Keir Starmer choked up as he announced he would go. Within days the rooms around him had emptied. Ministers walked out of his cabinet. More than eighty of his own members called on him to step down. A party that had just shed close to fifteen hundred council seats turned its hopeful gaze to Andy Burnham, fresh from his win at Makerfield, and set about forgetting the man who had led it to a landslide barely two years before. A leader is measured, in the last accounting, by who remains in the room when the door stands open. Starmer looked around his, and found it bare.

Now, according to the Observer, he is eyeing a far larger room. The office of NATO secretary general falls vacant in 2028, when Mark Rutte’s term concludes, and Starmer is said to want it. His allies make the case briskly. He is well regarded among European leaders. He held his own at the recent G7. His rapport with Volodymyr Zelensky is warm enough that the two are said to pocket dial one another by accident. After Downing Street, the argument runs, why not the helm of the Western alliance?

Jerusalem, of all capitals, should pause over this. The post Starmer covets bears directly on Israel’s security. The secretary general helps decide how the Western alliance speaks of Tehran, how closely it reads the Eastern Mediterranean, and whether it treats Israel as a partner or as a problem to be managed around. And the temperament that would shape those judgements was on plain view only months ago, when Israel and the United States struck at Iran’s nuclear programme and the Prime Minister of Britain could not bring himself to stand with them. The job, in other words, is the inverse of the one he has just lost, and far more demanding of the very quality he lacked.

The office........

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