Keir Starmer opens Downing Street’s door this week for guests from schoolchildren singing carols to MPs and hacks, trooping in to meet the PM over English sparkling wine. Starmer will be looking forward to a few days off. He looks and sounds tired after undertaking a punishing travel schedule to introduce himself on the world stage. Even his closest allies admit that the plan for a focussed first half year in office hit the reality buffers fast.
A new poll for Ipsos shows three-fifths of voters are unhappy with Labour’s record, with personal satisfaction ratings dropping even further — Starmer has the worst score for a Prime Minister, since research began under Margaret Thatcher. Unforced errors from the “freebie” scandal and unhappy departure of Starmer’s intended ex-civil service enforcer, Sue Gray, as well as a Cabinet resignation (Transport Secretary Louise Haigh), have fast watered down the “Keir’s here” relief which followed July’s confident election result.
Key decisions have also landed badly. These include scrapping the winter fuel payment for up to a million pensioners and a “big bazooka” of tax rises and National Insurance hikes, which alarmed business. A hangover mood surrounds Number 10 even before the morning after the nights before.
January will however see changes which Starmer hopes will lead to a more settled outlook. The remedy is an influx of former Blairites with public-private-sector experience, after Starmer conceded in recent cabinet meetings (according to someone present) that “we are not yet trusted to oversee delivery” of changes the public badly wants to see.
The remedy, overseen by the PM’s two most trusted allies, Morgan McSweeney in the chief of staff role and Pat McFadden as minister for the "central node" department of the Cabinet Office, is to use a more focussed “test and learn” approach to public service priorities derived from start ups and fast-growing digital companies.
From Elon Musk’s arrival as co-head of the ”Department of Government Efficiency” in the US to the rather more reticent McFadden in the UK (whose only excess, as far as I could judge from glimpsing him at the US Embassy party, was consuming an excess of the very fried fare), governments are aware that there is a gap between their spending and what is achieved or improved.
Both McFadden and McSweeny have persuaded an initially sceptical Keir Starmer that a part of the solution is the “bring backery” of former Blairites who impressed in delivery of policy between 1997 and their boss’s defenestration by Gordon Brown in 2007. So back from a stint in financial institutions and investment strategy roles comes a shrewd Liz Lloyd, as director of “policy and innovation” (only the government could combine the words “director” and “innovation” in a title without being aware of the joke about the BBC in the W1A comedy series having a “Director of Better”).
It’s telling that Starmer has gone back to the future to appoint so many people who were last in Government during the Blur/Oasis years
Back too is Sir Michael Barber, who already works for Starmer as an unpaid advisor on “effective delivery”. Slightly oddly, Barber will combine this role with a new hat as envoy to the Palestinian authority, supporting economic development there, which also feels like a Blair-era project revived for darker times in Gaza and the West Bank.
Jonathan Powell, Blair’s closest aide on foreign affairs and a veteran (to put it politely) of the Iraq war controversies has already returned as national security advisor. The overall aim to is to deliver a faster iteration of changes – under the codename P4C (Programme for Change). It’s telling that Starmer has gone back to the future to appoint so many people who were last in Government during the Blur/Oasis years. But as one of the returners put it to me, “Labour has been out of office since 2010 and had a stint of Jeremy Corbyn in the middle of that. We’ve forgotten what ‘good’ looks like.”
Putting that right is hard-going. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, is already having to plead with voters for patience on social care reforms and dealing with schisms in NHS England and the NHS Confederation (which represents health service managers). These are arguments about the balance between averting winter crises in A&E departments by diverting resources to them – and managing down waiting lists for complex treatments and surgery to fulfil pre-election promises.
Streeting says he is content to be judged on NHS improvements, but that a period of five months is not a reasonable time to expect transformation. That points to a key tension in reviving the Blair-era model at a time when public finances are far more stretched: there is far less money to oil the wheels of change and soak up discontent. Also, bigger technological changes in public service delivery, needed to make the “test and tweak” approach work accurately, mean syphoning money into longer-term changes, at the expense of quick fixes. It's hard to say there is much clarity on this.
At Labour’s winter gatherings, you can sense the "Blairites are back" vibe in huddles of people who worked together two decades ago and who have a shared sense of focus. “What civil servants want,” says one of the group, “Is a firm nod as to what direction to go in when it comes to key priorities and choices. “Starmerism has not yet delivered on that simple but vital premise. The “ancien regime” has been revived support of a leader of different temperament in more trying times. The question, as 2025 dawns will be: to do what?
