A new dawn broke on 5 July 2024, did it not? Six months on from Labour’s general election triumph, interpretations vary.
On that fateful summer day, Britain’s constitutional choreography seamlessly swept one premier out of power and waved in another. It was a striking dichotomy with the political carnage witnessed overnight, as Conservative MP after Conservative MP — including an array of household names — saw their political careers unceremoniously ended by a merciless electorate.
Pathetic fallacy had been a campaign theme ever since Rishi Sunak, sans umbrella and suit pooling, powered through the rain to issue his election proclamation. Six weeks later, a hopeful summer glow drenched Downing Street as Keir Starmer arrived, fresh from his meeting with His Majesty. A little overnight rainfall stained the new prime minister’s path to his lectern. But the Tory storm was over.
In his first appearance before the nation as prime minister, Starmer evoked Tony Blair, the last Labour leader to experience the ecstasy of election victory. There was the spirited hand-shaking, the waving of union jacks — and of course the rhetoric. He pledged to restore trust with “actions not words” — by leading a “government of service”.
“We ran as a changed Labour party”, Starmer declared shortly after Sunak conceded defeat. “And we will govern as a changed Labour party.”
The wider Blair-Starmer parallels, on a cursory assessment, were manifest. Labour’s new majority of 174 was the largest since Blair (179). Overnight, Labour candidates had repeatedly shattered the previous Conservative-to-Labour swing record of 18.8 per cent — set by New Labour in Brent North in 1997. 46 constituencies surpassed this level in the early hours of 5 July; and the new record was set, elegantly, in Liz Truss’s former fiefdom of South West Norfolk (25.9 per cent).
After fourteen years of Conservative-led government, the result appeared to herald a new political epoch. But the headline figures belied a more complex picture.
Although Labour won 63 per cent of commons seats (411 MPs), it did so with just 33.7 per cent of the vote — the lowest winning share of any party since 1832. A perfectly pitched campaign had seen Labour advance in marginal seats, but shed voters in traditional stronghold areas — supporters that were, technically, surplus to Starmer’s electoral requirements.
After all, Labour’s overall vote share was only around two points higher than in 2019. And turnout stood at 59.8 per cent — down from 67.3 per cent. It meant Starmer’s Labour received half a million fewer votes than the party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
Since the 2019 election, consecutive Conservative PMs squandered a far sturdier political hegemony than Starmer’s today. The collapse of the Tories’ 80-seat “super majority” is rightly taken as proof of a volatile electorate — one willing to surmount seemingly insurmountable governments.
Nor are these difficult facts disputed by Labour’s top brass. The prominent pro-Starmer think tank, Labour Together, published a report after the election outlining what the party must do to win in 2029. The report reads: “In the past, winning 411 seats was the kind of victory from which a government might confidently expect 10 years in power.
“This Labour government has been cautiously hired, on a trial basis, liable to prompt dismissal if it deviates even slightly from its focus on voters’ priorities.”
Meanwhile, Labour’s inheritance — as Starmer often stresses — is historically harrowing. Nor do politicians, in the current environment of distrust and impatience, tend to improve their public standing once high office is secured. Starmer’s initial premiership may well be testament to that. Polling from Ipsos, gathered the week before his December “Plan for Change” speech, showed Starmer as the most unpopular PM after five months in office since the firm began conducting approval ratings in 1979.
The scale of Starmer’s task is enormous. But it has been made taller still by self-inflicted blunders. Labour’s new dawn has been dampened by drift and dysfunction.
With the stakes high and ratcheting upwards, can the prime minister restore the confidence of a restive electorate in its leaders? Can Starmer ensure Labour’s rule, after fourteen years of irrelevance, matters more than a mere interregnum? Or have early missteps taken a lasting toll on Starmer’s hollow hegemony?
Can the prime minister, above all, deliver on the simple but fulsome promise of his one-word election slogan: “Change”?
As for how the events of 2024 help answer these questions, we begin with Starmer’s reshuffle.
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Starmer picks his people
For fourteen years, it was the Conservative Party and its ascendant faction that contoured our political discourse and realities. In the end, the real power of any majority — let alone one the size of Labour’s — is that the victorious party sets the political parameters. On 5 July therefore, the primary fact of our politics was this: opponents vanquished, Keir Starmer is in charge.
There’s no better way to gauge the steer of a new administration than by inspecting those individuals appointed to it. Boris Johnson viewed his patronage powers through the prism of his own political self-advancement, as he worked to shore up his position in the Conservative Party with loyalist picks. Likewise, Liz Truss’ ministerial ranks were stuffed with sycophants, whose qualifications began and ended with their ideological conviction. Rishi Sunak’s appointments were dictated by his dire party-management imperatives; fearful of irking putative rebels, his factions were flattered and antagonists appeased. Sunak’s “government of all the talents” reflected the Conservative Party’s concerns, not the country’s. Eventually, David Cameron was ennobled and shunted into the Foreign Office. But his appointment in November 2023 hardly spoke to a prime minister at ease with their power.
Unlike his immediate three predecessors, Starmer needed neither to will his power into existence nor apportion jobs among the possibly spiteful. As such, before unforeseen events and unforced errors stymied Labour’s progress, his appointments in July told a pretty complete story about the government Starmer planned to lead.
The prime minister’s ministerial picks — reflecting experience and expertise — were intended to serve as an immediate, emphatic signal of a rebooted Britain. This was at its most telling with the PM’s more imaginative appointments, including human rights barrister Richard Hermer as attorney general, former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance (of Covid press conference fame) as science minister and Prison Reform Trust chair James Timpson as justice minister. The appointment of Timpson, a businessman who has long made prisoner rehabilitation part of his company’s mission, stood out as especially significant.
