Winter is coming. That’s the message from Keir Starmer’s set-piece speech this morning from the No. 10 rose garden. After a tricky few weeks for the new Prime Minister on cronyism claims and anxiety about cuts to the winter fuel allowance, Starmer and his team attempted seize the agenda with a speech looking ahead to the months to come. However, anyone hoping for optimism will be disappointed. While Tony Blair was associated with the D:Ream anthem of ‘things can only get better’, Starmer warned that things can only get worse – at least in the short term:
Frankly – things will get worse before we get better. I didn’t want to release prisoners early. I was chief prosecutor for five years, it goes against the grain of everything I’ve ever done. But to be blunt, if we hadn’t taken that difficult decision immediately, we wouldn’t have been able to respond to the riots as we did.
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