Tomorrow the government will be 100 days old and facing its first progress report, says Fleet Street Fox. One-word judgements have been banned, so here’s a few extra
Judging a government on its first 100 days in office is a ridiculous thing to do. It’s too early to see results, too late to change your mind, and too pointless to be worth the effort.
But it’s a convenient early target, in all senses of the word, and one which Labour set for itself. It’s being used by its ministers to score points, by the Opposition to score points, and columnists all over Fleet Street to fill space before they can go and score a gin and tonic.
One of the government’s first moves was to ban Ofsted from making one-word judgements, and it can therefore hardly begrudge me giving it a few extra. But this column strives to be different, so we will be fact-based, even-handed, and communicate the most important points clearly.
1. Keir Starmer has outlasted two lettuces. Unlike the one-lettuce Prime Ministers of yore, he has not crashed the markets, put up your mortgage, or caused the governor of the Bank of England to ring up wanting a little scream in his ear. Yay!
2. He has not fired anyone from his government, even though it includes people who have made Ibiza raves uncool, who think Taylor Swift concerts are for the middle-aged, and don’t seem able to dress themselves without help.
3. He recruited Sue Gray to make his government seem moral and competent, and then shunted her sideways when his government seemed the opposite. Whether it was her fault or someone else’s we have yet to see, but in general, shunting women is Not A Good Look.
4. He scrapped one-word judgements from Ofsted, single-handedly giving school inspectors a reason to use AI for their reports, giving most parents less of an idea about how a school compares, but making stressed teachers significantly happier which is no bad thing.
5. He honoured Tory commitments for public sector pay rises and was blamed for paying for it with pensioner’s heating subsidies. This is what is known in the biz as Poor Messaging – getting two entirely separate things confused so they look like one caused the other, and being found smeared in faeces while the real culprit gets away with it.
6. He’s suspended seven MPs for rebelling against the two-child benefit cap and successfully crushed a series of race riots. There are still plenty of rebels and racists around, but they are much quieter (for now).
7. He launched GB Energy although you still can’t switch your supplier, new housing targets although none are actually required yet, launched GB Railways although trains are still s***, and restarted the HS2 link to Euston which will be ages away but at least the advertising hoardings are gone.
8. He lost the man who buys his clothes and Rosie Duffield, neither of which he will notice because a) his wardrobe is full and b) so are the backbenches.
9. In Poor Messaging #2, he ‘lost’ the Chagos Islands to Mauritius even though he is actually keeping hold of the military base on Diego Garcia which is the only reason we wanted them in the first place, and he’s done it without asking the Chagossians how they feel about it which would, let’s face it, be polite.
10. He negotiated his children down from getting a dog to a cat. If there’s anything which counteracts the narrative this man just gives stuff away to whoever asks for it, it’s this: he got his children to forego a happy, bouncy puppy, full of beans, for a clawed sociopath full of malice. All right, the lack of a catflap in the Downing Street flat is a flaw in the plan, but housetraining a German shepherd while living on the third storey is even less ideal. It’s the most pragmatic compromise, if you can’t persuade them to a goldfish.
11. He made private schools pay the same taxes as any other part of the private sector, which has made a lot of Tory voters unhappy that he is ‘punishing’ parents by shutting down a tax-avoiding charity scam. He said he would, he did it, he’s looking at protecting military families who rely on it, and it’s what the nation voted for. Suck it.
11. He’s now less popular than Sideshow Bob’s lazy British cousin, I mean Nigel Farage.
Despite the fact that judging a government on a little over three months’ work is silly, especially when one month was holiday and another three weeks were party conferences, he still insisted people do so and that is why his team is now talking about a ‘reset’ of something which has barely left the factory.
This then is the judgement of a machine that has not warmed up, has a few screws loose, and is being operated by someone who’s got nice spectacles and nice ideas but has yet to find the pedals.
If you want to sum up how things are going, look no further than Rishi Sunak, who seems as happy as Larry. He can go back to being an out-of-touch helicopter-obsessed fruitloop who doesn’t know how to use a debit card. That same man said Starmer would do “irreversible damage” in his first 100 days, and, er, he hasn’t.
Being in office is harder than being in Opposition. What you could say, on one side of the House of Commons, must be enacted on the other. And that involves protocol, chains of command, budget constraints, and a civil service that has of late been rather seriously abused.
You can’t get everything you want, but must do the best you can. So scrapping one-word Ofsted judgements because they don’t say enough is fine, but don’t expect parents to wade through a 10,000-word report. Better to have shorter-but-longer summaries, easily understood but indicating more.
So here’s one for the government’s first 100 days: ‘The Boy Starmer is a 2-lettuce Prime Minister yet to harness his potential; must do better.’ And frankly, in a class of chaotic governments run by egotistical morons, that’s the most glowing report possible.
