Starmer marks first year with a clear crisis and blow to his leadership

Sky News

9 hours ago

July 5 2024, 1pm: I remember the moment so clearly.
Keir Starmer stepped out of his sleek black car, grasped the hand of his wife Vic, dressed in Labour red, and walked towards a jubilant crowd of Labour staffers, activists and MPs waving union jacks and cheering a Labour prime minister into Downing Street for the first time in 14 years.
Starmer and his wife took an age to get to the big black door, as they embraced those who had helped them win this election - their children hidden in the crowd to watch their dad walk into Number 10.
Keir Starmer, not the easiest public speaker, came to the podium and told the millions watching this moment the "country has voted decisively for change, for national renewal".
He spoke for the "weariness at the heat of the nation" and "the lack of trust" in our politicians as a "wound" that "can only be healed by actions not words". He added: "This will take a while but the work of change begins immediately."
That was a day in which this prime minister made history. His was a victory on a scale that comes around but one every few decades.
He won the largest majority in a quarter of a century and with it a massive opportunity to become one of the most consequential prime ministers of modern Britain - alongside the likes of Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair.
But within the win was a real challenge too.
Starmer's was a loveless landslide, won on a lower share of the vote than Blair in all of his three victories and 6 percentage points lower than the 40% Jeremy Corbyn secured in the 2017 general election. It was the lowest vote share secured for a single party in over 70 years. Support for Labour was as shallow as it was wide.
2:03
In many ways then, it was a landslide built on shaky foundations: low public support, deep mistrust of politicians, unhappiness with the state of public services, squeezed living standards and public finances in a fragile state after the huge cost of the pandemic and persistent anaemic growth.
Put another way, the fundamentals of this Labour government, whatever Keir Starmer did, or didn't do, were terrible. Blair came in on a new dawn. This Labour government, in many ways, inherited the scorched earth.
For the past year, I have followed Keir Starmer around wherever he goes. We have been to New York, Washington (twice), Germany (twice), Brazil, Samoa, Canada, Ukraine, the Netherlands and Brussels. I can't even reel off the places we've been to around the UK - but suffice to say we've gone to all the nations and regions.
What I have witnessed in the past year is a prime minister who works relentlessly hard. When we flew for 27 hours non-stop to Samoa last autumn to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) summit, every time I looked up at the plane, I saw a solitary PM, his headlight shining on his hair, working away as the rest of us slept or watched films.
He also seems almost entirely unflappable. He rarely expresses emotion. The only time I have seen a flash of anger was when I questioned him about accepting freebies in a conversation that ended up involving his family, and when Elon Musk attacked Jess Phillips.
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I have also witnessed him being buffeted by events in a way that he would not have foreseen. The arrival of Donald Trump into the White House has sucked the prime minister into a whirlwind of foreign crises that has distracted him from domestic events.
When he said over the weekend, as a way of explanation not an excuse, that he had been caught up in other matters and taken his eye off the ball when it came to the difficulties of welfare reform, much of Westminster scoffed, but I didn't.
I had followed him around in the weeks leading up to that vote. We went from the G7 in Canada, to the Iran-Israel 12-day war, to the NATO summit in the Hague, as the prime minister dealt with, in turn, the grooming gangs inquiry decision, the US-UK trade deal, Donald Trump, de-escalation in the Middle East and a tricky G7 summit, the assisted dying vote, the Iran-Israel missile crisis.
He was taking so many phone calls on Sunday morning from Chequers, that he couldn't get back to London for COBRA [national emergency meeting] because he couldn't afford to not have a secure phone line for the hour-long drive back to Downing Street.
He travelled to NATO, launched the National Security Review and agreed to the defence alliance's commitment to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035. So when he came back from the Hague into a full-blown welfare rebellion, I did have some sympathy for him - he simply hadn't had the bandwidth to deal with the rebellion as it began to really gather steam.
Where I have less sympathy with the prime minister and his wider team is how they let it get to that point in the first place.
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Keir Starmer wasn't able to manage the latter stages of the rebellion, but the decisions made months earlier set it up in all its glory, while Downing Street's refusal to heed the concerns of MPs gave it momentum to spiral into a full-blown crisis.
The whips gave warning after 120 MPs signed a letter complaining about the measures, the Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall had done the same, but Starmer and Reeves were, in the words of one minister, "absolutist".
"They assumed people complaining about stuff do it because they are weak, rather than because they are strong," said the minister, who added that following the climbdown, figures in Number 10 "just seemed completely without knowledge of the gravity of it".