Alongside Starmer’s newbies, in rushed a constellation of experienced ex-ministers, including Lord Coaker (Ministry of Defence), Stephen Timms (DWP), Dame Diana Johnson (Home Office), Dame Angela Eagle (Home Office), Maria Eagle (Ministry of Defence) and Sir Chris Bryant (DCMS).
Elsewhere, Heidi Alexander, an ex-parliamentarian who sought re-election after a stay away from Westminster, entered government immediately as justice minister. That mirrored the appointment of Douglas Alexander, a mainstay cabinet minister during the New Labour years, as trade minister. He was re-elected in July after almost a decade in the wilderness.
King Keir holds court
On 17 July, King Charles III delivered the ceremonial Speech from the Throne as part of the first state opening of parliament under a Labour government in 15 years. It was a moment rich in political symbolism and policy substance. “My government’s legislative programme will be mission-led and based upon the principles of security, fairness and opportunity for all”, His Majesty, fitted in ceremonial robes and adorned with the imperial state crown, began.
The king went on to deliver, deadpan, bullet-point by bullet-point, Starmer’s forthcoming legislative agenda. But the pomp and ceremony belied an intensely political affair. Speaking in the commons after Charles III’s address, Starmer argued that “The fight for trust is the battle that defines our political era”.
The prime minister went on: “The era of politics as performance and self-interest above service is over. … The challenges we face require determined, patient work and serious solutions, rather than the temptation of the easy answer.
“The snake oil charm of populism may sound seductive, but it drives us into the dead end of further division and greater disappointment.”
The deliberate, politically charged passage directed observers to reevaluate Starmer’s full speech and the surrounding legislative raft. That the prime minister felt compelled to address “snake oil” populism directly was instructive. Consciously imbuing his government with a purposefulness that its predecessors sorely lacked, Starmer planned to utterly undermine the populist refrain that promises no longer matter.
Part of the answer to the populism, Starmer supposed, was to style his government as insurgent and ensure relentless policy delivery. Since 2010, Speeches from the Throne have on average contained 20 bills. Labour’s had 40.
The king’s speech suggested Starmer understood the pressing precariousness of his premiership — and the threat posed by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. But the set piece also proved the backdrop to a more immediate party-political concern: a Labour rebellion over the two-child limit.
The Scottish National Party (SNP), reduced to nine MPs in July, announced plans to table an amendment to the king’s speech, calling on ministers to scrap the two-child benefit cap. Labour MP Kim Johnson did the same — with the support of John McDonnell, Starmer’s shadow cabinet colleague and Labour finance chief from 2016 to 2020.
But it wasn’t just Starmer’s usual detractors urging him to scrap the cap. Apparent allies, including Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and former prime minister Gordon Brown, both stated their opposition to the policy, introduced by the Conservative government in 2017.
And so arrived a concession from Starmer. The government planned to take the sting out of the rebellion by setting up a government “task force” — co-chaired by education secretary Bridget Phillipson and work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall — with a remit to examine the reasons for child poverty. But still the rebellion raged.
Having witnessed the lows of Rishi Sunak’s administration, the new PM was expectedly averse to the optics of a Labour government being pushed and dragged around by its own MPs. The Conservative Party would have seized on any apparent capitulation to Labour’s left flank to vindicate its fears — expressed during the election campaign — that Corbynista MPs would hold significant sway under Starmer.
Moreover, scrapping the cap would have forced Starmer to win an argument, against the grain of public opinion, over welfare spending — and find a further £3.4 billion a year worth of funding. So while many saw the episode as a test of the government’s progressive credentials, Starmer interpreted the rebellion as a test of his commitment to fiscal discipline, on one hand, and of his ability to control his party on the other.
On 23 July, Starmer saw off the first organised rebellion of its term in emphatic fashion, going as far as to suspend the seven Labour rebels who voted in favour of the SNP amendment. At the time, commentators cautioned that this combative display of authority set an unsustainable standard for future commons fracas. But Starmer never let the Labour left settle as opposition leader — in government, it would be business as usual.
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‘Black holes’ and revelations
The regal grandeur and rebellious possibility of the king’s speech prompted significant commentary. But it was the address delivered by Rachel Reeves on the Monday of Labour’s first full week in power, that really set the tone for Starmer’s government.
Addressing an audience of journalists and Treasury officials, the new chancellor extolled Labour’s plan to spur economic growth. She labelled the newly scrapped de facto ban on onshore wind licences “absurd” and confirmed Labour would reinstate national housing targets. But in a more pertinent passage confronting Labour’s inheritance, Reeves rubbished a “legacy of fourteen years of chaos and economic irresponsibility”.
And in the speech’s Q&A portion, she described Labour’s lot as the “worst set of circumstances since the Second World War”. Reeves added forebodingly: “What I have seen in the past 72 hours has only confirmed that”.
Slowly the books were being prised open — and the chancellor’s speech set cogs in motion. Starmer, in a subsequent article for the Guardian newspaper on 12 July, wrote of the “mountain of mess [left] for this government to clean up”. In a speech that same day, justice secretary Shabana Mahmood rubbished the last Conservative administration as a roguish regime that “left the country threatened with a total breakdown of law and order”.
Outlining plans to release thousands of prisoners to ease overcrowding, Mahmood added: “Those responsible — Sunak and his gang in No 10 — should go down in history as the guilty men. The guilty men who put their political careers ahead of the safety and security of our country. It was the most disgraceful dereliction of duty I have ever known.”
Around this juncture, new health secretary Wes Streeting commissioned Lord Darzi to conduct an immediate independent investigation of the NHS; and, in a widely covered commons statement, home secretary Yvette Cooper revealed the now-scrapped Rwanda deportation scheme cost the taxpayer £700 million in total — far more than her predecessors had stated.
