Keir Starmer has approached the first anniversary of him becoming prime minister in a ruminative, rueful mood. Across a series of long-form interviews, he has seized on the opportunity to appraise his year-old premiership; the account of events delivered in Starmer’s media meditations is candid, well-considered and — perhaps unintentionally — scathing.
The PM’s inaugural confessional came on the fringes of the G7 summit last month. Beth Rigby of Sky News urged Starmer to volunteer his biggest “mistake” in office. Prime ministers tend to baulk at this media cliché, communicating a confused stream of passive-voiced regret, cynical deflection and banal excuses.
Starmer delivered an abstract answer, but one few would dispute. He conceded that the government had not “always told our story as well as we should, explained our decisions in the way that might in retrospect have been better.”
The prime minister continues to bare the soul of his administration. Asked by The Sunday Times how a mass rebellion of over a third of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) ambushed Downing Street, Starmer admitted he was distracted. “I was heavily focused on what was happening with Nato and the Middle East”, he said, referring to the recent summit in the Netherlands. Only on Wednesday night — just hours after dismissing the objections of over 120 Labour MPs as “noises off” — did Starmer “fully” turn his attention to the doomed welfare bill.
It is no secret that the welfare rebellion has coloured much of the commentary on the eve of this government’s first birthday. Starmer, laudably, has not shirked from his responsibility to deliver answers. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Political Thinking podcast, he said he “did not engage” properly with Labour MPs before conducting a series on damaging U-turns. “My full attention really bore down on this on Thursday”, Starmer declared.
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But the peak of the PM’s apologia arc came in his interview with the Observer, published last Sunday. Speaking to former Labour adviser and Starmer biographer, Tom Baldwin, he touched on the controversy surrounding his “islands of strangers” speech, delivered on 12 May.
“That particular phrase – no – it wasn’t right. I’ll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it”, Starmer said. Had he held the speech’s contents “up to the light a bit more”, he would have concluded not to use the line.
The confession reflects a level of candour that prime ministers only really express once they have left office. These extensive revelations are saved for the memoirs – or podcasts. Rishi Sunak disavowed his “stop the boats” slogan as part of a sit-down with BBC Radio 4’s Nick Robinson in March. But Starmer does not recoil from the fact that he is fallible. He sees value in tipp-exing over his government in real time.
It’s surely a personal strength that Starmer has publicly skipped the self-righteous denial phase his predecessors spent whole premierships festering in. His introspection projects both an assured self-awareness and a vulnerability that are rarely visible in prime ministers.
But there is a reason that Starmer’s predecessors struck coy poses when asked to evaluate their own inadequacies. The calculus of his public confessions is curious; unconditional self-incrimination is a bold political strategy.
Indeed, Starmer’s commendably objective appraisals border upon brazen when considered collectively. In their own way, each of the missteps Starmer described are fundamental: communication, multi-tasking, party-management and speech work. These are not marginal elements of the office, or supplementary tasks to the daunting duties 10 Downing Street confers on its incumbent. They are the aspects that make the prime minister’s power possible — the channels through which authority is established.
Starmer’s “islands of strangers” indiscretion, an avowedly inadvertent echo of Enoch Powell, is instructive. In one fell swoop, Starmer released a whole series of unedifying admissions into the SW1 ether.
There is important context, of course: the prime minister had arrived back from a three-day trip to Ukraine the night before, and, on the morning of the speech, the porch of his former family home, occupied by a relative, was fire-bombed.
But one cannot escape the conclusion: Starmer delivered an immensely significant speech that he had not fully read and/or understood. It’s an extraordinary admission.
It is no secret that every prime minister is surrounded by speechwriters, whose words they recite. But for Starmer to cast himself as a passive figure, whose political views are literally dictated to him, seems ill-judged. Crucially, it lends credence to one of the PM’s more reasonable caricatures: that prime minister Keir Starmer is a daily construct of his advisers, above all No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney.
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From incoherence to dysfunction and back again
Every premiership, consciously or not, develops a theory of governance. The prime minister’s personality and politics infuse the office. No 10 is moulded in the image of the individual who inhabits it.
Across his first twelve months in power, Starmer has forged a model of governance of remarkable, almost hermetic, centralisation. Decisions, such as those on winter fuel and welfare, are conceived in the Downing Street bunker before being released unto the PLP. MPs are entrusted with communicating the contents to their constituents; but there is no sense of wider political consultation with Starmer’s parliamentary stakeholders. Decisions of state are dictated under the threat of suspension — not deliberated.
For months, this top-down system was sustained by the complacent assumption that the sheer size of the government’s majority would insulate it from internal rebellion. That belief, along with the government’s newly filleted flagship welfare bill, today lies in tatters on the commons floor.
Labour rebels offered eleventh hour concession on welfare cuts
Starmer’s welfare debacle was highly revealing: not only of the assumptions and anxieties that pervade No 10 — but also of the distance between Downing Street and the median Labour MP. The prime minister, again to his credit, does not resile from this observation. As per his BBC Radio 4 interview, he admits No 10 got the “process” wrong and did not “engage” well with Labour MPs. In the weeks leading up to summer recess, before MPs scuttle back to their constituencies, reports suggest Starmer has begun an overdue outreach programme.
Confessionals, of course, are not the only way a prime minister can admit failure. Starmer’s ceasefire with his parliamentary party, after weeks of menacing ultimatums from the Whips’ Office, is a more tacit but no less lucid declaration of historic dysfunction.
Starmer, we know, doesn’t like Westminster. In a January 2023 interview with the News Agents podcast, Starmer revealed — with barely a moment’s hesitation — that he would “choose” Davos, the seat of the World Economic Forum, over the parliamentary estate. Starmer came to politics later in life than most politicians — and certainly prime ministers. He hasn’t taken to all of its elements naturally; nor does he show any signs of wanting to. Perhaps that was a strength in opposition. In government, this position has emerged as a glaring vulnerability.
