Keir Starmer’s Bafflingly Bad Start as the U.K.’s Prime Minister
People used to say that Sir Keir Starmer would make a good Prime Minister because he wasn’t very political. The leader of the Labour Party, which won a huge victory at this summer’s general election, was always fairly wooden on the campaign trail. He wasn’t a vision guy. He didn’t understand why he—a former prosecutor of terrorists, a knight of the realm in his early sixties—was expected to talk about his parents so much. The truism, among people who worked with Starmer and knew him well, was that 10 Downing Street was where he belonged: that he was serious and dedicated, a truly effective leader. It would be as Prime Minister that the people would come to know, and love, the real Keir. In a largely edifying biography by Tom Baldwin, a former Labour communications director, Starmer’s deputy, Angela Rayner, described her boss as “the least political person I know in politics.” I think it was a compliment. After fourteen years of turbulence and performative self-harm at the hands of the Conservative Party, the British population was ready for a little less politics, too.
But maybe not quite so little. The first hundred days of the new Labour government have been underwhelming in the extreme. As Prime Minister, Starmer has delivered a minor scandal over alleged corruption, a lot of office gossip, and a depressing atmosphere of economic constraint. The political calendar has been unfortunate. Labour won power just before the summer parliamentary break, which was followed by the annual party-conference season, giving the new government limited time to introduce legislation. But the rest has been, in the British political euphemism of the moment, missteps.
A major part of Starmer’s public image is his workaday-ness. So it hasn’t looked great that, since April, he has disclosed receiving nearly forty thousand pounds’ worth of gifts in kind—including high-end clothes, eyeglasses, and the loan of an apartment—from a single Party donor. By coincidence, or not, the same donor, a TV executive and Labour peer named Waheed Alli, was given a security pass to Downing Street. The scandal, such as it is, has become known as “passes for glasses.” All of Alli’s gifts, along with other donations, were recorded and itemized, dutifully, by Starmer’s office—the cost of “multiple pairs of glasses” came to two thousand four hundred and eighty-five pounds—and then were seized on by his political opponents as evidence of sleaze and the new Prime Minister taking to the high life. (Since June, Starmer and his family received a total of ten tickets, worth more than seven thousand pounds, to see Taylor Swift, and four more tickets to see horse races in Doncaster.) Adding to the awkwardness, on October 2nd, Alli was put under an investigation by the House of Lords for allegedly failing to register his own financial interests properly.
There have also been reports—from the opening weeks on—of dysfunction among Starmer’s closest advisers. In March, 2023, Starmer hired Sue Gray, one of the U.K.’s most senior civil servants, to be his chief of staff. The appointment was controversial. In her previous job in the Cabinet Office, Gray had led an inquiry into parties and other rule-breaking in Downing Street that had taken place on Boris Johnson’s watch during the pandemic. But Gray was also an experienced Whitehall operator, who helped to give Starmer and Labour the appearance of a government-in-waiting. After the election, however, gossip spread among Labour insiders—and into the newspapers—that Gray was a micromanager with poor political instincts. She clashed with Starmer’s long-term political adviser, Morgan McSweeney, and her bureaucrat’s energy was said to compound Starmer’s own. (It didn’t help that Gray’s son, a newly elected Labour Member of Parliament named Liam Conlon, was another recipient of Alli’s donations.)
The result has been incoherence; a sense of governing without meaning. Since taking over a country and an economy hobbled by years of underinvestment and political instability, Starmer and his ministers have done little more than complain about how hard everything is. Instead of establishing a new direction for the U.K., to emerge from the torpor of austerity and the lingering damage caused by Brexit, the most notable political achievement of the Starmer administration so far has been to dramatically cut a benefits program that helps the elderly heat their homes. The contrast between this dourness and Starmer’s fancy new eyewear is not so much unfortunate as dumb—and self-inflicted. On September 28th, Rosie Duffield, a Labour M.P. for Canterbury, in Kent, resigned from the Party in protest. “I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party,” she wrote to Starmer. Both Labour and Starmer’s popularity ratings have tanked.