Ministers were working relentlessly, at a moment of peak Conservative fragility, to further toxify the Tory brand and entrench popular memory of the last government as profligate, dishonest and incompetent. But it soon registered that Starmer’s condemnation of Sunak’s earth-salting was not merely politically viable — but wholly necessary in forging popular consent for the actions he planned to take over the coming months. That was the plan, at least.
On 29 July, the government’s crescendoing commentary culminated with a commons statement from Reeves identifying a £22 billion “black hole” in the public finances. That figure, the result of a Whitehall-wide audit of shortfalls in funding plans, followed weeks in which ministers scoured their departments for concealed schemes and unrevealed liabilities.
Addressing parliament on the eve of summer recess, the shadow chancellor cast her Conservative opponents, deprived of office mere weeks ago, as reckless cowboys who played political games with the nation’s financial stability — ideologues who plundered Treasury coffers in the short-term, while scheduling austere restraint in future years to swindle the government’s fiscal rules. Weaving Rishi Sunak’s subterfuge into a broader tale of Tory mismanagement, Reeves argued that his party had in effect cooked the books at a time of burgeoning disillusion with the political system.
“After the chaos of ‘partygate’ when they knew trust in politics was at an all-time low, they gave false hope to Britain”, Reeves blasted in her statement’s most affecting passage. “When people were already being hurt by their cost of living crisis, they promised solutions that they knew could never be paid for.”
Reeves’ speech — still the most significant delivered by any Labour figure this year — was peppered with arresting slogans, designed to emphasise her fury and delivered with escalating severity. “If we can’t afford it, we can’t do it”, she declared time and time again. The chancellor’s vitriol was tangible — and her fiscal fixes correspondingly grave.
Reeves informed MPs that the government would now means test the winter fuel payment. That, the chancellor said, would save the country around £1.5 billion. The declaration came alongside a raft of other cost-saving measures; Rishi Sunak watched on as legacy project after legacy project was sacrificed on the alter of fiscal prudence.
Sunak’s very visible despair aside, the winter fuel payment cut would have lasting political consequences. It soon emerged as no less than the most significant decision Labour took in its first few months in office.
Starmer vs the rioters
When parliament rose for summer recess, the government remained firmly in control of the political narrative. Would-be controversial policies on the economy and criminal justice were exhibited entirely on Labour’s terms, guarding against outside objections. The Conservative Party was still ruminating and recriminating. Starmer had stored up trouble for later; but for the moment, the government’s energy and confidence was palpable in everything it did.
This is what commentators mean when they refer to the summer riots as Starmer’s first “test” as prime minister. And what a first test.
The background to the unrest is well rehearsed: the disorder was fuelled by an online misinformation campaign after an attack in Southport on 29 July left three young girls dead and several injured. Amid an initial dearth of information regarding the identity of the attacker, unfounded claims rushed the vacuum; far-right types falsely concluded that the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker to stoke anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment. In other words: a cocktail of malicious conspiracy theories, stirred by social media algorithms, marched goons onto Britain’s streets — and to disastrous effect.
Faced with a fast-changing situation, Starmer’s riots strategy — in terms of both policy and rhetoric — was remarkably consistent. Ministers struck back quickly with a series of practical measures designed to clampdown on wanton rioting. As the unrest escalated, Yvette Cooper unveiled plans to provide mosques with emergency security; a “wider deployment of facial recognition” surveillance featured among a raft of other measures, such as the provision of a “standing army” of specialist officers.
Channelling his prosecutor past, the prime minister addressed the nation on several occasions. He condemned “far-right thuggery” and issued a powerful warning: “I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder, either directly or those whipping up this disorder online”.
The approach bore stark contrast to the varying messages articulated by Nigel Farage, whose remarks both before and after the outbreak of rioting came under considerable scrutiny. In a combative interview with LBC Radio on 7 August, Farage excused his initial response to the stabbing as having been influenced by misinformation. The Reform leader had simply been misled by “stories online from some very prominent folks with big followings” — prominent folks, Farage clarified, like internet misogynist Andrew Tate.
In time, the riots abated. But the prime minister’s vow to clamp down on their perpetrators placed him on a collision course with those who disseminate, host and tolerate misinformation — both at home and abroad.
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The tyranny of low expectations
On the eve of parliament’s return from recess, Keir Starmer reiterated the government’s gloomy rhetoric in his first keynote speech as prime minister.
In an audacious act of expectation management, Starmer’s Things can only get worse address (27 August, No 10 rose garden) warned of a “rot set deep in the heart of the foundations of our country under previous Tory governments”.
The dreary speech dispelled any doubts that Labour would be raising taxes in the upcoming autumn budget, now pencilled in for 30 October. Starmer promised “short-term pain” — and further “tough” decisions in the vein of his “tough” decision to cut the winter fuel allowance.
The result was that the sunlit uplands foreseen by the Conservative Party’s seismic defeat in July were cast in thicker fog. During the general election, the prime minister had hardly campaigned in poetry — but his doom-laden rhetoric in government effected a rude awakening, for Labour MPs and the public alike.
The bottom line was this: Starmer had convinced Britons of his dire challenge, and even of the Conservatives’ culpability — but not yet of his ability to make things better.
This was the backdrop to the second rebellion of Starmer’s premiership over the government’s winter fuel payments plan. Speculation ahead of the vote was feverish. The Guardian reported that up to 50 Labour MPs could rebel, joining opposition parliamentarians from the Conservative Party, Liberal Democrats and SNP in resisting ministers’ plans. Unlike the debate on the two-child benefit cap, the views of the opposition parties — and Labour rebels — were aligned.
On 10 September, the government defeated the Conservative Party opposition day motion by 348 votes to 228 (a majority of 120). Only Labour representatives voted “No”; parliamentarians from all other parties — Conservative, Lib Dem, SNP, etc — marched into the “Aye” lobby following a tense 90-minute debate.