That he marks his first anniversary with the humiliation of having to abandon his flagship welfare reforms or face defeat in the Commons - something that should be unfathomable in the first year of power with a majority that size - is disappointing.
To have got it that wrong, that quickly with your parliamentary party, is a clear blow to his authority and is potentially more chronic. I am not sure yet how he recovers.
2:58
Keir Starmer said he wanted to rule country first, party second, but finds himself pinned by a party refusing to accept his centrist approach. Now, ministers tell MPs that there will be a financial consequence of the government's decision to delay tightening the rules on claiming disability benefits beyond the end of 2026.
A shattered Rachel Reeves now has to find the £5bn she'd hoped to save another way. She will defend her fiscal rules, which leaves her the invidious choice of tax rises or spending cuts. Sit back and watch for the growing chorus of MPs that will argue Starmer needs to raise more taxes and pivot to the left.
That borrowing costs of UK debt spiked on Wednesday amid speculation that the chancellor might resign or be sacked, is a stark reminder that Rachel Reeves, who might be unpopular with MPs, is the markets' last line of defence against spending-hungry Labour MPs. The party might not like her fiscal rules, but the markets do.
The past week has set the tone now for the prime minister's second year in office. Those around him admit that the parliamentary party is going to be harder to govern. For all talk of hard choices, they have forced the PM to back down from what were cast as essential welfare cuts and will probably calculate that they can move him again if they apply enough pressure.
There is also the financial fall-out, with recent days setting the scene for what is now shaping up to be another definitive budget for a chancellor who now has to fill a multi-billion black hole in the public finances.
But I would argue that the prime minister has misjudged the tone as he marks that first year. Faced with a clear crisis and blow to his leadership, instead of tackling that head on the prime minister sought to ignore it and try to plough on, embarking on his long-planned launch of the 10-year NHS plan to mark his year in office, as if the chancellor's tears and massive Labour rebellions over the past 48 hours were mere trifles.
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It was inevitable that this NHS launch would be overshadowed by the self-inflicted shambles over welfare and the chancellor's distress, given this was the first public appearance of both of them since it had all blown up.
But when I asked the prime minister to explain how it had gone so wrong on welfare and how he intended to rebuild your trust and authority in your party, he completely ignored my question. Instead, he launched into a long list of Labour's achievements in his first year: 4 million extra NHS appointments; free school meals to half a million more children; more free childcare; the biggest upgrade in employment rights for a generation; and the US, EU and India free trade deals.
1:03
I can understand the point he was making and his frustration that his achievements are being lost in the maelstrom of the political drama. But equally, this is politics, and he is the prime minister. This is his story to tell, and blowing up your welfare reform on the anniversary week of your government is not the way to do it.
For Starmer himself, he will do what I have seen him do before when he's been on the ropes, dig in, learn from the errors and try to come back stronger. I have heard him in recent days talk about how he has always been underestimated and then proved he can do it - he is approaching this first term with the same grit.
If you ask his team, they will tell you that the prime minister and this government is still suffering from the unending pessimism that has pervaded our national consciousness; the sense politics doesn't work for working people and the government is not on their side.
Starmer knows what he needs to do: restore the social contract, so if you work hard you should get on in life. The spending review and its massive capital investment, the industrial strategy and strategic defence review - three pieces of work dedicated to investment and job creation - are all geared to trying to rebuild the country and give people a brighter future.
But equally, government has been, admit insiders, harder than they thought as they grapple with multiple crises facing the country - be that public services, prisons, welfare.
It has also lacked direction. Sir Keir would do well to focus on following his Northern Star. I think he has one - to give working people a better life and ordinary people the chance to fulfil their potential.
But somehow, the prime minister is failing to articulate his mission, and he knows that. When I asked him at the G7 summit in Canada what his biggest mistake of the first year was, he told me: "We haven't always told our story as well as we should."
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I go back to the Keir Starmer of July 5 2024. He came in on a landslide, he promised to change the country, he spoke of the lack of trust and the need to prove to the public that the government could make their lives better through actions not words.
In this second year, he is betting that the legislation he has passed and strategies he has launched will drive that process of change, and in doing so, build back belief.
But it is equally true that his task has become harder these past few weeks. He has spilled so much blood over welfare for so little gain, his first task is to reset the operation to better manage the party and rebuild support.
But bigger than that, he needs to find a way to not just tell his government's story but sell his government's story. He has four years left.