In the coming days, you’re going to hear a lot about Sir Keir Starmer’s first 100 days. There will be newspaper interviews to mark the moment when it arrives on Sunday, a trip to Scotland to convene his new council for the nations and regions and a big investment summit early next week. The PM will be all over the television trying to tell you how he’s changing this country, as the columns land — like this one — dissecting his performance to date.
You might be wondering why we mark this anniversary at all. As the great, late Alistair Cooke explained beautifully in one of his Letters from America radio dispatches, measuring the first 100 days in office is a US convention imported here, in which the media assumes the role of a “vindictive school master” to “mark the President’s paper summing up the first 100 days as if they constitute a dry run for his first term.”
Cooke described it as a “foolish custom” and in some ways he is right. For a start, how can anyone measure up to the leader this mythic yardstick was made for, Franklin D Roosevelt? He pushed through a record number of laws in his first 100 days in office as he sought to pull America out of the clutches of the Great Depression and confront a national crisis. Nothing like it has been seen before or since. You can understand why the vainglorious President Trump dismissed the 100 days notion as a “ridiculous standard” (while simultaneously caring ever so much and setting up a website dedicated to his first 100 days).
Putting Roosevelt aside, there are reasons why the first 100 days is a useful yardstick. It sets the tenor of a premiership. These early weeks are when a Prime Minister is at the height of popularity and has the momentum and political capital to take radical policy steps. We can assess whether a leader has met the moment or fallen short.
In the case of Starmer, it has been, by any measure, a dreadful first 100 days. The fresh start he promised in the election has given way to a false start. He is marking his three months in office with an entire overhaul of his top team after his No 10 operation became paralysed by infighting while his personal ratings plummeted over rows over freebies. His net approval rating this week fell to minus 33 — a drop of 44 points since his post election high, while one poll out this week put Labour just one point ahead of the Tories.
A winner-takes-all battle
It is not what they hoped for. A No 10 insider acknowledges it’s been “incredibly frustrating” but insists “some of it has been inevitable”.
“Putting a new team in place after being out of power for 14 years was never going to be easy. But people elected Labour to be focused relentlessly on the economy, living standards, the NHS. Talking about anything else makes voters unhappy. We have to be quicker to react when we’re out of touch with the public mood.”
Finally this week, Starmer did act, removing Sue Gray as his chief of staff and replacing her with his election chief Morgan McSweeney as well as shuffling others at his top table to get more personal support around the PM and sharpening up the communication unit. You may not know who the characters are, or what they do behind the big black door of No 10, but the changes will prove defining for the Starmer government — and it is a gamble.
That’s because Starmer has swapped out a seasoned civil servant who gets Whitehall — Gray — as the most powerful operative in No 10 with the man who is the political brains behind the entire Starmer project. This has been a power struggle which McSweeney has won.
McSweeney won Starmer the election, Gray was meant to run the transition to government. It hasn’t worked, with endless briefings against Gray undermining her role and distracting from the business of government. With dysfunction at the heart of his operation, the PM concluded — fairly or unfairly — it was Gray who had to go.
“The PM recognised it was going wrong and moved to make it right. Weak leaders let dysfunction run on. He didn’t have the right people in the right places and he moved to make the changes he wanted to make,” says one insider.
Operation boring
It has been bloody with endless briefings against Gray, who might have worked well with cabinet ministers but displayed political naivety as she made enemies of advisors, questioning their experience, their pay, their access to the Prime Minister. While we should be talking about the missions of this Labour government, we have spent most of the first 100 days talking about the toxicity of Starmer’s No 10.
The hope now is to make No 10 “boring once more” with those operating in the back rooms out of the headlines. There is hope too that the discipline McSweeney and cabinet office minister Pat McFadden brought to the election campaign, can get repurposed in government.
But hope is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The whole point of bringing Gray into the No 10 operation is because she understood the machinery of government and how to pull the levers of Whitehall to get things done. McSweeney might be a brilliant political operator but has he got the experience to actually run government? Starmer presumably in the past concluded he had not, which is why he hired Gray.
Friends of Gray tell me she was of the view that Starmer needed more of what Blair had in government — bigger beasts to run the operation. She was of the view his team in opposition wasn’t necessarily right for the government. She sought to bring new people who she thought had the necessary experience (the reason Starmer didn’t have a principal private secretary — a crucial mandarin for any PM — until Gray was removed was because she and others were locked in a turf war over it). As Gray’s relations with advisors became increasingly strained, she found herself on the wrong end of briefing wars that neither she nor the PM could control.
The more Gray was in the press, the more untenable she knew her position would become with a Prime Minister running out of patience. Since her departure, allies tell me she has been unfairly scapegoated with some of the ills of the operation, be it failing to get a grip on freebie gate or control of the government grid of announcements — which I’m told were not her remit.
Whatever the machinations, that it got so toxic so quickly doesn’t bode well for Starmer. It speaks to a dysfunction in his operation — and it is rarely one individual from which that dysfunction flows.
The Prime Minister can at least take comfort from the fact that much of the criticism a leader faces in the first 100 days doesn’t have to define the success of a leader. Early woes can be long forgotten when election day comes around again. President Bill Clinton is an example of that: after a shaky start he went on in 1996 to be the first Democrat since Roosevelt to win a second term.
But them there was Jimmy Carter. His difficult relationship with Congress in first 100 days foreshadowed a rift that between the Carter’s White House and the liberal wing of the Democratic party that bedevilled the remainder of his time in office.
If, as one of Starmer’s allies tells me, “every day in government in matters”, then the first 100 days have been a horrible waste. For even as the new Labour administration has set in train planning reform, workers’ rights, its plans for green energy and its border command, it has squandered the goodwill of voters and left watchers like me with serious misgivings about whether the Starmer administration is up to the task of running the country if they can’t even run Downing Street.
Starmer promised a decade of renewal and is of the view — to quote one ally — that his government is “not about the first 100 days, it’s about the first five years”. After a false start, is now the new dawn? He simply can’t afford for it not to be.
