These days, the best way to ingratiate yourself into the social circles of the Westminster set has been to sneer at Liz Truss. Unsure of how to break the ice at a drinks reception? Just evoke your mockery of the former PM, the one who burned brightly and was outdone by a lettuce.

Perhaps soon, however, there shall be a more palpable object of Westminster derision, Sir Keir Starmer. Sweeping into the corridors of power on the back of a slew of pledges that painted him as the anti-Truss, Starmer was to be the grown-up in Government, a stable pair of hands that would see us through.

Instead, what we got was the bland radicalism that takes things apart slowly and quietly. His policies thus far have punished work, targeted aspiration and replaced conviction with compliance. It’s time to drop the polite fiction that Starmer is safe. He is not, he is the smiling face of decline, a man dismantling the fabric of Britain not through ideology or incompetence, but through slow, bloodless bureaucracy. Here are five reasons why, in office, Keir Starmer has already done more harm than Liz Truss ever managed in her brief weeks at the wheel.

The Family Farm Tax

Few policies better reveal Starmer’s tone-deafness to rural Britain than his naked attempts to collapse its economy and rip it up by the roots. His new inheritance levy on family farms strikes not at the wealthy land barons of Left-wing imagination but at ordinary families who have spent generation after generation keeping the countryside alive.

These are people who work 80-hour weeks for little or no reward, not oligarchs hiding behind trusts. By treating land as loot rather than legacy, Starmer is destroying the very backbone of rural Britain, those who feed the nation and care for its soil.

Liz Truss, whatever her faults, understood that the countryside is not a museum for urban guilt but the living heart of Britain’s economy. Starmer sees it only as something else to tax.

The Winter Fuel Payments Fiasco

Few moments have captured the coldness of Starmer’s administration like his gross mishandling of Winter Fuel Payments. Pensioners who had budgeted carefully found themselves suddenly at risk of being excluded, forced to choose between heating and eating in the name of “targeting support”.

The Prime Minister who promised compassion delivered confusion instead. Britain’s elderly, many of whom had endured rationing, then strikes and lockdowns, found themselves treated as entries on spreadsheets to be “means-tested” out of sight. It was a penny-pinching policy that saved nothing and cost trust. Truss may have spooked markets; Starmer chilled households.

VAT on Private Schools

One of the most utterly ludicrous policies put forward by this Government, a VAT on Private Education is little more than a tax dressed up as virtue. By slapping VAT on private schools, Starmer and his government have persistently claimed that they are funding equality, but in practice he is taxing aspiration and heaping more and more onto a state education system that can ill-afford the change.

Thousands of parents who make sacrifices to keep their children out of an overstretched state sector will now pay twice for education: once in tax and again in fees. The policy is even estimated to cost more than it will raise, and will drive small independent schools to the wall and push their pupils back into a system already buckling. Starmer’s Britain doesn’t want you to climb the ladder, it wants to remove the rungs. Truss, at least, believed in letting people rise.

The Chagos Deal

In his rush to prove Britain is truly a “post-imperial” state, Starmer has expended a vast amount of energy (and cash) to sell out one of our last overseas territories, the Chagos Islands, in a deal that betrays British sovereignty, the rights of the islanders, and exposes the taxpayer to vast amounts of cost.

The handover to Mauritius may play well in diplomatic salons, but it sends a dangerous signal: that Britain’s word is negotiable and her allies expendable. The Chagossians, who have fought for decades to return home, were barely consulted.

A Government that cannot defend its own citizens’ rights abroad will soon forget how to defend them at home. Truss made mistakes in policy; Starmer makes them in principle.

The Lord Alli Scandal

The Prime Minister who vowed to “clean up politics” soon found himself wading into the swamp he promised to drain.

The Lord Alli scandal came with a whiff of favouritism, lobbying and quiet influence, and exposed Starmer’s pious façade for what it is: hypocrisy in a sober suit. His response was pure managerial evasion.

The party of “integrity and accountability” turned out to be as grubby as the rest, only duller about it. Truss’s downfall came from conviction pursued too fast. Starmer’s may well come from cowardice pursued too long.

Liz Truss failed by doing too much, too quickly. Keir Starmer fails by doing nothing good, too carefully. One believed Britain could be bold again; the other believes it should be managed into mediocrity.

Truss may have crashed the car, but Starmer is syphoning the petrol, selling the tyres and congratulating himself on not getting too close to the speed limit. Under her, Britain risked chaos; under him, it risked paralysis.

And while chaos can be mended, paralysis can last forever.

Britain deserves better than managerial mediocrity. It deserves courage, conviction and a leader who still believes this country can stand on its own two feet.