BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
There is a peculiar and necessary cruelty in the language we reserve for our exhausted public men. When we reach for the ornithological, we are not being poetic; we are being clinical. To be termed a ‘lame duck’ is to be diagnosed. It is to be marked not merely for failure, but for a kind of biological irrelevance.
The image is precise: a creature designed for flight, for the V-shaped wedge of power, now reduced to a pathetic, ground-bound waddle. It still quacks as if in command, but the flock has departed for warmer climes, and the hunters are already reloading.
The phrase, as with so much of our political vocabulary, was not born in a parliament but on a trading floor. It was the cant of the eighteenth century London Stock Exchange, a brutal slang for the broker who could not meet his debts and had to “waddle out of the Alley.” It was a word for utter financial ruin, for the man whose credit was dead. By the time it crossed the Atlantic, it had evolved into a political diagnosis for the officeholder who had been rejected by the people but still haunted the corridors of power-a figure whose authority had been amputated, though the body had not yet been told to stop breathing.
Today, as he presides over the smouldering debris of his government, it is impossible not to apply this diagnosis to Sir Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister has become precisely that: a bird that cannot fly, a leader from whom all authority has drained away. The SNP’s Westminster leader was right to say so, and right to state the obvious truth that it is in no one’s interest for this pretence to continue. But to call Starmer merely a lame duck is to miss the true horror of the spectacle. A lame duck, in the classical sense, at least implies a calendar. An election has been held, a verdict delivered, and we are merely waiting for the clocks to run down. What we have in Downing Street today is something far more degenerate: a dead duck walking.
Consider the anatomy of his current putrefaction. It has been precipitated by the rancid saga of Peter Mandelson, a figure so steeped in the dark arts that he makes the court of Nero look like a village fête. This is the man Starmer appointed as ambassador to Washington, despite the fact that his intimate friendship with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein was not a secret held in the deep state, but a matter of public record. The information was there, in the files released by the United States Department of Justice. It was there for anyone with eyes to see.
The Prime Minister saw it, and he appointed him anyway.
We are now asked to believe that this catastrophic failure of judgement was merely the result of bad advice. His chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, has fallen on his sword-taking, we are told, ‘full responsibility’ for the debacle. But a leader leads; a manager merely processes paper. The final decision was Starmer’s, and the unforgivable nature of that choice is entirely his. When the police are now investigating a peer for allegedly leaking market-sensitive government information to a convicted sex offender, the chain of command does not end with a resigned aide. It ends at the desk of the man who put that peer in place.
The fallout has been as swift as it is devastating. The chief of staff is gone. The government is in chaos, distracted from a cost-of-living crisis that has soared under its own watch while its own MPs openly call for the leader to go. When your own Members of Parliament, the people who rely on you for their political existence, are sharpening the knives, the game is up. The loyalists, we are told, are in the most “terminal mood.” Terminal is the right word. It implies an ending that is not just imminent, but total.
This is the true hallmark of the lame duck. It is not merely about poor polling-though Starmer is now the most unpopular Prime Minister on record, a feat of negative achievement in itself. It is about the evaporation of the one commodity a leader cannot fake: authority. When McSweeney stood as the lightning rod, there was a semblance of protection. Now the rod is gone, and the full voltage of a party’s despair, a public’s disgust, and a press’s fury is coursing directly through the Prime Minister. He is exposed, alone, and utterly impotent.
A dead duck walking. That is the phrase. For a dead duck has no future. It may not know it yet; it may still be upright, still moving its beak. But the shot has been fired, the lead is in its vitals, and it is only a matter of time before it keels over. Starmer’s premiership now exists in that dreadful interregnum between life and political death.
This is not a government. It is a holding pattern over a swamp.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).