In the end, 52 Labour MPs were recorded as absent. That does not mean all 52 consciously abstained — some will have been “paired” with opposition MPs unable to make the vote. But among that number featured several of the government’s most prominent critics, such as Diane Abbott and Andy McDonald. Only one Labour rebel voted for the Conservative motion: veteran left-winger Jon Trickett. “I will sleep well tonight knowing that I voted to defend my constituents”, he said in a statement.
Of the seven independents suspended by Starmer following the two-child benefit cap rebellion, John McDonnell, Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Zarah Sultana and Apsana Begum all voted against the government — surely extending, perhaps permanently, their political exile.
Labour malfunctions
By late September, it was no secret that the Labour Party’s mood had worsened — and nor was there any disguising why. Parliamentary rebellions, accusations of cronyism, infighting at the heart of power, petty scandals, vituperative briefings and dismal polling dips are political ailments generally reserved for administrations in their death throes. Westminster has witnessed plenty of those in recent years. The symptoms diagnosed themselves.
The government’s decision to cut winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners — its first big consequential move — had exacerbated tensions at Westminster and gone down disastrously beyond. Meanwhile, the rolling stories of Labour “freebies” — from frocks and glasses to exclusive corporate boxes — skirted the edges of Starmer’s pledge to lead a “government of service”. The prime minister had promised to lead a government of incontrovertible, unimpeachable integrity. Donor Lord Alli’s largesse, in Downing Street and interest declaration forms, provided ample ammunition for frothing Conservative politicians.
That Labour wasn’t hyper-attuned to the “freebies” controversy suggests processes failed in No 10. The row ended after the publication of a new set of principles for political donations and the repayment of more than £6,000 in gifts by Starmer himself. On 6 October, science secretary Peter Kyle reflected that the public’s expectations are “so much higher” for Labour than for the Tories; he sounded surprised, even exasperated. After years castigating Conservative cronyism and vowing to be better, he should not have been.
As the freebies row rumbled on, Downing Street frictions burst into the public domain after BBC News reported that Sue Gray — the prime minister’s ever-conspicuous chief of staff — had been given a salary in government of £170,000. The story led with the revelation that this was £3,000 more than her boss, the most powerful politician in the land.
Secondary reactions to the scoop focussed on why Gray — Starmer’s political minesweeper — did not spot the potential problem posed by her salary. Gray will have been aware of her reputation, accrued rightly or wrongly in recent years, as a result of her starring “Partygate” role and controversial flight from officialdom. Gray was extremely exposed to revelations like this: the furore was foreseeable and avoidable. Why then, wasn’t the furore foreseen and avoided by the No 10 chief of staff — the very person whose job it is to foresee and avoid furores?
This said, the BBC report didn’t just prove incendiary because of what it said about Gray’s political nous, or lack thereof. Far more sensational was how the story portrayed the culture and mood in Labour’s Downing Street operation.
The briefings at Gray’s expense, designed to lend credence to her political caricature, reflected genuine resentment in No 10 — resentment about Gray’s pay and influence, on the part of those who felt underpaid and denied influence. And the anonymous rants — borne of dispossession, spite or genuine righteousness — were coruscating.
“It was suggested that [Gray] might want to go for a few thousand pounds less than the prime minister to avoid this very story”, one source told BBC News acidly. “She declined.”
“Sue Gray is the only pensioner better off under Labour”, one official told the Sunday Times.
But the defining quote of Labour’s Gray debacle was as follows: “If you ever see any evidence of our preparations for government, please let me know.” That came via an anonymous Labour adviser.
Briefing of this intensity reflected not just anger within No 10 — but a broader recognition that Labour was struggling. When a government is governing well, the fraught and/or adversarial relationships of faceless advisers will typically remain shrouded in secrecy. In a standard “honeymoon” period, it’s unlikely resentful advisers would get much of a hearing. Their dispossessed wails just wouldn’t fit the prevailing narrative. But the narrative shifted against Labour after parliament’s return from summer recess.
After all, what was most striking about Starmer’s early woes was just how well-developed they were: grudges forged in opposition were now playing out across government. Media stories depicted a regime riven with dysfunction and struggling to seize the moment.
Already enervated by grim messaging, Labour’s post-election jubilation diminished further in September. The party’s plans for power, it had become clear, were not nearly as fully formulated as senior spokespeople insisted during the campaign.
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Starmer rediscovers the sunlit uplands
This was the mood pervading Labour circles as the party rolled into Liverpool in late September. The party’s annual conference, its first in power for fifteen years, was now cast as a means by which Starmer could reimagine and revitalise his government’s image.
The change in tone was stark and revealing. Touring the makeshift broadcast studios on her pre-speech morning media round, Rachel Reeves insisted she’d “never been so optimistic” about Britain’s future. Smiles fixed to faces, Labour was embracing hope and change — the feelings a new government should almost necessarily inspire — after months of manky miserabilism.
But the bubbling discontent burst forth on the final day of Labour conference, as members and delegates voted to condemn the government’s decision to cut the winter fuel payment. The motion, which called on ministers to “reverse” the removal of the allowance from all but the poorest pensioners, was passed by hand-vote in the conference hall, as per party rules.
Even if the non-binding vote was effectively futile, the Labour leadership’s defeat made for a downbeat finale to the party’s first mass gathering since the election. It also suggested that Starmer’s implicit plea in his keynote conference address, for members to shun the politics of “easy answers”, went unheeded.
The vote served as a stark reminder that the winter fuel controversy remained Labour’s defining predicament — freebies furore notwithstanding.
Fade from Gray
In October, Sue Gray was ditched as the No 10 chief of staff as Starmer ruthlessly reordered his No 10 inner circle. Morgan McSweeney, the political strategist who masterminded Labour’s election victory, replaced her.
