Keir Starmer told me he'd met every challenge. But things look bad right now

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a day ago

Will Keir Starmer allow himself to celebrate his first anniversary as prime minister this weekend? Or will he be taking a long, hard look in the mirror and asking himself what went wrong?That is what is in my mind as he greets me in the Terracotta Room on the first floor of 10 Downing Street for a long-planned conversation about his first 12 months in office, this week.He looks surprisingly relaxed, given that his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had been in tears sitting behind him in the Commons just hours earlier. That triggered fevered speculation about how long she would last in the job, moving markets to sell the pound and increase the cost of borrowing.Perhaps that is the impression he wants to convey to me as he shares a story about his photo opportunity with Formula One cars parked outside his front door - the most famous door in the world.Starmer is determined that the problems of recent weeks - and boy there's been a long list of those - will not overshadow the achievements he believes deserve just as much attention."We have done some fantastic things," he tells me, "really driven down the waiting lists in the NHS, really done loads of improvements in schools and stuff that we can do for children - whether that's rolling out school uniform projects, whether it's school meals, breakfast clubs, you name it - and also [brought in] a huge amount of investment into the country. And of course we've been busy getting three trade deals."It's clear that, given the chance, his list would go on. And yet, I point out, there is another long list - of things he's recently admitted to getting wrong.In the last year, he's said hiring Sue Gray - Starmer's former chief of staff who left Downing Street in October - was wrong. He's also held his hands up about plans to end winter fuel payments, about rejecting a national grooming gang inquiry, and cutting benefits for disabled people. That's not even the full list, yet it's quite a number of things that he's admitting to being a mistake.The prime minister thinks I've rather crudely summarised his personal reflections on what he might have done better. He challenges the idea, which is prevalent in Westminster, that changing your mind represents weakness, or a "humiliating U-turn".Listen: The inside story of Starmer's stormy first yearInDepth: Why Sir Keir's political honeymoon was so short-livedThis is the fourth time we've sat down for an extended and personal conversation for my Political Thinking podcast."You know this from getting to know me," he says. "I'm not one of these ideological thinkers, where ideology dictates what I do. I'm a pragmatist. You can badge these things as U-turns - it's common sense to me."If someone says to me, 'here's some more information and I really think it's the right thing to do', I'm the kind of person that says, 'well in which case, let's do it'."There is, though, no doubt that scrapping so much of his welfare reforms was a U-turn - a costly and humiliating one. Starmer and his chancellor have not only lost authority and face, they've lost £5bn in planned savings, something that will have to be paid for somehow, through extra borrowing, lower spending or, most likely, higher taxes."I take responsibility," he says, "we didn't get the process right". But somehow he implies that it might have been someone other than the leader of the Labour Party's responsibility to persuade Labour MPs to back his plans. He doesn't spell out what he means by getting the process right and, perhaps more importantly, he dodges my attempts to get him to spell out clearly what story he's trying to tell the country about benefits.Should Labour be on the side of disabled people and people like his own mother, who had a crippling disease that meant she eventually had to have a leg amputated? Or should they adopt her unwillingness to be written off, which he described to me the last time we spoke? When told by her doctors that she wouldn't walk again she refused to listen.
Wounded by the events of the past week, Starmer refuses to even address that choice. But surely, I suggest to him, the nation doesn't just want a problem-solver, or a chief executive of UK plc? Voters surely want a leader who has a story to tell?Starmer clearly knew this question - or a variation of it - was coming. I've pushed him on it every time we've spoken at length. "It's about a passion, if that's the right word," he says. "But certainly a determination to change the lives of millions of working people and, in particular, to tackle this question of fairness.""It's almost like a social contract," he adds, "that people are getting back what they're putting in, that there is a fairer environment for them that supports them and respects them."That's a bit long to sew on to an election banner, to chant in the streets, or write in a post on X, but it is a theme. He is a self-proclaimed pragmatist who doesn't want there to be something that can be labelled as "Starmerism", but at least we can now say that his guiding principle is fairness.
In truth, what matters more than anything else to him is not losing, something he tells me he hates, whether in politics or on the five-a-side pitch playing football regularly with his mates - as he still does and has done for decades.I tell him people think he is losing now - some say he is the most unpopular prime minister since records began. He reacts with the defiance of a man whose football-playing friend recently described him as a "hard bastard". A man who served in Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet and then had him thrown out of the party; who stood to be leader on promises to keep much of Corbyn's agenda before tearing up those promises to win power; and someone who hired then fired Sue Gray as his first Downing Street chief of staff.
"Every challenge that's been put in front of me I've risen to, met it, and we're going to continue in the same vein," he says.I end our conversation by reminding him what they say about failing football managers who have "lost the dressing room". Has he lost the Labour Party dressing room? His reply is emphatic."Absolutely not," he says. "The Labour dressing room, the PLP, is proud as hell of what we've done, and their frustration - my frustration - is that sometimes the other stuff, welfare would be an example, can obscure us being able to get that out there."Almost as an afterthought he adds: "I'm a hard-enough bastard to find out who it was who said that, so that I can have a discussion with him." Knowing Starmer I suspect he's much more likely to deliver a crunching tackle on the pitch than a quiet word off it.But the prime minister's message is clear to me: Don't count me out, however bad it looks now. To pretty much everyone other than him it currently does look bad. Very bad.