A year on, Keir Starmer wears his convictions more lightly than ever
The PM’s readiness to change course will inevitably invite further challenges.
To mark the anniversary on Friday of his first year in power, Sir Keir Starmer granted three leading, broadly progressive, journalists extended access. Tom McTague of the New Statesman, Josh Glancy of The Sunday Times, and Starmer’s biographer, Tom Baldwin, for The Observer, each travelled with the prime minister, interviewed him multiple times, and, predictably, chatted about Arsenal FC over a blokeish beer with him, of which the prime minister drank little.
The three skilful writers paint much the same portrait of a doggedly dutiful man, consumed by the diplomatic demands of the Trump Era and almost too ready to admit mistakes in domestic policy. He is seemingly without any vision of how he wants to “change” the country, even though that was his election slogan.
In an otherwise colourless picture, Sir Keir’s family responsibilities weigh heavily on him - both his wife, son and daughter and his two sisters and late brother. He misses “normal” life. Indeed, he seems to regard being normal as the highest virtue – as apparently do many in focus groups who begrudge his sitting in the directors’ box.
The trouble is that the role of prime minister is an exceptional one. The clue is in the name; there is only one prime minister in the whole of the UK. Is someone who yearns to be normal, and who is ending his first year in an apologetic defensive crouch, the right person to lead the country? Starmer is miserable and so is the rest of the country judging by the exceptional unpopularity of the leader and his government in opinion polls.
Sir Keir Starmer has had “the worst start for any newly elected prime minister, Labour or Conservative”, the political analyst Professor Sir John Curtice told me on Times Radio.
On the other hand, there are still a likely four years to go until Labour must face the verdict of the voters in a general election. Sir Keir Starmer reminded his trio of profilers his life story has an upward trajectory. He usually emerges on top in the end. Perhaps the nation is missing something about this prime minister.
Sir Keir has more than a few regrets. Hiring Sue Gray, wrong. Ending winter fuel payments, wrong. Rejecting a national grooming gang enquiry, wrong. “Things will get worse before they get better”, wrong. “Island of strangers”, wrong. Cutting Personal Independence Payments, wrong.
Previous prime ministers have bowed to pressure and executed U turns. I cannot recall one, until now, who put their hands up repeatedly to leading the nation in completely the wrong direction.
“Apologies rarely help.” John Curtice also observed, “U-turns can suggest a lack of direction, which is already one of this government’s biggest problems”.
“Need for fine tuning” is the sort of excuse we have come to expect when leaders reverse out of an unpopular policy, Sir Keir has left the impression that he wears his convictions so lightly that he does not know where he wants to go.
The prime minister’s readiness to change course will inevitably invite further challenges. He has signalled to Labour MPs that he bows to pressure. The government’s proposed reforms to immigration and special needs education now look unlikely to get past his backbenchers. Labour’s hard left and soft left are already gathering for their next push, against the two-child cap on child benefits.
The root of this Labour government’s troubles is obvious: lack of money. In real terms, incomes have stagnated for the last fifteen years. The “change” the government is promising depends on public spending but Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, have effectively promised “working people” that they will not have to pay for it, because there will be no increases in Income Tax, VAT or employees National Insurance. Meanwhile government borrowing has edged up to 100% of GDP but, with interest rates now at significant levels, there is no policy option to borrow more.
This weak economic state is as more a product of circumstances – the 2008 credit crunch, Brexit, Covid, the Ukraine war, demography, booming welfare demands and perennial low productivity – than it is to recent governments. But they did not make things better. Labour did not win its “loveless landslide” on a record low vote share; the Conservatives were buried under it.
Starmer and Reeves set out with the worthy intent to “restore economic stability”. This demanded curbs in government expenditure, which cut against the instincts of most of the Labour MPs who had been elected, giving Starmer an overall Commons majority of 172.
Last week, 120 of them, almost half of first time 2024 vintage, signed the reasoned amendment which would have derailed this week’s welfare legislation. Their excuse is that the leadership should have emphasised reform rather than the cuts. While many acknowledge that the soaring cost of welfare is unsustainable, no-one, including Conservative and Reform spokespeople it must be said, is willing to specify what the reductions should be.
Saying we need more people in work and fewer immigrants is reminiscent of Monty Python’s Blue Peter sketch that the way to play the violin like a virtuoso is to pull the bow across the strings.
“If we can find the money for defence, why can’t we find it for welfare?”, Labour Lord Peter Hain asks. Cutting foreign aid to boost defence spending will not endear Sir Keir to his party. It also looks like the exception to his reverting to Labour type and avoiding “hard choices”, which he will be unable to get through parliament anyway.
In his mea culpa, the prime minister blames the advice he has received. He takes personal responsibility only for not listening to his party and “the country” instead. Incredibly he says he did not properly read the immigration speech, written for him, which challenged progressive orthodoxy in a mild way.
Elected MPs are jealous of their status. The PM will surely increase his popularity with potential rebels if he spends less time with officials and more time engaging with them. They hated being dismissed by him as “noises off”. There is cold fury among MPs that when abroad he sent his unelected Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney to address them as his representative at a meeting of the PLP.
Tony Blair’s New Labour had a network dedicated to keeping as many people as possible inside the “Big Tent”. Blair was a charismatic leader, who repeatedly challenged his party’s conventional wisdom. New Labour also ruled through a decade of economic growth. Mr Normal Starmer has none of these advantages, or instincts, although Number 10 is at last looking to get a grip of its messaging in search of a compelling story to tell.
On this anniversary, few have acknowledged the modest achievements of this first year of Labour government: slightly shorter NHS waiting lists, an increased minimum wage, 30 hours childcare, free primary school meals, breakfast clubs, a slightly more coherent energy and infrastructure policy, plans to extend devolution, limited mitigation of US tariffs.
Starmer’s stealth moves back towards the EU might help redress the biggest failure of the past 12 months – the boats have not stopped so, self-evidently, the gangs have not been smashed.
All these measures are very much in the comfort zone of both Sir Keir Starmer and his MPs. So are the assaults on the privileges of non-doms and private schools. The question is whether any of them can start to turn round the UK’s economic malaise in time to save Starmer, Reeves and ultimately his government.
The Conservatives have already failed. If Labour fails, the British electorate looks likely to turn its back on both “natural parties of government” in favour of more radical alternatives.
Are Sir Keir’s small ideas enough? Has he got what it takes? Neither he nor the three journalists given exclusive access for this first anniversary seemed wholly convinced.
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