acknowledged that he failed to make any preparations for government, despite it being evident from 2022 at least that a Labour victory was certain.

So he had blundered from U-turn to U-turn, launching attacks on working people only to be forced to retreat under mass pressure.

He has hewed close to Treasury and City orthodoxy in economics while backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, sabre-rattling against Russia and pandering to Donald Trump.

At home, he has extended authoritarianism by every measure, from proscribing Palestine Action to curbing jury trials to clamping down on the right to protest.

The future of our economy and social provision has been mortgaged to a massive arms build-up.

And, like Boris Johnson before him, Starmer has been up to his neck in sleaze.

In opposition he claimed epic expenses. Then he took free clothing, glasses, accommodation and tickets from millionaire Waheed Alli in an orgy of grifting, even as he was slashing winter fuel benefit for pensioners.

He was finally undone by appointing Peter Mandelson, already known to be a close friend of convicted financier and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and an intimate of sundry oligarchs, as ambassador to Washington.

A brazenly factional move, it led to the departure of Starmer’s consigliere Morgan McSweeney, without whom he lost whatever capacity to govern that he had to begin with.

The damage he has done to the Labour Party is immense and lasting. Even by David Lammy’s diminished standards to declare this week that Starmer will be remembered as “a giant of the labour movement” was a remarkably stupid encomium.

He will be remembered in fact as Labour’s least successful prime minister since Ramsay MacDonald, who at least had the distinction of being the first, and its most dishonest and undemocratic leader ever.

Starmer was one thing only — a loyal servant of the bourgeois state. When he steps down today, the air is at least a little cleaner in the labour movement.