Labour marks 100 days in power tomorrow, but there is precious little for Keir Starmer to celebrate. It is a truism of modern politics that a government’s first three months or so sets the tone for everything that follows. If the newbies hit the ground running, all will be well; if not, disaster inevitably awaits.
The Labour leader has hit the ground stumbling
As Labour ruefully contemplates the ruinous results of its first hundred days, a landscape of shivering and penurious pensioners; suits, specs and soccer seats worth thousands scrounged from generous millionaires; parents penalised for sending their kids to private schools; British territory handed over; vicious infighting in Downing Street; tax hikes on the way and plummeting popularity in the polls, it may be instructive to compare Starmer’s ‘achievements’ with the administration that originally set the benchmark for 100 days of success: the first of the four terms of US president FD Roosevelt.
Elected by a landslide in November 1932, FDR and his progressive Democrats took power in March 1933. America was mired in the greatest economic depression the country had ever known. Millions were jobless; banks were foreclosing on mortgages; farmers were going bankrupt and their fields were becoming dust bowls; as depicted in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, whole populations were on the move searching for bread and work. Hopelessness and fear gripped the nation. In his inaugural address, Roosevelt famously told Americans that ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. He immediately set to work to restore hope and put the prostrate country back on its feet.
Congress was summoned to sit in continuous special session for three months, during which 15 major bills and no fewer than 77 lesser laws were passed, enacting the major planks of Roosevelt’s New Deal platform. Informed by the economic ideas of JM Keynes, the programme initiated public works such as dams, roads and railways to get America moving and put spending money back into threadbare pockets. Other measures gave basic relief and security to the sick and elderly, saved banks threatened with closure, and protected the savings of Middle America from inflation. By July, in one of his famous ‘fireside chat’ radio broadcasts, Roosevelt coined the ‘100 days’ phrase and convincingly claimed that the depression was bottoming out and America had turned the corner.
Revisionist historians have shown that the New Deal’s positive economic achievements were exaggerated, and that unemployment remained stubbornly high until World War Two finally lifted the US economy from the doldrums. But the vital factor which handed FDR three further terms in power and cemented his positive place in history was psychological. He gave a depressed and fearful people hope that happy days would return again. That is where a comparison between Keir Starmer and Roosevelt becomes frankly embarrassing.
While Britain is in the doldrums, the Prime Minister entirely lacks the former president’s ability to make people feel good. Notoriously touchy and humourless, Starmer carries around an aura of gloom and doom which he seems unable to shed. It is one thing to warn – as Starmer did in his August address in the Downing Street Rose Garden – of tough times ahead. But if such dire news is not also laced with a promise of broad sunlit uplands that will eventually be reached, the warnings will fall on deaf ears.
Successful politicians – one thinks of FDR, but also of a later US president of a very different political stamp, Ronald Reagan – are those who don’t stint on telling people the bad news, but who coat the bitterest pill with reassurance that the patient will get better; if that bitter pill can be wrapped up with an inspiring or memorable phrase like ‘city on a hill’, ‘morning in America’ or ‘manifest destiny’ then so much the better. In Keir Starmer’s case, a man with all the joyful eloquence of a Sat Nav, he has already lost his audience’s attention.
Starmer’s first wasted 100 days in power have revealed a man unsuited by temperament or training for the high position he holds. The Labour leader has hit the ground stumbling rather than running, and his complete absence of elementary political skills and human sympathies mean that he is heading for a great fall.
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