And on the hundredth day, he rested. The prime minister marked the passing of this crucial milestone for his young government by jetting off to an Italian villa borrowed from a friendly millionaire, to relax and plan for the hundred days to come.
No, not this prime minister, and not the millionaire you’re thinking of, either. This was Tony Blair back in August 1997, chilling by the Tuscan swimming pool belonging to then paymaster general, Geoffrey Robinson. Keir Starmer on the other hand, having been forced by the riots to scrap his own Italian holiday this summer, could be forgiven for spending his hundredth day screaming into a pillow.
Young governments inevitably make mistakes, as the transport secretary, Louise Haigh, rightly said last week. Unfortunately, she then proved it, being publicly slapped down by Downing Street for denouncing ferry company P&O as “rogue operators” who deserved boycotting for their record of firing crew and replacing them with cheaper agency workers. In fairness to Haigh, this was broadly Labour’s view in opposition, and it’s why Angela Rayner sought to end fire-and-rehire in the painstakingly negotiated employment rights package she finally unveiled last week. But evidently it’s not Labour’s view in government – or at least not the weekend before an investment summit at which P&O’s parent company was due to announce a £1bn investment in British ports.
Awkwardly for Haigh and Rayner, the company spent the weekend being frantically sweet-talked “at the highest level”.
For those thinking that things like this never happened to Blair, all I can say is memory plays strange tricks. His first hundred days are now remembered as a triumph, but towards the tail end he failed to win a byelection in Uxbridge, triggered uproar by giving fundraiser Michael Levy a peerage, and almost lost his foreign secretary, Robin Cook, to the fallout from the latter’s extramarital affair. These stumbles ended up mere footnotes to history in part because the big early gambles – from Bank of England independence to Northern Ireland peace talks – ultimately paid off. People are very forgiving when their lives are getting measurably better.
That’s roughly where Starmer is aiming, too. Facing awkward questions this weekend over ousting his chief of staff Sue Gray, he reached as he often does for a football metaphor, arguing that the fans will always barrack but “only the manager knows the gameplan for this match”. He wants to be vindicated on the pitch like a stoical Gareth Southgate, not get bogged down explaining who he put on the bench and why. This faintly gnomic approach worked in opposition where he was constantly being written off, only to end up confounding his critics. And a Tory leadership race in which the emerging favourite got knocked out by accident certainly leaves him the political equivalent of an easy cup draw. But football isn’t politics, especially at this level. For the left hand to know what the right hand is doing, the gameplan must be understood across Whitehall and the parliamentary party, while a government facing a hostile media can’t just expect the goals to speak for themselves.
Last week’s somewhat brutal No 10 reshuffle was accordingly meant to inject more political and media nous into the operation while healing self-inflicted wounds, not least a pay dispute with special advisers that had seen a Labour government somehow screw up industrial relations with its own people. The downside of Starmer’s serial ruthlessness – for Gray joins a growing list of the dumped or demoted – is, however, high levels of churn. Blair brought into Downing Street a battle-hardened, fiercely bonded team who knew each other, and him, inside out. Starmer has far fewer long-haulers who can claim to know his mind almost before he does. The relief that swept much of government when Starmer’s longstanding strategist Morgan McSweeney replaced Gray suggests he now has fewer square pegs in round holes. But though there are good people in this team, there arguably aren’t enough of them. If you want to know what all this apparently nit-picking stuff looks like in practice, it’s a flagship summit where nobody seems to have sufficiently anticipated problems, with the star turn’s name being mud in union circles and two unnecessarily embarrassed cabinet ministers. With an infinitely more difficult budget less than three weeks away, the new team doesn’t have long to bed in.
One reason Blair could relax by August 1997 is that Gordon Brown’s first budget was by then done and dusted. Rachel Reeves has taken a longer run-up, buying her more time to grapple with an impossible fiscal position, but at a cost. Cabinet ministers waiting months for the Treasury’s green light have had too little to say and do, and the longer the process drags on, the more internal arguments will seep out. The decision in July to strip many pensioners of their winter fuel payment, the announcement that did most to push the new government’s approval ratings off a cliff, looked worse spotlit in isolation than it may have done in the context of a full budget.
Thankfully, all these things are fixable. Starmer is a quick learner, capable of recognising and correcting mistakes, and that’s exactly what his reshuffle aimed to do: messy, perhaps, but less so than letting the infighting drag on. Welcome talk last week of a budget for investing in schools, hospitals and transport suggests a manager rather more responsive to booing from the fans than he sometimes likes to admit. The story of the week is less one of disaster, than future disasters hopefully averted. But these will be an anxious few weeks in the Downing Street dugout, all the same. Perhaps now isn’t the time to point out that the first hundred days is traditionally the easy bit.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian and Observer columnist
