Those of us who voted Labour with pleasure on 4 July could never have imagined the new government’s first 100 days. We thought that the grown-ups would take charge after the chaos of the Tory years. Labour would be the adults in the room, as the cliché goes: sensible, professional people like Sir Keir Starmer, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, and Rachel Reeves, a former analyst at the Bank of England.
Conservative readers are fooling themselves if they believe that Labour’s troubles will continue
Angela Rayner once described Keir Starmer as ‘the least political person in politics I know,’ and many found his apolitical nature endearing – mature, even. We could not have been more wrong.
The first 100 days of his government have proved that what is grown-up in the rest of the world is childish in politics. Here’s where that delusion has led us. The first thing most people know about the first centre-left government in 14 years is that it wants to means-test the winter fuel allowance for the elderly.
The second is that Keir Starmer and many of his ministers took gifts of clothes, fancy spectacles, tickets to Taylor Swift concerts, and in one egregious case, £14,000 towards a remarkably lavish birthday party without a thought of how it would look to the public.
And finally, and if only subconsciously, the nation has noticed the emptiness of our new government. Its lack of energy and urgency, as everyone hangs around like so many Vladimirs and Estragons waiting for Godot to finally show up, or in the case of Labour MPs, waiting for Reeves to finally produce her budget.
The vacuum has been filled by ferocious office politics, and ferocious denunciations in the Tory press, which have done nothing to improve the government’s reputation.
Before I go on, I should say Conservative readers are fooling themselves if they believe that Labour’s troubles will continue. There is every indication that the Starmer government is about to get a grip, and that Starmer himself is becoming more politically savvy by the day.
Still, it’s worth noting that Labour has tested to destruction the comforting centrist belief that the standards and norms of the professional middle class are a good guide for politicians – and it didn’t even take 100 days to do so.
Take the decision to means-test the winter fuel payment. Any incoming chancellor will have Treasury civil servants laying out the absurdities of Britain’s tax and benefit system: the council tax still based on 1991 valuations, and the bribes to elderly voters that the Tories used to secure the pensioner vote. In a rational world, there’s no justification for giving wealthy pensioners a winter fuel allowance as if they were Tiny Tim. But politics isn’t rational, and if it’s a profession, it’s one unlike any other.
In 1919, the German sociologist Max Weber tried to guide the politicians who would govern the newly democratic Germany. His essay Politics as a Vocation is read with sadness today, because we know the politicians Weber addressed failed to prevent the rise of Nazism. Yet his definition of democratic politics as ‘the strong and slow boring of hard boards’ requiring ‘both passion and perspective’ still resonates.
I have no doubt Labour ministers are genuinely passionate about redistributing wealth away from rich pensioners. But they lack the detachment and perspective needed to step back and figure out the best way to achieve that. However reasonable the Treasury’s recommendations may seem, a politically astute leader wouldn’t simply nod along. They would understand that means-testing the winter fuel allowance is a non-starter. It won’t raise much money once the ministers protect poor pensioners, and it paints the government as a heartless confederacy of Scrooges.
Technically, Starmer was right. Politically, he was an idiot
Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, declared that ‘the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.’ Rachel Reeves has got the smallest possible amount of feathers with the largest possible amount of hissing.
It does not stop there. The same inability to understand that what works in middle-class institutions does not work in politics also explains Labour’s failure to deliver a budget.
In any other large organisation, a senior figure charged with determining strategy would be given time and space. Of course they would. But governments need momentum. The delays in coming up with a budget have sucked the life out of this one, and allowed the Tory press to set the agenda.
Speaking of which, Tory journalists have feasted on the freebies Labour’s grandees enjoyed. They did not need to be Woodward or Bernstein to break their stories because Labour politicians had dutifully recorded their gifts in the register of members’ interests. All the hacks needed to do was copy and paste.
And they provided a political lesson as they did so. The gift scandal shows once again how the standards of modern institutions have no place in politics – in part because ethical standards in the private and public sectors are so low. Most institutions boast of their transparency. But transparency is at best a minor virtue. It is preferable to secrecy. But no one respects an outrageous institution or individual because they are honest about the outrages they commit.
Thames Water is transparent about the £2.3 million it pays its chief executive, for example. No one thinks that excuses his inability to stop sewage flooding our rivers.
A part of the problem for Labour politicians is that they thought it was enough to follow the weak standards of professional life. When the Financial Times reported in July that Sir Keir Starmer had taken £76,000 in freebies, he replied, ‘The system is one where if we take any contribution or donation of any sort that is all set out and declared. And that’s what we’ve done properly on my behalf.’
Love it or loathe it, Labour will rule for a long time
Technically, he was right. Politically, he was an idiot.
There are all kinds of signs that this strange interregnum is over, and the Labour party is learning to put politics first. The backstabbing in Downing Street ended with Morgan McSweeney, the political organiser, triumphing over former civil servant Sue Gray. I hold no brief for McSweeney. His analysis that Labour can only win by appealing to socially conservative Red Wall voters may turn out to be a horrible mistake if the progressive middle classes abandon the party. But at least McSweeney is a political thinker who understands that politics is indeed a vocation and that civil servants like Gray can never be, and should not try to be, political figures.
Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves’s budget will soon be with us. The 40 bills in the King’s Speech are beginning to make their way through Parliament. Brute political facts are asserting themselves.
So much of the fury in the Tory media over the past few months has been a coping mechanism to duck the most brutal of those facts: that Labour has a huge majority, while the right is split and short of talent.
Love it or loathe it, Labour will rule for a long time. Indeed, its rule is only just beginning.
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