how Keir Starmer fumbled his first months of power

Sir Keir Starmer’s friends say the prime minister needs a holiday After a year of election victory followed by a sharp drop in support, with no time off, the senior leadership of the UK Labor Party appears to be exhausted.

“He needs a break, everyone needs a break,” said one confidante. “These are people who haven’t had a year off. They crawl to the finish line.” The big question ahead Starmer: is whether he can return refreshed from a New Year’s holiday abroad and revive his ailing administration.

The Financial Times spoke to ministers, aides, business leaders and Labor MPs, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, to find out what has gone wrong for Starmer since her July 4 election victory and whether the prime minister can turn things around.

His ambitions to lead a “service government” were marred by an almost constant stream of distractions or mistakes;

“He’s really disappointed with the way the first few months have gone,” said one Downing Street insider. “Not just a waste of time, but a waste of political capital.”

Publicly, Starmer is defiant. Asked by the House of Commons communications committee last week whether he would have done it differently, the Prime Minister said: He counted reforms in planning, pensions and railway nationalization among his government’s achievements.

However, no prime minister has seen such a catastrophic drop in public support in such a short time. Some Labor MPs have begun discussing who could replace Starmer and lead Labor into the next election.

It is now widely agreed in Number 10 and the Treasury that the £1.5 billion cut in winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners at the end of July was a major policy mistake that sowed the seeds for further problems for the government.

“We should have asked more questions,” admitted one official involved in the decision, referring to the belief that Chancellor Rachel Reeves was too willing to accept the cost-savings idea long pushed by the Treasury.

The decision fueled a feeling around the new Starmer government that Work: would have been little different from the Conservatives, who had just been ousted after 14 years in power.Starmer’s acceptance of £32,000 in free suits and glasses added to that story.

Former Labor Downing Street aide John McTernan says: “The cut in winter fuel payments was a blunder because it was done out of context, in the long, four-month gap between the election and the budget. It had a fundamental effect on fixing the perception of this government.”

Reeves hailed the cut in winter fuel payments as evidence of the need to take “tough decisions” to tackle what he claimed was “the worst economic legacy of any government since the Second World War”.

Senior Labor figures admit the bad message has contributed to a loss of business confidence. “We have been too gloomy,” said one minister are we doing these things?”

Ministers admit that the party was also ill-prepared for the government. “The accession talks did not start early enough before the election,” said one minister, referring to the discussions taking place between opposition politicians and the civil service to prepare a government plan. :

Gray, Starmer’s former chief of staff, has been widely criticized within Starmer for a lack of preparation, not only in terms of policy but also in terms of personnel.

Eventually, Gray forced Starmer out of the job in October, shortly after the prime minister returned from a Labor conference in Liverpool that looked more like a wake than a victory party.

“After the conference, Keir was determined to change things,” said one Labor member. It wasn’t all Sue’s fault.”

Then came the Reeves Budget on October 30, an event that caused a huge rift with the business community that Labor had stubbornly favored before the election. Economic stagnation and a decline in business confidence has followed.

The feeling of betrayal caused by Reeves’ £25 billion increase in national insurance was huge, but it also had a knock-on effect on the economy.Surveys measuring manufacturing confidence and hiring plans fell through sharply; the economy leveled off.

“He’s just not up to the job,” said one FTSE 100 executive.

The cumulative effect of all these setbacks has been the erosion of morale at the center of Starmer’s administration.

In December’s attempted restart, Starmer set out six policy “pivots” to focus his government’s energy and resources, but he made more headlines with his claim that some civil servants were “comfortable in the soft bath of a managed recession”.

“I can’t understand where that came from,” said one of the ministers. “I would be upset.” Starmer was then forced to write to furious civil servants in an attempt to calm the row.

Starmer’s supporters believe he could turn things around in 2025. The Prime Minister’s biographer Tom Baldwin says that “in every big job he’s done, he’s had a pretty rough start”, referring to his role as Labor leader. the inconvenient beginning as the director of the prosecutor’s office.

“He tries different things until he finds something that works,” Baldwin said.

Starmer’s top team is finally being formed and Tony Blair-era veterans are being brought back to the centre.Blair Downing Street stalwarts Jonathan Powell and Liz Lloyd are being brought back to reassert their roles on foreign policy and domestic reform respectively.Lord Peter Mandelson will take the lead , a New Labor veteran as US ambassador.

Pat McFadden, a Cabinet Office minister and ex-Blair fixer, and Lord Spencer Livermore, a veteran adviser to Gordon Brown, meet regularly with Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, to strategize and smooth out political wrangling.

Starmer’s allies say he will “spread his wings” and continue in the job, although any deterioration in the economic outlook or the fallout from US President-elect Donald Trump’s trade policies could force Reeves to return later in 2025. harmful tax increases.

There is some optimism in the Starmer camp that Cammy Badenoch, the Tory leader, has yet to turn out to be the political threat they first feared. “He was worried about how he would be viewed in the House of Commons, that he might look like a white man ‘explaining’ to a black woman. He was fine with it.”

Starmer, however, is worried about the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Britain, which could initially pose a threat to Badenoch’s right but which Labor strategists fear will eventually deliver. serious danger to his party as well. “People are very nervous about the reforms,” ​​said one of the ministers.

Starmer’s team says they won’t make the mistake of using the “Pied Piper strategy” adopted by US Democrats before the 2016 presidential election, when they heavily talked about Trump in the hope it could destabilize Republicans and get them down the populist rabbit hole. .

Attempting to talk to Farage in the hope that he can draw Badenoch into the populist Reform terrain could easily backfire, according to Labor strategists. Another said: “There is no template for the center-left to beat the populist right.”

Starmer’s team admits the prime minister needs to roll up his sleeves and prove to voters that a mainstream centre-left government can still deliver. “He is disappointed, everyone is disappointed,” said one Downing Street insider Let’s show that we are with them.”

McTernan said the Labor government reminded him of Eric Morecambe’s joke about “playing all the right notes but not . . . in the right order”, adding. “The founders are right, the communications haven’t been great, but it’s better than the other way around.”

Should Starmer and Reeves go into 2025 trying to inject some optimism into a political debate that has become depressing, almost fatalistic, one Labor minister sounded unsure. “I’m just not sure if Rachel and Keir are optimistic people.”