Keir Starmer must tell a better story

The Prime Minister needs to offer hope as well as gloom to prove he really runs Britain.

Who really runs Britain? It’s a favoured pastime of both left and right to suggest the answer is someone other than the prime minister: big business, the civil service, the trade unions or the media. The combination of a new government and the summer parliamentary recess has revived this perennial debate.

Keir Starmer has not taken a holiday – the Prime Minister’s consolation has been family time at Chequers – but claims that someone else is in charge have persisted. Sue Gray, his chief of staff, has been accused by Whitehall sources of “thinking she runs the country”. The Conservatives have declared that Labour has been “played by its union paymasters”. Still others contend it is the Treasury that rules as an austere Budget looms.

In each case, the accusation is a familiar one. “It took me precisely two years before I realised finally who it is that runs Britain,” Oliver Letwin, the former Conservative minister, said in 2012. “Our great United Kingdom is actually entirely run by a lady called Sue Gray, the head of ethics or something in the Cabinet Office. Unless she agrees, things just don’t happen.”

Much the same is now being said of Gray – but with far less sympathy. She stands accused of restricting security officials’ access to Starmer and of seeking to marginalise Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s head of political strategy. For a media nostalgic for Blairite-Brownite feuds, here is an irresistible new conflict.

Government special advisers reject this framing, but not because all is well in No 10. “It’s not Sue vs Morgan; it’s Sue vs everyone,” they say. This charge is not levelled by pugnacious aides of the Alastair Campbell and Damian McBride school, but more mild-mannered types. Their grievances include long delays in confirming appointments and inadequate pay (with some offered significantly lower salaries than in opposition). As a consequence, moves are underway to unionise Downing Street through the FDA, the body that represents public service professionals.

Gray was always destined to preoccupy the media. She did not become the story – the complaint traditionally made of backroom advisers – she already was the story. It was a prime ministerial scandal – partygate – that brought her to public attention. As cabinet members contend with the Whitehall machine, the presence of Gray – “someone who knows how to pull levers” – is deemed essential.

But the focus on her signals a wider challenge for Starmer: who and what defines his government? Since Labour entered office there has been no shortage of activity. Compulsory housebuilding targets have been restored, the ban on onshore wind has been lifted, the Rwanda scheme has been scrapped, GB Energy has been launched, public sector pay disputes have been settled. But what is the collective project all this amounts to?

Some inside Labour believe Starmer should have used the riots as an opportunity to give his government greater political definition. Here was a chance not only to wield state power but to contest the far right’s account of nationhood. Instead a vacuum emerged, filled by allegations of cronyism inside No 10 and outrage over the means-testing of winter fuel payments. By the time Starmer emerged to deliver a speech in the Downing Street rose garden on 27 August, the moment had somewhat passed.

“The riots didn’t just betray the sickness,” he declared, “they revealed the cure, found not in the cynical conflict of populism but in the coming together of a country the morning after.” But his speech was chiefly remembered for a different line: “Things will get worse before they get better.”

There is political logic to Labour’s focus on its baleful inheritance. Past Tory governments have used the same narrative device to devastating effect. Margaret Thatcher never tired of invoking the “winter of discontent”. George Osborne used the 2008 financial crisis – and Labour’s “overspending” – to win not one but two general elections. As Phil Tinline charts in The Death of Consensus, British politics has been shaped by collective nightmares, an endless procession of guilty men.

But such narratives are most powerful when used to define governments positively as well as negatively. The risk for Starmer is that declaring “things will get worse” makes him appear powerless – as if the Conservatives are still running Britain from beyond the political grave.

An associated fear among ministers is that a supposed emphasis on economic growth is giving way to Treasury austerity. Reeves, critics contend, is not only mimicking Osborne’s rhetorical devices but his fiscal ones too: a slew of early infrastructure cuts.

The Chancellor will get a chance to respond when she delivers the Budget on 30 October. Economic restraint is not an obstacle to popularity – the notion of shared sacrifice has resonated throughout British history. But it has always been accompanied by the promise that better days will follow: a “New Jerusalem” (Clement Attlee), “prudence for a purpose” (Gordon Brown) or “sunlit uplands” (David Cameron). Starmer speaks with gritty realism of a “decade of national renewal”, but he needs to offer voters glimpses of the renewal they can expect by the halfway point.

“The Labour Party is like a stagecoach,” Harold Wilson, Starmer’s Labour leader of choice, once observed. “If you rattle along at great speed, everybody is too exhilarated or seasick to cause any trouble. But if you stop, everybody gets out and argues about where to go next.”

Keir Starmer has not stopped this summer. But to avoid stalling, he will have to give his passengers a clearer sense of the destination.