As Keir Starmer marks his first anniversary with a crisis and the splits, Fleet Street Fox looks at how his second year ought to be
On the one hand, if a grand old dame that’s 125 years old can still do the splits on national TV then she can’t be in too bad a shape.
But on the other, it’s a hell of way for your political party to mark the one-year anniversary of a landslide election victory. And to double the fun, the two Labour MPs who are setting up a new left wing party appear to have an internal split already, because one reportedly announced it without telling the other. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!
If that wasn’t enough to make you pull a face about the general state of the Labour government, the chancellor was in tears this week, the PM admitted he doesn’t read his speeches before he delivers them, and the parliamentary party just gave them both a £5bn headache that has rendered half their policies unreachable.
Every columnist in the country is picking through the Downing Street bins to assess what sort of a year it’s been, but you already know that, because they’ve told you at least once already. So let’s step back, and take a peer at the second year of Keir.
There will be no new donated suits, no Jeremy Corbyn (except on Question Time), and no money tree.
There will, judging from recent history, be an over-abundance of air miles, Nigel Farage, and lawsuits for the Ministry of Defence which will suck up all the pennies earmarked for tanks, drones and submarines.
We also won’t be short of soundbites about “working people”, despite the fact that children, pensioners, the chronically-ill, and the simply unemployed are full citizens deserving of their government’s consideration and policy-making. There might even be tax rises. In fact, no, that one’s nailed on.
But if I’m any judge, the main thing Labour will be doing next year is training the entire nation to enter the 2027 Forehead Smacking World Championships, a contest we haven’t won since Brexit, and a title more often than not taken home by the idiot powerhouse of America.
What Keir needs to do is reshuffle his Cabinet, and clear out the top layer of Whitehall that instinctively blocks change. He needs to stop jetting around like the head of International Rescue, and get his head under the bonnet of the civil service to winkle out all the wingnuts.
He needs some hope, and more than anything he needs some achievements that sound and look and feel like the radical change he never promised, but everybody wants.
When he u-turns, he needs to finish it, not stop halfway and wriggle about a bit until the party or Reform give him a shove and he gets in a spin. More than anything he needs a bit of salesmanship. So when he raises taxes he previously promised he wouldn’t, do it with a bit of zing. Sell it – 10% more from the 1% who have it all, talk about taxes as a patriotic investment in your own home. Strip every fleeing millionaire of their citizenship, and they’ll soon stop whining.
And for all that he needs a storyteller, because he isn’t one. Unless it’s about tool-making, and as fairytales go that one’s a bit short and he never gets past the first line before everyone’s asleep. Whoever that job belongs to in Downing Street right now, they need to be kicked awake, bawled out, and sent to bed without any supper. And then someone with some zip needs to get the job.
Stop fleecing the sick, old, and disabled. Stop stalling on the Hillsborough Law. Stop delegating stuff that matters most to the country while trying to collect a complete set of summit tote bags. Stop delaying the inevitable, create a National Care Service NOW, and ditch all the reviews.
But above everything else, what Starmer really needs to do is stop letting the Downing Street machine filter everything out so that the bad news doesn’t land on his desk until after it’s become a catastrophe. That’s the main reason he looks like he’s lurching between disasters all the time. Foresight and forewarning are the key to a smooth run, and he is in dire need of both.
He can’t carry on like this, because eventually the nation’s hand, forehead or patience will simply erode. If that happens, Keir 2.0 will involve votes of no confidence, economic turmoil every time a female in his Cabinet looks less than chirpy, and Angela Rayner headlining at Glastonbury. Sometimes, a landslide turns out to be nothing more than sand: but mix it with cement, and you have the foundation for something better.