Gray would take on an advisory role as Starmer’s nations and regions tsar, Downing Street announced on an otherwise sleepy October Sunday. No one really knew what this position entailed — other than it represented a bruising demotion for the former civil servant and “Partygate” sleuth. Some suggested “nations and regions” was really Westminster’s equivalent of Siberia: i.e. Soviet-esque political exile.
Gray never did take up the role of course. (She has since won a peerage as compensation for her multi-phase, discomfiting defenestration).
One way of viewing Gray’s resignation was as the climax of a venomous power struggle between the PM’s onetime closest confidant and her successor, McSweeney. Reports of tension between the two had been a recurring theme since Labour’s return to government.
Another non-mutually exclusive view holds that Gray’s demise reflected an admission that Labour made political missteps upon entering government — and that McSweeney, the party’s savviest strategic mind, was the individual best placed to right them. The truth in that sense was simple. Gray failed Starmer on her own terms and in her primary task of preparing Labour for office.
Gray’s departure was nonetheless announced far sooner than Westminster collectively expected. It is easy to lampoon a government as maladroit and dithering when it comes to the deposition of problem individuals. (By which I mean figures who become net drags on the party operation). But many still expected Gray to survive until Christmas — paving the way for a more totemic New Year reset.
It soon became clear that Gray’s deposition was the first step in a wider reconfiguration. James Lyons, a former journalist and communications adviser to TikTok, was drafted in as director of strategic communications; he arrived alongside Jill Cuthbertson and Ninjeri Pandit as co-deputy chief of staff and principal private secretary respectively.
In the weeks and months ahead, Starmer further bolstered his government by marching a veritable Blairite battalion back to the halls of power. The respective returns of New Labour powerhouses Jonathan Powell (national security adviser), Liz Lloyd (director of policy delivery and innovation), Alan Milburn (non-executive director, DHSC), Sir Michael Barber (adviser on effective delivery) and now Lord Mandelson (British ambassador to the United States) speak not to the resurrection of an old political consensus, but a government again prioritising expertise and experience — in lieu, it would seem, of any extensive preparatory work.
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Noise
It was often suggested that the Conservative leadership contest would benefit Starmer in his first months as prime minister. The long-anticipated internal bout looked set to reopen old wounds and distract the party from its government-facing responsibilities.
But the incentive structure of the months-long leadership race saw Conservative politicians ratchet toward increasingly hysterical criticisms of Starmer and his administration. The existence of Reform in parliament, meanwhile, served to sharpen Tory partisanship. The prospective Tory chiefs, at every turn, needed to implicitly rebuke Nigel Farage’s claim that he is the “real leader of the opposition”.
With the Conservative candidates competing for finite media coverage (among themselves and Farage), every government move was subjected to the churn of noisy controversy Starmer pledged to end in opposition.
Westminster “noise” is something Starmer, not an innately political beast, is understood to deplore. But it’s also something his own missteps and blunders contributed to across September and October. Day-to-day political management aside, Starmer’s inability to seize the agenda was inextricably tied to the timing of his much-trailed, heavily anticipated autumn budget.
The countdown to Labour’s first fiscal event in almost fifteen years was protracted and bitter. Rachel Reeves’ pronouncement on the existence of a £22 billion fiscal “black hole” in July succeeded in fomenting the requisite feverish interest. But as the weeks passed and Labour doubled down on its grim economic narrative, the energy was harnessed increasingly by the Conservative Party at Starmer’s expense.
The result, as Blair-era adviser John McTernan suggested, was the creation of a political “vacuum” at the heart of government. “It feels like it has been a terrible political miscalculation”, he told Times Radio in late October, “to leave the budget for so long.”
He said: “You define yourself in your budget because that sets what you are going to do to public services, what you are going to do to tax, what you are going to do to spending.”
What was particularly punishing, McTernan added, had been “to leave the defining element of what you are doing in public services to be taking the winter fuel allowance from 10 million pensioners — that is the thing that stands there as the definition.”
From September-October, Starmer was not so much blown off course by media “noise” and Conservative criticisms — as much as his government had yet to resolve on a course. The result was a form of political phoney war, in which every government announcement was overshadowed by the inexorable drip-drip of budget reports and ministerial non-denials. The winter fuel cut, meanwhile, hung albatross-like around Starmer’s neck.
The sense of drift this inspired was the antithesis of the insurgent government Labour planned to pursue.
There were reasons for the budget’s late timing, that said. The official line, proclaimed by defence secretary John Healey in response to McTernan’s remarks, was that Liz Truss’ failed premiership showed “what happens when you try and rush a budget”. This was also the first time Labour had reckoned with the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which needs 10 weeks to produce its forecasts. The consecutive summer and conference recesses further narrowed Labour’s room for manoeuvre.
The good news for Starmer was that this politically unsustainable situation could not last forever. And after months of meandering messaging, Rachel Reeves set out Labour’s fiscal stall on 30 October.
Labour, finally, governs
Effective budgets propound a clear narrative against a complex economic-political backdrop. Delivering the first Labour budget in fourteen years, Reeves — the first female chancellor — declared her intention to “invest, invest, invest”.
Reeves unveiled plans to increase government spending by around 2 per cent of GDP a year, on average, over the next five years. She announced compensation payments to victims of the Post Office Horizon IT and infected blood scandals; an increase to the minimum wage by 6.7 per cent; and a £22.6 billion increase in the day-to-day health budget — plus a £3.1 billion increase in its capital budget over the next two years.
On these terms, the chancellor delivered on Labour’s pledge not to return Britain to austerity. But the decision to invest in public services while balancing the books meant that, in cash terms, Labour’s package was the biggest tax-raising budget in history. The £40 billion headline figure beat Norman Lamont’s post-Black Wednesday budget in 1993.
