The Prime Minister has impressed on the world stage and is clearly in his element, says Fleet Street Fox. Only trouble is, he’s never home
After the general election last year, one long-in-the-tooth MP said to me: “Well, that’s the civil servants running the country for the next 18 months.” And sometimes, that’s a relief. The chaotic rollercoaster of Boris Johnson’s government would have been far worse were it not for the half a million officials valiantly trying to bring some sanity and continuity to the whole affair.
But when a country is yearning for change, that refusal to be radical has a huge political cost. Boris blamed it for ballsing up Brexit (although he’d have ballsed it up all by himself). Benefit cuts and cutbacks are continuing like there hasn’t been a change of government. Today, the Hillsborough families are threatening to go on the warpath over officialdom’s attempted ambush of efforts to stop the British state covering up its worst failures. And all of it has happened because the Prime Minister’s attention is elsewhere.
Starmer is doing a great Tony Blair impression, jetting between hotspots, smoothing troubled waters, persuading and wheedling and making himself useful. He’d make a great boss of the United Nations, or Starfleet. The only problem is, that’s not his job.
His job is restoring the national bank balance. Building warships, getting down waiting lists, making sure schools have pens and people have dentists. That’s all hard graft, it takes forever, and it’s much easier and quicker to hold a summit and counteract whatever the racist tangerine just did.
But while he’s doing all that, he has to delegate to 100 or so ministers, and only a fifth of them have previous government experience. Of the rest, a significant number were not even MPs until last July. On the one hand – great, they’re from the real world. But on the other, they’ve no idea where the kettle is or how the printer works. Exactly the same thing happened when Blair swept to power in 1997. Labour’s support today is not as deep, and will not last into a second term unless the change sought is actually delivered.
When you’re new in a job you rely on the other people in the office to tell you what to do. When you’re the minister they still tell you what to do, but in a more diplomatic way. We should check the code of conduct first, minister. That’s a bold suggestion, minister, we should have a review to make sure you get it right. The ministers get their egos stroked, the special advisers are given a thousand things to keep an eye on, and civil servants carry on exactly as they did before. And nobody asks, hey, do we need a strategic defence review just like Blair did, when we all know what we need is drones and ships, PDQ?
Every fresh government is told by the Treasury they should cut the Winter Fuel Allowance. Starmer’s is the first to actually be stupid enough to do it. Every government is told we need a review before that decision, and white papers, and when Starmer’s administration said oh, right, let’s get that started then, they unwittingly bogged their whole enterprise for a year. Despite a large majority, we have weak government. And the words ‘CHANGE AT SOME POINT, MAYBE’ don’t work on an election billboard.
Even the most radical thing the Prime Minister has announced – unleashing his inner Donald Trump today to abolish the NHS England quango – is just another triumph of the Whitehall machine, and a repeat of what Blair once said and did. The Department of Health has squidged the upstart which was sucking its power away. The PM can say the NHS will now be back under political control, but that applies only so far as West Streeting can reach. And he’s still parroting lines fed to every minister by officials since the Thatcher era about the efficiencies of private healthcare, despite the fact they haven’t manifested once in human history.
The truth is that Labour has been out of power so long there are few in Cabinet with the experience to know where or how far they can go. Of a hundred members of government, many were never even MPs until July. They are finding their feet and getting played like a violin by senior civil servants who’ve been at this game for decades, while the boss who put them there is scooting about at 35,000ft, blissfully unaware the stuff he delegated is not being done.
Starmer has found a way around it: with the Hillsborough Law, for example, he insisted that he alone will sign off on it. So nobody really knows how it looks, every official with skin in the game has slipped a few edits in, and it’s sitting on his desk waiting for him to have time to read it, with a pile of other urgent matters. Meanwhile, the dozens of campaign groups who relied on his pledge of a duty of candour at all levels, backed by criminal sanctions for officials who lie – as the police did at Hillsborough, as the DoH did over infected blood, as the MoD does today about nuclear veterans – are banging on every door in Whitehall asking to see it in the fortnight left before it’s supposed to go to Parliament. No-one will let them, and the PM is getting increasingly close to breaking the first rule of politics: don’t piss off Liverpool.
As with the Hillsborough Law, so it is with everything else. Senior mandarins have intervened to slow down and nalls up something which would protect junior officials in every part of the public sector. The security services have tried to snaffle the right to lie with impunity as though that is a reasonable option in a country that’s not Russia, and the few in government with experience have their heads in their hands, while the government is as nimble and proactive as a motorway bollard.
This will all sound incredibly cruel to those working hard and doing their best, and who cannot find space to breathe between the daily binfires of rule. But there’s one person whose job it is to ensure they have their hands held, that they are reinforced, that they are given the authority to act and force through the government’s agenda rather than meekly accept the edits of an institution as fat and self-satisfied as Jabba the Hutt, making them dance until they drop.
That person is the Prime Minister. And however well-intentioned he is, however good his staff, too much of people’s daily struggles are being treated as a political game: who cares about farmers or old people, they don’t vote for us anyway. WASPI women are enraged, the disabled find it as hard as ever to land work, and his backbenchers are dismayed at the own goals that keep wandering into the net by themselves. “We should be better than this,” texted one. Well yes. Mainly because, we’ve done Tony Blair already, and the crowd wants something different. Starmer needs to put down his passport, and start taking the rubbish out.
