29/06/2026
Keir Starmer is a man who had, by every available measure, won — a glittering legal career, the leadership of his party, a landslide — and then watched all that winning curdle the moment he was in office. So what went wrong?
In Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse separates games played to win, which end when someone does, from games played to keep the play going, in which the rules and even the boundaries shift to that end. As he puts it, the finite player plays within the boundaries; the infinite player plays with them.
Bernard Suits, in The Grasshopper, comes at the same idea from another angle: a game, he says, is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” — we accept the rules precisely because they make the play possible. A prosecution is a finite game: fixed rules, a judge, a verdict, and an end. So is a leadership ballot. Governing isn’t. It could be argued that Starmer was so used to winning at finite games, he didn’t know how to approach an infinite game.
Entrepreneurship is mostly an infinite game.
In the past, I’ve sometimes pushed back when entrepreneurs tell me the answer is to get more of them into the heart of government — people who have built things. But I’ve come around to thinking they’re right, because the evidence has started to stack up. The exceptional people who disprove my rule: Matt Clifford, Alex Depledge, Emma Jones, James Wise, Martha Lane Fox and Kate Bingham, to name a few. Bingham has called for an “entrepreneurial mindset” in government, and Emma has been telling me much the same for over a decade.
A note of caution. It’s possible — not least given how much we love to copy the US — for this thinking to lead to something like DOGE, which managed to break more things than it fixed. But that isn’t Britain’s problem — sclerosis is. We need more infinite players in government.
At 63, after a life of public service, Keir Starmer could be forgiven for opting for semi-retirement upon handing over the reins. However, as our new study on the age of some of Britain’s most successful founders shows, many of Britain’s most well-funded companies were started not by a sprightly...