This £40 billion figure was comprised, for the most part, of the government’s plan to increase national insurance contributions for employers from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent from April 2025. The government also lowered the secondary threshold at which NI is paid from £9,100 to £5,000. In total, this will raise £25 billion a year, Reeves told MPs.
During the election campaign, Labour’s quintessential pitch was that Britain is broken and requires fundamental, far-reaching change. But Starmer’s “change” slogan was underpinned by two intertwining vows: that Labour would shun frivolousness when it came to both government spending and tax.
Therein lay the risk that Starmerism would begin to eat itself in government. As Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester, mused in September: “Raising taxes is unpopular. But so is failing to deliver improvements to a collapsing public realm.”
In a similar vein, Andrew Marr argued in the New Statesman: “There is no point in electing a different government if it doesn’t try to take a different course”.
At the budget, Labour recognised “change” as the centre of its mandate. That was the determinative choice informing Labour’s budget choices. In one fell swoop therefore, Reeves quashed the eccentric post-Brexit fantasy of “Singapore-upon-Thames”. The state, the chancellor in effect insisted, can arrest Britain’s doom spiral of decline.
Moreover, the budget’s pointed politics effectively compelled the next Conservative leader to defend those from whom Labour extracted revenue in the name of change, specifically: private schools, non-domiciled taxpayers, private jet users and capital gains taxpayers.
The more Conservative MPs hiss and wail, Labour hopes, the more Toryism begins to extract itself from the mainstream of public opinion that so demanded change in July.
Reeves, in her first fiscal statement as chancellor, set a new political-economic baseline. Ergo, if the Conservative Party wants to do anything different (as Kemi Badenoch insists it does), it must explain what spending will be cut to reverse Labour’s tax rises. After years spent on the wrong side of fiscal “traps”, Starmer planned to corner the next Conservative leader before they were even elected.
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Kemi Badenoch saves the day
The best thing to happen to Keir Starmer in his six months as prime minister was the election of Kemi Badenoch as Conservative leader three days after the budget on 2 November.
An opposition chief’s performance at PMQs, it is often contended, cannot in and of itself dictate the political weather. But with Westminster forced to pay attention to six full questions (and probably fewer answers), it is a rare opportunity for a party leader to propound some chosen message. All this means that when Badenoch takes to the despatch box on a Wednesday afternoon, Westminster isn’t expecting the kind of confident spontaneity that good opposition leaders eventually master. But the Conservative Party, at the very least, expects Badenoch to exploit and manipulate Keir Starmer’s political vulnerabilities — of which he has many.
Somehow though, Badenoch’s performances are both over-rehearsed and stumbling. Her scattergun strategy, bereft of any cohesive narrative, supplies Starmer with ample escape routes — which he nimbly exploits. There remains no organising principle dictating the fights Badenoch picks, or hints as to the political direction she plans to lead her party.
The Tory chief, instead, confronts Starmer with a list of familiar arguments — arguments that Starmer has in effect won. There is something strikingly Sunak-esque about Badenoch’s style: the long windup, the edgy demeanour, the flat delivery and resultantly unimpressed backbenchers.
Across several sessions, Badenoch has yet to demonstrate political and intellectual leadership by saying something new, either about Starmer or her mode of conservatism. This, certainly, is no “new Toryism”. And an ideologically static Conservative Party benefits all of its opponents: especially Starmer.
In December, Badenoch’s decision to embrace a battle about migration, the week after the Office for National Statistics significantly revised up its estimate of migration in the year to 2023 from 740,000 to 906,000, was at best ill-advised — and at worst politically suicidal. It said something about our capricious politics (and Labour’s long-term savvy) that the Conservative leader’s decision to ask a progressive PM about immigration was utterly fatal. But it was.
I have referred repeatedly in recent times to the defining question a worthy Conservative strategy must answer, that is: how does the Badenoch, in just five years, convince the public that a party that serially broke promises in power is now suddenly telling the truth in opposition?
I’m still not sure what the answer is. But Badenoch’s approach certainly isn’t.
The cabinet’s conscience splits
In his first six months as prime minister, Starmer has also been forced to reckon with the most profound cabinet split since the Brexit years.
The prime minister was plain from the outset that the vote on Kim Leadbeatter’s assisted dying bill, as precedent dictates, would be “free” — allowing Labour MPs and cabinet ministers the ability to act according to their conscience. And so, despite his well-known views on the contentious issue, the prime minister remained schtum as the debate crescendoed.
The same cannot be said for some of his fellow cabinet ministers.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, was accused of contravening the government’s official neutrality with his relentless commentary. Weeks before the historic commons debate on 29 November, the health secretary told Times Radio that legalising assisted dying would have “resource implications” for the NHS that would “come at the expense of other choices.”
“To govern is to choose”, he said, “If parliament decides to go ahead with assisted dying, it is making a choice that this is an area to prioritise for investment. And we’d have to work through those implications.”
Shabana Mahmood was similarly critical. “As a Muslim, I have an unshakeable belief in the sanctity and the value of human life”, she told The Times. “I don’t think that death is a service that the state should be offering.”
The comments came despite the advice distributed by Simon Case, the then-cabinet secretary, who told ministers in early October that the government’s neutrality on assisted dying meant they “should exercise discretion and should not take part in the public debate”.
In the end, eight cabinet ministers voted against the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill at second reading, including Angela Rayner, Mahmood, Streeting and David Lammy. Fourteen voted in favour, including Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper and Pat McFadden.
Heidi Alexander, the new transport secretary, was another to vote for the bill. She had been appointed just hours before, following Louise Haigh’s sudden resignation.
