The Left have stopped grading on results and started grading on vibes. You see it at Cambridge, handing out honorary doctorates like party favours. You see it in Whitehall’s ever-expanding roster of peerages for the quietly unremarkable. And this week you saw it at the Élysée Palace, where Emmanuel Macron pinned the Légion d’honneur, the highest decoration the French Republic can bestow, on Keir Starmer, a man who leaves Downing Street next week having lasted barely two years in the job.
Let that sit for a moment. France’s supreme national honour, previously reserved for the likes of Churchill (three years after he’d liberated a continent, not two years into a wobbly premiership), Eisenhower, and Mandela, has now been extended to a British prime minister on his way out the door. Not for winning a war. Not for a peace deal. For chairing meetings.
The Award for Attending Meetings
Read the citation carefully, because it’s instructive. Starmer wasn’t honoured for a ceasefire in Ukraine, there isn’t one. He wasn’t honoured for a decisive military breakthrough, there hasn’t been one. He was honoured, in Macron’s own words, for his “personal leadership” in setting up the “coalition of the willing,” a diplomatic talking shop that, more than a year after its founding, has produced a parade down the Champs-Élysées, a minute of applause, and a promise to maybe build a European alternative to the Patriot missile system at some point in the future.
Meanwhile Ukrainian forces are, as the same event’s own communiqué admits, suffering “crippling shortages” of the air-defence interceptors they actually need right now to stop missiles falling out of the sky. That’s not a footnote. That’s the entire ballgame. You can march 500 soldiers past the Arc de Triomphe all you like; it doesn’t reload a single Patriot battery.
So what, precisely, is the medal for? It’s for showing up. It’s for being emollient, agreeable, and reliably present at summits. It is, in short, an award for good manners, the diplomatic equivalent of a participation trophy, only cast in gold and pinned on by a head of state.
Good Company
If you want to know how debased the currency has become, look at who else has worn it. Jacques Chirac gave the Légion d’honneur to Bashar al-Assad in 2001. He gave it to Vladimir Putin in 2006, an honour Putin, delightfully, still holds today, war crimes and all, because nobody in Paris has quite worked up the nerve to take it back. Assad eventually got stripped of his, once gassing his own population became too embarrassing even for the Quai d’Orsay to ignore. Putin didn’t even manage that.
This is the club Starmer has just joined. Not Churchill’s club. Not Mandela’s. The club of men whom French presidents found agreeable enough, at the time, to decorate, regardless of what history subsequently made of them.
Rewarding the Process, Not the Outcome
There’s a pattern here, and it isn’t confined to Paris. Cambridge handed an honorary doctorate to Lord Hermer while he was busy trying to sign away British sovereign territory (the Chagos Islands) to a country that has no right to it, at a cost to the British taxpayer running into billions. That wasn’t a reward for winning an argument. It was a reward for having the right opinions in the right rooms.
This is what happens when institutions stop measuring success by results and start measuring it by conformity to a shared worldview. You don’t need to have won anything. You don’t need your policy to have worked. You simply need to have believed the correct things, said them at the correct dinner parties, and been polite about it in front of the correct people. The mechanism rewards the performance of virtue rather than its substance, and the people doing the rewarding are, more often than not, marking their own homework, because they hold the same worldview themselves.
Starmer’s domestic record is not the stuff of legend. His approval ratings at home have been dismal for most of his tenure. He is leaving office after roughly two years, not because he triumphed, but because his own party essentially booted him out the door. He’s been a disaster from start to finish. And yet: a medal. Pinned on, with hugs, in front of the cameras, by a French president who is himself deeply unpopular at home and facing his own political troubles.
Two unpopular and struggling leaders, applauding each other, on a stage built for the occasion. It has the unmistakable whiff of people awarding one another gold stars because nobody else is going to.
Why It Matters
None of this is really about Starmer personally, or even about Macron. It’s about what happens to institutions… universities, honour systems, the machinery of state recognition, when they become closed loops. When the people who decide who deserves an honorary doctorate, a peerage, or the Légion d’honneur are drawn from the same narrow class as the people receiving them, the whole exercise stops being a genuine verdict on merit and starts being a mirror. It tells insiders they’re doing brilliantly. It tells everyone else, watching from outside, that the scoreboard has been quietly switched off.
That’s worth being annoyed about, not because Starmer doesn’t deserve a friendly send-off from an ally, but because when honours become unmoored from outcomes, they stop meaning anything at all.
Churchill’s Légion d’honneur meant something because everyone, everywhere, could see what it was for. Nobody needed it explained to them. If Starmer’s needs a three-page justification about coalition-building and personal warmth, that itself is the tell.
The public isn’t stupid. People can see a parade. They can also see empty missile stockpiles, a war grinding on with no end in sight, and a domestic approval rating in the gutter. When the gap between the pageantry and the reality gets that wide, dressing it up in ceremonial ribbon doesn’t close it. It just makes the ribbon look a hell of a lot cheaper.
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