No iron law of politics says a government cannot recover from a bad early stumble. So don’t write Keir Starmer off too quickly because of the long game he insists on playing or the freebies he took. But don’t kid yourself that his government is not wounded either. Because, after only three months in power, it has already felt a brush with mortality.
The Labour conference in Liverpool has made little difference to this. Party conferences can seem absorbing when you are present. But their wider importance is overstated. The same goes for leaders’ speeches. Most people living outside the bubble barely notice them, and they didn’t care that much in the first place anyway.
In Tuesday’s speech, Starmer showed he could see this, but also that he doesn’t possess the tools to change it. He acknowledged the indisputable, that the public mood towards politics and government has changed in modern times: “brittle and fragile” were his chosen words. When ministers ask for “patience in pursuit of national renewal”, people wonder what there will be to show for it. “I understand that,” said Starmer.
What followed showed the limits of his understanding. The speech relied on a reiteration of familiar assertions that ought, in theory, to inspire but do not, and have triggered Starmer’s recent lurching poll ratings. That politics can make a difference. That Labour’s is a long-term project, requiring patience. That the project is not easy. That, in the words of the speech, “It all comes back to that question: can politics be a force for good in people’s lives?”
That is indeed a big question, one of the biggest. But the decline in public confidence towards politics has gone further and faster than the politicians’ responses. Three months in, Starmer’s homilies, worthy and well-intentioned, do not supply an adequate answer. Recent polls underline this. They confirm instead that no response is worth anything if it fails to grasp how much of the public no longer has confidence in politicians and government. To underestimate this is to doom oneself to failure and disappointment.
Confronting this problem is Starmer’s central challenge – and perhaps also our country’s. But Labour’s answer is too tepid. After the Conservatives imploded in autumn 2022, it was always obvious Labour would win the next election. Preparation for government was intense. Shadow ministers were briefed for months. Few incoming governments could have been more ready for the task than Starmer’s.
So how come they didn’t see this month’s freebie row coming until it hit them in the face? It wasn’t as if the scandal was about anything new. Quite the opposite. MPs’ dubious expense claims and ministerial sleaze have tainted British politics for decades.
Surely there was someone in Downing Street or in Starmer’s office who saw in advance that ministers accepting cash from donors for clothes, rentals, holidays and tickets was an awful look, especially post-Boris Johnson? Why did no one say “Just say no”? Was there no one who grasped that saying yes to freebies is a prime example of exactly what leads so many to conclude that all politicians are the same – and that all politicians are in it for themselves?
In the campaigning part of its brain, Labour knows this. It is why the party put the issue front and centre in its election manifesto at the start of the summer. There was a crisis of confidence in politics, the document said. Labour would, therefore, govern differently. It would restore confidence. No ifs, no buts. Did ministers simply not bother to read these words? How does that square with free tickets and clothes?
To which the answer is that too many in Labour have awarded themselves a free pass. Some of this is fed by the suspicion, expressed by several ministers, that a hostile Whitehall establishment is behind the leaks. Most, though, is explained – though not excused – by the Labour belief, clearly widespread, that they are financially underprivileged compared with the Tories (not invariably true, by the way) and thus morally entitled to be judged by a lower standard. Labour’s blind spot about its own virtue is deep in its culture. Remember “pretty straight sort of guy”, anyone?
What the past two weeks should tell Starmer is that he can never afford to be so insouciant about such matters again. Starmer said nothing in his speech to confront the issue. But Labour is kidding itself if it thinks the impact of the freebie rows has receded. It is far more likely that the damage inflicted by the freebies will outlast the optimism at which party loyalists clutched in Liverpool.
For starters, Starmer needs to appoint someone to his inner circle whom he trusts to tell him when he is digging a hole for himself. Experience suggests this is not Sue Gray. If he had had such a person already, he would not have got into the freebie hole and then tried to defend himself in the feeble manner he still adopted on the Today programme this week over the central London accommodation supplied to him by Lord Alli.
But he also needs to send a clear and more insistent message about Labour’s project. A stronger No 10 team and a more aggressive communications operation are parts of this. But only parts. A much more significant part is to be personally proactive on the issue itself: to cap donations and gifts to ministers and to put them all into an independently operated body such as a blind trust to which genuinely needy ministers can apply if appropriate, up to a modest ceiling.
But the bigger key is to do what I warned on these pages on the eve of the election needed to be done. Starmer needs to ensure that he, his staff and his ministers all absorb the Nolan principles of public life into their every waking act. This has not happened, with the consequences we have seen. It is a disgrace that there is not yet an updated ministerial code in place.
When that is rectified, Starmer must make the code tough, transparent and independently enforced. This government’s wider political credibility rests, to a degree it may not appreciate, on a collective ability to maintain and enforce a regime of demonstrable modesty and frugality. Without such an approach, Labour is one sleaze scandal away from a slide into a disrepute with a doubting public that would make even the most virtuous project unachievable.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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