Haigh, a member of the cabinet’s unofficial “soft left” grouping, stepped down after it emerged she had pleaded guilty to a fraud offence a decade ago, a conviction she reportedly told Starmer about in 2020 when he appointed her to the shadow cabinet. In a letter to the prime minister, Haigh said she remained “totally committed to our political project” but had decided “it will be best served by my supporting you from outside government”.
At PMQs the following Wednesday, Kemi Badenoch sought to capitalise on Starmer’s first cabinet casualty. “The country needs conviction politicians not politicians with convictions”, the Conservative leader blasted.
In response, Starmer recalled that both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak had “convictions” for breaching the Covid rules. It was also noted how Haigh’s swift exit contrasted with the dither and delay that characterised cabinet departures under Starmer’s predecessors.
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A Change of Plans?
A “reset” is almost necessarily an act of political despair — and often of desperation. They admit, tacitly or explicitly, that the path hitherto trodden has failed in some significant respect. Lessons learnt and experience acquired, a new trajectory is charted to whatever political success now represents.
Resets are also risky. Opponents lampoon the government for accepting criticisms of it that were once vociferously denied. They can make the government seem uncertain and/or bereft of consistent purpose. Nor is there any guarantee that the new direction appeals more widely than the old.
Starmer is a seasoned practitioner of the art of the political rebrand. Since announcing his bid for the Labour leadership in 2020, he has debuted ten “pledges”, five “missions”, six “first steps”, two (more implicit) “priorities” and now a series of “milestones” or “targets”.
In his “Plan for Change” address, Starmer sought to spell out the defining cause of his government in evermore explicit language. “The purpose of this government is to make our public services and economy work for working people”, Starmer stressed, setting out targets on living standards, housebuilding, clean power, policing, NHS waiting lists, and school-readiness.
Specific pledges, Starmer resolved, are the only way to convince an understandably sceptical electorate of progress. But the challenges Starmer invites with his vows are threefold. He must first ensure his “terms” are the people’s “terms”; in other words, voters must view Labour’s targets as reflecting their concerns, aspirations and anxieties. There is no point hitting your pledges if voters reject them as irrelevant. Secondly, Starmer must, in time, be able to cite his successes in ways that chime with the lived experience of the electorate. That means delivery.
Finally, in this age of noisy politics, winning the argument on pledge success will be far from simple. By the time of the next election, the battle for political supremacy could reflect emergent frictions between competing realities. Starmer doesn’t just need his pledges to cut through — but his advances too.
Part of the plan?
The thinking behind Starmer’s reset wasn’t solely electoral, however. The targets were deliberately designed to connect up and corral disparate elements of the government machine. Writing in The Sun on Sunday newspaper ahead of his speech, the prime minister spoke of his plan to slash through departmental silos, as he compared “focusing the machinery of government” to “turning an oil tanker”.
It was Starmer’s reflections on the civil service that prompted the greatest commentary following his “Plan for Change” speech. In his address, paraphrasing one of US president-elect Donald Trump’s more potent promises, the prime minister declared: “I don’t think there’s a swamp to be drained here. But I do think too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.”
He went on: “Make no mistake — this plan will land on desks across Whitehall with the heavy thud of a gauntlet being thrown down. A demand, given the urgency of our time. For a state that is more dynamic, more decisive, more innovative.”
The following week, Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden invoked the names of Spotify, Airbnb and WhatsApp as examples of workplace cultures that the civil service must replicate. New “crack teams” of “problem solvers”, McFadden announced, will be sent to improve public services, imbed a “start-up mindset” and help the government achieve its goals.
He even channelled Dominic Cummings, the mercurial former chief adviser to Boris Johnson, suggesting that appealing to “weirdos and misfits” is part of the government’s strategy.
The backlash to the comments, which included pointed criticism by public sector unions, prompted Starmer to write a letter to civil servants a few days after his speech to say they were “admired across the world”. The saga, suffice it to say, further distracted from the substance of Starmer’s new milestones.
Then, on 17 December, work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall told the House of Commons that paying up to £10.5 billion in compensation to the Waspi women would not be a “fair or proportionate use” of taxpayers’ money. The last government, she added, had not left “a single penny” aside for such measures.
In opposition, Labour had supported the Waspi (women against state pension inequality) cause. Starmer once referred to the treatment of those 1950s-born individuals hit by major changes to the state pension age as a “huge injustice”. But while Kendall accepted there had been “maladministration” in the failure to properly notify women of the changes, she rejected the parliamentary ombudsman’s recommendation of compensation.
Labour MPs reacted scathingly to the announcement. Speaking in the commons after Kendall’s statement, Labour MP Brian Leishman said he was “appalled” by the decision. “WASPI women certainly do not need words of disappointment and hollow statements. What they need is justice”, he insisted.
Usually supportive MPs asked the government for further “reassurances”; Kendall provided few. At least two MPs (Gareth Snell and Melanie Onn) called on the government to “reconsider” the decision in the future, when the fiscal position improves; Kendall refused. Others asked for a narrower compensation scheme than that recommended by the ombudsmen; Kendall pointed to logistical challenges.
In recent days, the backlash has flowed out of parliament and into WhatsApp groups, where MPs have expressed their misgivings in still courser language. According to messages seen by The Times, Olivia Blake, the MP for Sheffield Hallam, wrote: “I fear the political cost of this will outweigh the financial cost of compensation significantly.”
Sarah Champion, a select committee chair, asked: “Why was it decided to announce this before recess, when journalist[s] are bored and everyone is spending time with their grannie — have we not learnt from WFP [winter fuel payment] announcement?”
The criticism of several “newbie” MPs from the 2024 intake, many on slim majorities, could be interpreted as a sign Starmer’s authority — which looked unimpeachable six months ago — is weakening. If a commons vote does come to pass, potentially via the mechanism of an opposition day debate, a further MP rebellion looks likely.
