Westminster’s journalists gathered in No 10’s state rooms for a reception with the Prime Minister last night. Every time I’ve seen Keir Starmer since he entered office, he has been grinning. In many ways, Rishi Sunak left him a blessed inheritance. When he’s not been at the Euros in Germany, he has been cavorting with Macron at Blenheim Palace. Today, he is travelling to Paris for the Olympics opening ceremony.
But beneath the glamour, the situation is grim. Labour is finding, and making sure it is seen to find, broken public service after dilapidated department. The screams of, “Oh, horror, horror, horror!” is heard upon the opening of any Whitehall door. It knows that the stories it tells in these first five weeks will shape how it is viewed for the next five years. The lower the bar from which the Labour Party start, the higher the perceived achievement.
In this battle over the narrative, the media don’t seem to be playing ball. Lobby journalists abhor a vacuum. The rift between Sue Gray and Morgan McSweeney inside No 10 provides an arc which could last the parliament. Ditto Angela Rayner’s reported isolation from power. Starmer’s attempt to strip the nasty, personality-based politics out of government could, therefore, prove tricky. Success will lie in tight party management and keeping the focus on policy delivery. Restoring decency and getting the public realm on its feet is the order of the day.
Where are the dangers? As I wrote on Tuesday, Starmer will soon name “populism” as the government’s key enemy. But defeating populism will require more than polite words and amiable relations with Rishi Sunak. They seemingly have no plan to cut migration, even though Starmer has explicitly said he wants to do so. What’s worse, this is an elite project. Senior members of the government want to bring the numbers down to stave off Reform, but the cabinet is split and the party is opposed.
If you think populism is caused by economic factors, not cultural angst over immigration, then the story is the same. Rachel Reeves has accepted the Osbornite economic framework she inherited from the Tories. The fiscal rules are the same. Net public investment is still destined to fall over the parliament, despite GB Energy and the National Wealth Fund. And which government hasn’t wanted to rally private sector investment? She’s promised to leave the tax system as it is. Devolution is a constitutional reform, not an economic one. HS2 is dead. The government say they will build Northern Powerhouse Rail, but so did the last.
And yet Labour is now making two arguments which create room for itself to pursue a new course. First: everything is so bad that we need to take radical steps to fix the public realm. Second: our democracy is so threatened by populism that stable government won’t cut it. These are arguments to act swiftly, and to take radical steps to deliver.
In opposition, Starmer’s team thought that promising radical policies was complacent, that the public needed to be reassured Labour would govern lightly. In government, the reverse is true. The danger lies in doing too little, not too much.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here.
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