This was the week that Sir Keir Starmer hoped to relaunch his government and put the disasters of his first 14 months in power behind him. He announced the start of “phase two” of his government, with a focus on “delivering” for the British people. It was a bit of spin designed to suggest bringing a new team into Number 10 was all part of a long-term plan, rather than a devastating admission of failure. But Sir Keir’s Government was plunged into chaos by his colourful deputy, Angela Rayner, after she was forced to resign for failing to pay £40,000 in stamp duty that should have gone to the taxman.
The Prime Minister has now been forced to carry out a comprehensive reshuffle, something he’d been hoping to put off. Britain today has a new Foreign Secretary, new Home Secretary and new Justice Secretary. Ms Rayner has her fans. She’s a working-class northern woman who struggled against adversity after becoming a single mum at 16, She didn’t reach the highest levels of government without a lot of hard work.
But many people at Westminster found it hard to sympathise. She was first in the queue to point the finger at Tories, who she famously described as “a bunch of scum”, when they were accused of wrongdoing. Even so, Ms Rayner’s resignation makes Sir Keir’s problems worse. She was a valuable ally, and her presence around the Cabinet table reassured traditional Labour activists who liked her but struggled to warm to Sir Keir, a lawyer who grew up in leafy Surrey.
And even before she fell on her sword, the Prime Minister’s relaunch wasn’t fooling anybody.
He set out the Government’s three priorities on Tuesday, telling his Cabinet to focus on economic growth that people “feel in their pockets”, secure borders and improving the NHS.
The task of overseeing “delivery” now falls to Darren Jones, previously number two in the Treasury and this week appointed to the newly-created role of Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister.
It’s not a bad list, but it means he’s abandoned his original plan, which was announced in July 2024. That’s when he told Cabinet colleagues to focus on five “missions”, including growing the economy, delivering “clean energy”, improving the NHS, cutting crime and improving schools.
Have these missions been delivered? The economy is in a state, with inflation stubbornly high and unemployment rising. Overall crime rates have been falling for ten years, but our streets certainly don’t feel safer, thanks to an epidemic of shoplifting. Labour’s promise to cut energy bills by up to £300 has not come true, with the cap set by regulator Ofgem for the average household actually £152 higher than when Labour came to power.
The number of patients on the waiting list for NHS treatment is down from 7.6 million at the time of the general election to 7.4 million. The Department for Education is quietly getting on with the job of re-writing the school curriculum and attempting to solve the crisis in special needs education, but will publish its plans later this year.
Sir Keir’s relaunch is needed because his first 14 months in office have been an abject failure. He’s made so little progress on his plan that he’s decided to tear it up and start over again.
His decision to make the capable Shabana Mahmood his new Home Secretary is a sign that he realises immigration policy has been a disaster under Yvette Cooper, Ms Mahmood’s predecessor. Ms Cooper was shunted sideways into the Foreign Office, a prestigious job but one where she can’t do much harm because the Prime Minister takes charge of foreign affairs himself.
And Sir Keir has clearly lost faith in his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, although the two of them insist their relationship is stronger than ever.
He can’t sack her. Her tears in the Commons in July may actually have saved her bacon, because the Prime Minister was forced to throw his support fully behind her in order to stave off suggestions that he’d been a bit of a bully.
But Sir Keir has poached her deputy and appointed economist and former Bank of England Deputy Governor Minouche Shafik as his Chief Economic Advisor, reporting directly to him, not Ms Reeves.
Number Ten says Baroness Shafik, a member of the House of Lords, will “support the Government to go further and faster in driving economic growth and raising living standards for all”.
It can only mean the Prime Minister has decided he should be the one making decisions about economic policy rather than the Chancellor.
This is a path fraught with peril. Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s insistence on having her own economic adviser, Sir Alan Walters, led to the resignations of both Sir Alan and her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, exacerbating splits in the Conservative Party that forced Maggie out of Number 10 a year later.
For some Labour MPs, the launch of “phase two” confirms what they always suspected – that Sir Keir never had a plan for government. He was determined to get into Number 10 and to remove Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters from the Labour Party, which he did very successfully, but after that it was a blank sheet of paper.
The lack of achievements has left a vacuum that has been filled by bad news – the sort of thing voters can’t help but notice. When asked to name something Labour had done since winning power, good or bad, a recent poll found voters remember the decision to means-test winter fuel payments and 50,000 small boat crossings.
Labour does have one excuse for its failure to deliver on its promises. The British government doesn’t have any money to spare. The UK has debts of £2.8 trillion and spends around £105 billion in interest payments every year, more than we spend on education and three times the defence budget.
The Government was spending just £25 billion on interest back in 2020 and the huge increase took place under the Tories (partly because of the Covid pandemic), but Labour now has to deal with the consequences.
Many Labour MPs look to the future with trepidation. The Tories, their traditional enemy, are struggling but Sir Keir’s party is instead threatened by a pincer movement of Reform, on the right, and a potential coalition of Corbynites, Greens and independent politicians on the left. Labour fears losing ground in next year’s Scottish and Welsh elections, as well as local elections in English cities such as Birmingham.
Still, nobody said running a country would be easy. The question for Sir Keir Starmer and his team is how well they cope with the difficulties facing them, and his decision to launch a new “phase” of government suggests that even the Prime Minister realises they’ve done a lousy job so far.