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The unsettled dawn of Keir Starmer
After four years in opposition, a tedious prelude, Starmer’s reward has been the worthy work of government.
But his administration is troubled. In July, Labour hit the ground running with a packed king’s speech and its widely praised response to the summer riots — then, after months of meandering, it hit the ground.
In hindsight, Starmer did not move quickly enough to solidify his precarious electoral foundations with popular policy wins — or even hopeful rhetoric. He talked up his challenge instead, sensing an opportunity to toxify the Tory brand at an opportune moment: during the party’s post-election recrimination stage. It was a political indulgence Starmer finally tempered in late September — just weeks after doubling down. The general election result, which reduced the Conservatives to 121 MPs, suggested Starmer was preaching to a converted nation at a time when their attention was seized — and doing so in increasingly grim tones.
Of course, the gloomy rhetoric was also designed to set the scene, months in advance, for unforeseen budget tax rises. The revelations borne of the government “books” — true though they may have been — became a device, a performance for gaming expectations.
The decision to means test the winter fuel allowance generated intense backlash, and gave political form to the government’s “tough decisions” with little sense of any hopeful trade-off. The government’s positive appeal — measures that reflected ambition beyond the “black hole” — arrived months later in the autumn budget. But a narrative rot had already set in. Meanwhile, the self-inflicted blunders over donors and freebies robbed Starmer of some of the moral high ground — just as he sought to further ravage the Conservatives’ reputation.
The relentless bid to replicate George Osborne’s election-winning criticism of his predecessor government (from 2010-2015) became a burden — and missed the politics of the moment. It was a tactic pursued in lieu of a strategy — one that did not fit Labour’s reputation or political image. The conclusion, which Starmer’s first six months inexorably point to, is as follows: Labour was not ready for the demands of government.
Indeed, the party’s woes in government have flowed, in significant part, from two pre-election missteps on tax on personnel. The former — whereby Labour ruled out changes to income tax, VAT or national insurance — saw Starmer search for more innovative, controversial and possibly impractical revenue-raising measures.
Sue Gray, manifestly, was not the right person to lead Labour from opposition into office. The prime minister’s new No 10 operation, aided by the autumn budget, has been able to establish a sharper political definition, sense of identity and purpose. The government no longer looks far adrift. But the struggle to resonate endures.
These points notwithstanding, every so often — and sometimes all at once — the government signals its ambition. In the wake of Starmer’s “Plan for Change” speech, Labour ended the year with a policy blitz.
In recent weeks, Starmer has announced plans to fast-track planning decisions on at least 150 “major economic infrastructure” projects before the end of the parliament; a new co-operation deal with Germany to tackle people smuggling gangs; £10.1 billion to fund the building of four new prisons; a planning rules overhaul to deliver 1.5 million homes over the parliament; a new “Clean Power 2030 Action Plan”, that ministers say will unlock £40 billion of investment a year; and proposals for a devolution “revolution”, with mayors promised new powers over transport, housing, taxation and more.
This is a busy government that trusts its values and knows what it wants to do. But as has been a pattern over six months, political noise — enlivened by the performative elements of Starmer’s “reset” — consumed the agenda (as well as a spy row and dictator’s deposition, in fairness).
And across his six months in office, the stakes that dictate the severity of Starmer’s woes have heightened. The prime minister once benefitted from the transnational tide of anti-incumbency fervour. Now it is he facing down hostile insurgents across the political spectrum — and, it turns out, the world.
The US presidential election on 5 November, which set up Donald Trump’s return to the White House, was the single most important political development this year in global politics. Not only did it see another incumbent sacked, but Trump’s political resurgence has also galvanised Reform and Nigel Farage at a fork in the road for the British right.
One issue for Starmer is that it’s far from obvious who his primary adversary is this parliament. Right now it is Reform UK on the march. As such, Farage’s audacious claim that he is the “real leader of the opposition” deserves serious treatment — thanks in part to Kemi Badenoch’s inept, in-denial interventions.
But back in July, electoral friction on the right was a significant factor behind Starmer’s victory. It is certainly possible that Reform-Tory competition remains unresolved this parliament, leading to similar structural-electoral issues — and results — in 2029. A question hangs over Starmer’s government, therefore: at what point does Farage jump from political abettor to electoral threat?
Perhaps the answer lies with Elon Musk. The tech multi-billionaire’s antipathy for Starmer, forged by the summer riots, could see him funnel cash to Reform UK, aiding its attempts at professionalisation ahead of the 2029 general election.
Six months in then, Starmer has rather more strategic dilemmas than solutions. The prime minister’s ability to make enemies (pensioners, farmers, businesses etc.) has significantly outperformed his ability to make friends. Labour looks lonely, neither shaping nor accommodating public opinion.
It’s a familiar formula for a failed government.
The prime minister knows he will not win the benefit of the doubt from the media, which will style bad spells as interminable crises. But such bad spells could have severe consequences at a time of multi-party competition — when lapses in support provoke disproportionate electoral downturns.
Today, of course, the electorate’s collective eye wanders more promiscuously than ever. And Starmer only needs a few blocks to dislodge from his delicate demographic coalition for his hegemony to come crumbling down.
One conclusion after six months of Starmer is plain: the government’s initial struggles cannot be replicated next year. Before long, the local elections and Labour’s one-year anniversary will arrive as periods of collective reflection on the government’s progress.
In some senses, Labour’s decision to frontload pain early this parliament — in both messaging and policy terms — means things can only get better. Time has saved politicians before. But at this unsettled juncture, Starmer risks assigning ironic meaning to Tony Blair’s famous observation of a new dawn “breaking”.
To succeed in 2025, the prime minister must capitalise on his more confident, savvy No 10 operation — and prove progress can be made by making it.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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Year-in-Review, part one: How the sun finally set on Rishi Sunak and Conservative rule
