“When we asked for your vote,” said the prime minister, “we didn’t promise you instant sunshine. We pointed out … that a nation can’t accelerate downhill for years and then … suddenly return to prosperity … We had to start … the long, slow climb back up the hill to recovery. I’m afraid some things will get worse before they get better.”
When Margaret Thatcher said these words in a party political broadcast in March 1980, her government, like Keir Starmer’s, was months old but already unpopular. The economy was struggling and the mood in Whitehall and Westminster was souring. The following year, her party’s poll rating fell to a then historic low of 23%. As Starmer is discovering, having also warned that “things will get worse before they get better”, prime ministers who promise to reverse national decline by a circuitous route risk deepening the sense of disillusionment.
Yet only 18 months after Thatcher’s nadir she was re-elected with a huge majority, and went on to rule for another seven years, profoundly changing the country. Does Starmer’s troubled premiership have any chance of following the same trajectory?
After getting so bogged down in the controversies about donated clothes and apartments, and the working methods of Sue Gray, who resigned as his chief of staff last Sunday, Starmer seems an unlikely candidate to repeat one of the greatest comebacks in British political history. But there are actually some striking and unexplored similarities between his political situation and Thatcher’s in the early 1980s.
Just as she took advantage of an opposition split, between Labour and the breakaway Social Democratic party (SDP), so he benefits from the divide on the right between Reform and the Tories. As long as it continues, Labour can remain unpopular and still win the next election – perhaps even comfortably.
Similarly, just as Thatcher faced an inward-looking Labour party with an ineffectual leader, Michael Foot, so Starmer faces a Conservative party too interested in itself rather than the country. Like Labour in the early 80s, today’s Tories, including both the remaining leadership contenders, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, are seen by many voters as too ideological. Against such perceived extremists, at election time even disappointing prime ministers can seem the lesser evil.
Thatcher’s first government was also sustained by a widespread conviction in the media, the business establishment and the electorate that the country she had taken over in 1979 had been on the wrong track, and that, therefore, her reforms should be given a chance. Likewise, the view that it’s the Tories’ fault that “nothing works” in Britain today: Labour will probably repeat this argument for years to come, to justify any underwhelming results and outright disasters produced by Starmer’s policies.
He seems suited to such a simple, relentless strategy. Like Thatcher, with her insistence as prime minister that “there is no alternative” to her plan, Starmer has an unyielding quality, at least in public. “All those shouts and bellows [of criticism] … it’s water off a duck’s back,” he told last month’s Labour conference. “It’s never distracted me before, and it won’t distract me now.”
Starmer is also methodical. His capture of the Labour leadership, purging of most of the party’s left, undermining of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s premierships, and Labour’s election victory – each was achieved in stages, following clear and cautious plans. In theory, this step-by-step approach is also appropriate for the next, much more ambitious task that Starmer has set himself: “a decade of national renewal” for our economy, political system and society.
Yet in practice, as the messiness of the Sue Gray episode and much of Labour’s first three months in office has shown, the unpredictable demands of government can make fools of new prime ministers and their advisers who think that running the country can be made much simpler through new Whitehall structures and targets. Britain is an old country, full of entrenched interests and attitudes, and reforming it is almost never straightforward.
It’s also an increasingly impatient place politically, which for a decade has been rapidly accepting and rejecting prime ministers, party ideologies and national rescue strategies, with the whole process accelerated by the ever-expanding political media’s need for constant drama, and by the desperation of many voters with a deteriorating quality of life.
The society and political environment that Thatcher’s first government inherited was stable by comparison – despite all the bleak things said about it at the time. Public services were still relatively plentiful after decades of postwar investment, poverty was low by today’s standards, workers’ rights – now being partially restored by Labour – were more substantial, and fairly reverential reporting of parliament still played a big part in how Westminster was regarded. Thatcher was also a more commanding and charismatic premier than Starmer has proved so far.
Yet even with these advantages, she nearly didn’t make it through her first government’s bad times. By early 1982, after almost three years of her reforms, the economy was still spluttering and the Conservative party was still in third place in some polls, behind both Labour and an alliance the SDP had formed with the Liberals. Then Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands: something that could have happened at several points in the previous 15 years. Thatcher was handed an opportunity to win a war and transform her reputation and her party’s fortunes.
All governments experience unexpected events. But unless Starmer finds politically successful ways to take advantage of them, showing much more nimbleness as a leader than he has managed up to now, he may discover that determination and tidy plans will only take his government so far.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
