Even at the best of times, Keir Starmer has remained tantalisingly out of reach for those who crave simple definitions. Before the election, he consistently defied demands to set out a big vision or draw straight dividing lines. He’s always more comfortable with ambiguity and complexity. As he liked to say during the final days of the campaign, ‘There’s always a “but” with me somewhere.’
Now, of course, he really isn’t having the best of times. All those ‘buts’ are piling up. The ill-disciplined briefing battle within his team appeared to elevate office politics above real politics. The Treasury decision to means-test pensioners’ winter fuel allowances was inept. Most damaging of all were the expensive freebies which smouldered on for almost a month.
The plan to plug ‘black holes’ with ‘tough choices’ on tax sits uneasily with the pledge to attract investment
Few people in Westminster can possibly believe Starmer came into politics so that he could get some free suits and go to a couple of Taylor Swift shows, as has sometimes been implied by sections of a media hell-bent on finding false equivalence with the last government. But aides privately suggest that the Prime Minister suffers from an unworldly reluctance to realise how such stories undermine his reputation.
Some of those who work for Starmer have always been puzzled by the way he doesn’t quite fit the template for a political leader. He seems to lack the core skills and instincts needed to succeed as one. Too often since the election, he’s been strangely absent from their accounts of Labour’s victory – almost as if he was someone who didn’t even get to choose what clothes he wore or where his government goes from here.
The usual answer to questions about the direction Starmer would take once in power is to point to his ‘five missions’ – economic growth, safer streets, clean energy, breaking barriers to opportunity and getting the NHS fit for the future – that he began setting out from the start of last year. No one could say these ideas lacked ambition. Achieving the ‘fastest economic growth in the G7’ would stretch any government.
Instead, the criticism has been that the missions are simultaneously too bold and too vague. In office, this has meant the policy gap between the ‘first steps’ of Labour’s election pledge card and its plan for a ‘decade of national renewal’ has sometimes been filled with incoherence. A fiscal plan to plug ‘black holes’ with ‘tough choices’ on tax sits uneasily with other pledges to attract investment and encourage growth. Similarly, business–friendly efforts to get more homes built by deregulating planning laws seem to rub up against promises to clean up waterways, prevent another Grenfell Tower fire and, indeed, re-regulate the labour market.
The idea had been to break down barriers between departments and re-engineer Whitehall with the help of outside expertise. Few ministers think much of that is happening.
I have sometimes compared Starmer’s inelegant but highly effective leadership in opposition to a man crossing a minefield, because he took steps to the left and right, or even backwards, before moving forward. For most of his three months in office, he has appeared less certain of how to navigate the even more dangerous terrain of government. But, as so often with him, it has taken a bit of adversity for Starmer to take another look at his compass.
The Prime Minister’s sacking of Sue Gray last week is an example of a ruthless streak he has shown before. So too was appointing the hyper-political Morgan McSweeney, who ran Labour’s election campaign, as his new chief of staff. Close advisers say Starmer’s mood has noticeably altered in the days since. The ratchet-like relentlessness he showed in changing his party and winning power has reappeared. A planned trip to Australia has been scrapped. There is recognition that real effort needs to be made to join up decisions, rather than allowing announcements such as the Chagos Islands handover to dominate the news for days on end.
The renewed focus is on Rachel Reeves’s first Budget on 30 October. ‘We know it will be a fight and it’s important we pick the right one,’ said one senior aide. Although everyone within Downing Street to whom I’ve spoken in recent days insists that the missions are not being abandoned, that there is a ‘narrowing, focusing and tightening’ around a series of ‘tangible and deliverable goals for working people’. These will be ‘staging posts that tell a story to the country about where we want to be in two, three and four years’ time’.
Starmer is understood to be working on a document with Reeves and Pat McFadden at the Cabinet Office using a mass of polling evidence commissioned by McSweeney. Provisionally titled ‘Priorities for Change’, this is expected to be published before the Budget so that identifiable connections between the missions run through what the Treasury decides to do.
Starmer is a very long way from being the ‘dead parrot’ of comedy proverb. But it’s remarkable that he’s recalibrating his mandate so soon after a landslide – and this self-consciously serious man should avoid being too nakedly political.
Some voters may already be convinced that he’s no different to what they’ve had before. The solution to their despair cannot just be more focus-group-driven dividing lines, simple slogans and key performance indicators – because the repeated failure of that kind of politics has previously created ideal conditions for the worst kinds of populism to flourish.
A better test will be whether Starmer can deliver change in real people’s lives. For this he will probably need a hundred months in office – not just a hundred days – and some thicker gruel than that being offered now.
Tom Baldwin’s updated Keir Starmer: The Biography is out next week.
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