That conclusion may surprise many. Our robotic PM was born to be a lawyer, not a politician. He struggles to inspire, to connect, to show the passion leadership requires.
Yet he still knows what has to be done. That’s partly because it’s glaringly obvious. He has to get the economy moving again. When voters feel richer, they’re far more forgiving. When everyday life is a battle, they want someone to blame.
That stench of division and decline hanging over Blighty? It would waft away if growth hit 3% a year.
But that’s not his only task. Starmer desperately needs to stop the boats. We still need some immigration to plug labour shortages, but it has to be legal, beneficial and controlled.
The PM knows that too. It’s why he made relative hard-liner Shabana Mahmood the new Home Secretary, to take the tough decisions that made liberal predecessor Yvette Cooper feel seasick.
There’s another challenge the PM can’t afford to duck.
He also has to rein in the ballooning cost of health and disability benefits. They already swallow around £50billion a year and that’s forecast to top £75billion before the end of this Parliament.
Signing people off work for mental health problems, real or imagined, is a disaster. Nothing is more corrosive to wellbeing than being locked out of work.
Above all, though, Starmer must get rid of Ed Miliband. He’s now the single biggest obstacle to restoring the nation’s finances.
As Energy Secretary, Miliband’s priority should be driving down our crippling power bills. Instead households are shelling out £1,755 a year on gas and electricity, while industry is being hammered even harder.
British manufacturers pay roughly £80 for every megawatt-hour of power, compared to around £28 in the US.
No wonder industry is fleeing abroad where energy is cheaper (and dirtier). Yet Miliband’s ideological crusade piles on costly green levies, sinks energy firms with punitive taxes, blocks new North Sea licences and squanders billions on unproven technologies such as carbon capture and blue hydrogen.
Starmer tried to ditch Miliband last week, but he refused to budge. Yvette Cooper and former foreign secretary David Lammy didn’t want to go either, but did. Why not Miliband?
This brings us to the real issue. If it were just one man, Starmer would sweep him aside. He’s ruthless enough.
The underlying problem is Labour itself. Activists and backbenchers have no appetite for the hard choices needed to restart growth.
They’d rather dream up new ways to tax those still working, signal their virtue over the climate, and spend money we simply don’t have.
All very nice in theory. But growth has to come first. That’s how we pay for all those goodies, a fact many in the party refuse to accept.
Starmer knows this. And he knows Miliband is the biggest block to delivering it. Yet the PM daren’t sack him, because the party won’t wear it.
So we’re stuck. Miliband will go on draining tens of billions in wasted spending and strangled growth, Starmer won’t get his growth, and voters will remain unforgiving. And rightly so.