In the day job, I’ve tried to get the measure of most party leaders and prime ministers since the Eighties. There was one so dull that I nodded off in an upright position over lunch. Mostly I’ve had an idea of what makes them tick: Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher wanted to remake the UK in their own contrasting images; David Cameron and Boris Johnson were convinced of their entitlement to lead; Rishi Sunak saw government as a technocratic challenge; John Major and Theresa May were decent and proper; Gordon Brown had moral purpose.
Sir Keir Starmer, whom I ought to know the best — fellow north London Gooner, friend of friends — eludes me. I’ve spoken to him on and off the record many times since he became an MP in 2015. And although I can describe some of his important characteristics — he’s ruthless, tough, prone to being ponderous in decision-making, methodical — I can’t tell you why he was so determined to be Prime Minister.
This is why at Labour’s first conference since forming the new Government in July, in rainy Liverpool, I’ve been asking his colleagues what I’d see if the real Keir Starmer ever stood up, other than when Arsenal score. This is as good as it got, from a member of the Cabinet who should know him better than most: “He’s a progressive problem solver.” The eyes of another senior minister lit up when telling me about Starmer’s commitment to social justice and social mobility, what he calls “shattering the class ceiling”. Which is worthy, and I am sure true, but leaves me with a nagging feeling that there must be something else.
Starmer told my partner, the journalist Charlotte Edwardes in a revealing interview for the Guardian, how he overcomes adversity: he soldiers on by thinking about how his mum raised a family when she was in agonising, life-threatening pain caused by the arthritic condition Still’s disease. Her triumph over adversity is an admonishment never to give up. He also said he never reflects on what makes him tick, has never had therapy, and defines himself as the person who just keeps going.
An eccentric beginning
It explains how, when most of his Cabinet tell me they despair of all the mistakes the Government has been making, he gives no hint of self-doubt. In fact, he is conspicuously enjoying being Prime Minister. Having spent time with him on a recent trip to Washington and at conference, I am struck that he relishes the challenge. During the latter days of Opposition and during the election, he was looking jowly, weary, a few pounds to the bad. Being in office suits him. He seems younger, fitter, more energetic. He tells anyone who asks that he loves being PM even though the job is harder than he perhaps expected.
But is he any good at it, for all his genius — and that of his campaign mastermind Morgan McSweeney — at winning the election?
Much has been made by me, among others, of how Labour’s unassailable majority in the House of Commons was delivered by fewer votes than were won by Jeremy Corbyn in the party’s 2019 nadir. On that basis, its grip on power is anything but unassailable. Delegates get this at Labour’s first party conference since the election. There was nothing like the triumphalist bacchanalian New Labour celebrations of 1997 in Brighton.
To grasp quite how eccentric the opening months of the Starmer era have been, it’s important to reframe the election result. First, it is clear that the UK is determinedly Left-of-centre, if not overwhelmingly Labour: Lib Dems, Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru and Labour collectively received 55 per cent of all votes.
Second, disillusionment with the established parties is at an all-time high. Around half the population either didn’t vote at all or they backed the curse-on-all-the-mainstream-houses Reform Party of Nigel Farage. In other words, large numbers are actively hostile to how we traditionally do government here or can’t be bothered to engage with it.
If that’s Britain today, any new government would have two overwhelmingly important priorities. First, that ministers would be conspicuously working for the country, not themselves. And they would signal that their first priority would be to protect the vulnerable.
The moment of truth
Here is one Cabinet member’s description of what’s actually happened. “It looks as though we’re taking money from poor pensioners while simultaneously enjoying free holidays and expensive clothes given to us by wealthy donors. You would be hard pressed to invent a worse start.”
In other words, Starmer’s government is doing the opposite of what the demographics of the election result would say is rational. Some of this can be written off as the early teething problems of being in high office, having never had any kind of even junior ministerial job — which is true of him and the majority of his important colleagues.
But on October 30, the day of the Budget, there can be no more excuses. This and the spending review five months later will set the course of this Government up to and including the next general election. The Budget will be the big moment that will determine how much our taxes will rise, how much additional money the Government can and will borrow, and how much money each department will receive in 2025-26, while also setting the overall spending total for all departments — the “envelope” — up to and including the most likely date of the next general election, in the spring of 2028.
Almost everything that matters to a government’s ability to succeed will be determined. And one of the reasons this Government has been so chaotic so far is that before this Budget it was impossible for Starmer to articulate the point of his government, the big project. There’s been a political vacuum, and vacuums suck in soap-opera stories like whether the PM’s chief of staff Sue Gray is Rasputin reincarnated.
It will be the most important budget since those of Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson in the Eighties. Everything for the Government’s and our prosperity will be determined by a once-in-a-parliament choice about how much to raise taxes and reform the fiscal or borrowing rules, whether to raise a few billions or a few tens of billions.
Ministers tell me Starmer knows if he doesn’t go big now, he’ll never have the opportunity again to raise the funds for serious investment to reform and mend health, defence and the rest of the fraying fabric of the state.
Under the British system, this will be chancellor Rachel Reeves’s moment. In practice, it will define the Prime Minister, probably forever. It will answer the question of who he is, for the UK’s better or worse.