It is a baffling situation, to some extent. “All my colleagues are feeling sad and disappointed because this wasn’t necessary. This isn’t him,” a Labour peer, told me last week. It was obvious, for more than a year, that the Party was on course for government, so it is hard to understand how these early months could have gone so listlessly. It’s not as if Starmer’s weaknesses were unknown either. After the election, Labour staffers circulated among themselves “The Death of ‘Deliverism,’ ” an essay from the U.S. political journal Democracy about how the Biden Administration had failed to derive political benefit from its economic policies because of an absence of stories and emotion to bind them together.
This week, as the hundredth day of Starmer’s government approached, it was impossible not to compare the sense of drift with the dynamic early months of Tony Blair’s Labour premiership, in 1997, which followed a brisk “route map” of policy announcements. “Government is not just about the technocratic delivery of policy and change,” Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former press secretary, told the B.B.C., when he was asked about the performance of the new government. “It’s about the relentless, endless, never-ending conversation that you’re having with the country about what you are trying to do for the country. And I think it’s fair to say that that bit has been largely missing.” Another official from the Blair era told me, “It’s a little bit unforgivable to come in without a plan of some sort. I mean, that is the point of being in government. You have to actually want to do something.” The official despaired of the donations fiasco. “They say we have abided by the rules, so what’s wrong with it? They don’t think about how this actually looks, and that’s the politics of it,” he said. “If you’re missing that bit, it makes it a whole lot worse.”
Starmer’s own behavior has been erratic. He has veered between attempting to stay aloof from petty criticism and giving long, overwrought explanations. (The Prime Minister said that he needed to borrow Alli’s eighteen-million-pound apartment during the election campaign so his son could have somewhere quiet to study for his high-school exams. “Any parent would have made the same decision,” he told Sky News.) In September, at the Labour Party conference—a noticeably sombre affair, given the Party’s landslide election victory—Starmer gave a creditable and, by his standards, warm speech, in which he reflected on his love of playing the flute as a teen-ager. “Even now, I turn to Beethoven or Brahms in those moments when, how to put it, the reviews aren’t so good,” Starmer said, before waiting a beat. “I’ve got some Shostakovich lined up for tomorrow.”
I asked Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, for his impressions of the Prime Minister’s early struggles. Baldwin served as a communications director under Ed Miliband, the Labour leader prior to Jeremy Corbyn, and he is sympathetic to Starmer. But he acknowledged that the Prime Minister has an ungainly style as a politician. “I have used this metaphor of a minefield,” Baldwin said. “He takes one step forward, two steps to the side, one step back, two more steps to the side. It is inelegant and uninspiring—confusing even. But it’s the best way to get to the other side. In opposition, the other side was victory. In government so far, he’s looked more like a man wandering around a minefield without a clear sense that he’s getting somewhere.” Baldwin observed that Starmer has been in comparable situations before—both early in his time as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service and as Party leader—and that he was able to get it together. “It kind of almost needs to get quite bad with him before he does recognize a change of course is necessary,” Baldwin said. “But, when he recognizes there is a problem, he’s quite ruthless.”
On October 2nd, Starmer announced that he had paid back some six thousand pounds’ worth of gifts that he had received since becoming Prime Minister and that the rules on hospitality for ministers would be modified. Four days later, Gray quit as Starmer’s chief of staff and was replaced by McSweeney. There were signs that Starmer was finding his direction. Westminster bubbled with talk of a relaunch and “Starmer 2.0.” “It’s good to have a serious Prime Minister. I don’t think that’s changed since before or after the election,” the Blair-era official told me. “This is come-able back-able from. People writing off a government after two months, when they got a huge majority and five years, is just ludicrous.” Baldwin suggested that Starmer return to the language of “Five Missions” which had framed Labour’s election campaign— economic growth, green energy, public safety, education, and the N.H.S.—but which has since got lost in the noise. “I don’t think he can turn around now and say, I’ve discovered a new fundamental purpose for this government,” Baldwin said. “There’s a very real danger he’ll be ridiculed if he does that. And the missions are personal to him. They’re important.”