Parliamentary parties, especially large ones, are complex organisms. They contain a whole host of contrasting characters, literally, from all over the country. They are stratified, officially and unofficially, by seniority, ideology, geography and electoral majority. And so they require deft management and accommodation.
Meanwhile, it is the job of the prime minister’s political operation to locate, account for and manage their boss’ weaknesses. If Starmer’s foremost flaw can be loosely defined as “politics”, his political operation should step in to make the informed judgements his instincts cannot. Nor is the prime minister’s time, a scarce and valuable resource, best spent on Kremlinology of the contemporary Labour Party.
This nature of Starmer’s time management has been brought to the fore by Labour’s recent tumult. The PM pointed to his appearance at the Nato summit as one reason he was not across the welfare rebellion. The “islands of strangers” phrase slipped into the PM’s immigration speech, in part, because Starmer was detained in Ukraine.
This is not, solely, his fault. There is no doubt that recent blunders reflect a failure of the Downing Street apparatus that surrounds Starmer.
The prime minister has two parliamentary private secretaries (PPSs), Liz Twist and Chris Ward. In theory, they are the connective tissue that joins Downing Street to the PLP. They are tasked with spotting problems before they arise and communicating them, concisely and in a way the prime minister can manage alongside his more “important” duties. This process, overseen also by the PM’s political secretary, Claire Reynolds, has failed.
What’s striking, is just how ill-judged and unsubstantiated the government’s complacency was. Far from being protected by a parliamentary supremacy of servile Starmtroopers, the government is uniquely exposed to the possibility of rebellion. This observation flows from the nuanced nature of Labour’s landslide victory, recorded a year ago yesterday.
Starmer secured 400+ MPs on 34 per cent of the vote: a loveless landslide, a monumental sandcastle, a wide but not deep mandate. Pick your cliché. In short, Morgan McSweeney masterminded an electoral strategy that saw Labour lose support where it could afford to — but make strong gains in unlikely areas. That resulted in a massive net gain of seats.
Managing a party elected on these terms is inherently challenging, no matter the size of the majority.
McSweeney’s strategy stuffed parliament with Labour MPs on perilously small majorities. These parliamentarians, it follows, will be hyper-aware of constituents’ complaints: political seismographs attuned to any kind of tremor. As such, when Downing Street places Labour on the wrong side of public opinion, MPs become understandably nervous. Do this ritualistically for a year, and the Westminster incentive structure that rewards loyalty will dissolve.
At this febrile juncture, Starmer must learn to view party-management as integral to the worthy work of government — rather than as a distraction from it. He is good at diplomacy; he should do it at home too.
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Fourteen years one year of chaos
These points reflect the defining paradox of Keir Starmer’s premiership.
His operation is highly centralised, personalised, even presidential. It is dictatorial, distant and, according to some MPs, dismissive.
But the orders that emerge from the centre are disjointed and incoherent. The welfare bill, since hollowed out by MPs, stood as the government’s “flagship” legislation. But it was also isolated: divorced from any form of positive argument that could possibly imbue it with political meaning.
It is a perverse formula that appears almost uniquely constructed to generate chaos: muddled messaging, disseminated by a detached and distant Downing Street, reflects a self-reinforcing recipe for political dysfunction.
The result is a Downing Street that looks buffeted by events; that lacks consistency, knowledge of its parliamentary party and/or the political acumen to anticipate danger. Meanwhile, backbenchers see a vacuum where the vision should be, and rush in. The confusion around the prime minister’s own politics, exemplified by the “islands of strangers” saga, incentivises rival political actors to compete for and manage the image of the real Keir Starmer. That only contributes to the immediate sense of incoherence.
Starmer vowed to lead a stable and dependable administration. Instead, he has accidentally created a political operation that generates the kind of strife that sickened the country of Conservative rule.
It is little surprise that the data suggests the government is in mortal danger. Britain Elects has compared Starmer’s standing at the end of his first year in office with those of his predecessors. As of day 357, the PM’s -33 approval rating was six points lower than Rishi Sunak’s (-27) at the same point, 32 points lower than Boris Johnson’s (-1), 31 points lower than Theresa May’s (-2), 27 points lower than David Cameron’s (-6), and 77 points below Tony Blair’s (+44). (Starmer does best Gordon Brown by 11 points, that said.)
At the same time, new YouGov polling shows that as many people think it would have been better if Sunak and the Conservatives had won the last election (33 per cent) as say it is better that Starmer and Labour won (33 per cent). (A further third, 33 per cent again don’t know).
Downing Street should interpret this finding as a crushing blow: it evinces failure on two parallel tracks. Labour has failed to signal “change” in its first year; but nor has it succeeded in comprehensively toxifying the Conservative Party’s reputation.
Starmer has shown himself to be uniquely comfortable confronting his flaws. This, and what we know about the PM’s ruthless streak, would suggest a far-reaching reset is on the horizon. That will be characterised by a restructuring of Downing Street’s operation and a renewed focus on the bonds that bind Starmer to the parliamentary party he leads.
Starmer, our self-aware premier, has correctly identified his government’s chaotic output. He must now understand its causes and make the requisite adjustments, however brutal they may be.
Candour is no substitute for competence, or the felt change Labour must deliver to stem the tide of disillusion. From the government’s perspective, the stakes — symbolised by the insurgency of Reform UK and Nigel Farage — could hardly be higher.
Josh Self is editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here and X here.
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Week-in-Review: Welfare rebellion has permanently damaged Starmer
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