Friends of Sir Keir Starmer say the Prime Minister needs a holiday. After a year of electoral victory followed by a sharp decline in support – with no respite in between – the UK Labor Party's senior leadership looks exhausted.
“He needs a break, they all need a break,” said a confidant. “These are people who haven't had a year off. They're crawling to the finish line.” The big question facing Starmer It is whether he can return refreshed from a New Year holiday abroad and revive his ailing administration.
The Financial Times spoke to ministers, aides, business leaders and Labor MPs – most of whom spoke anonymously – to piece together what Starmer did wrong after his landslide election victory on July 4, and whether the Prime Minister can turn things around.
His ambition to lead a “service government” was disrupted by an almost constant stream of aberrations or blunders: the summer riots, the clothing donations scandal, the departure of Sue Gray, the budget fallout.
“He's really disappointed about the way the first few months have gone,” a Downing Street insider said. “Not only is it a waste of time, it is a waste of political capital.”
Publicly, Starmer is defiant. When asked by the Commons Liaison Committee last week if he would have done anything differently, the Prime Minister said: “No.” He achieved planning and pension reforms and railway nationalization among his government's achievements.
However, no recent prime minister has seen such a catastrophic decline in popular support in such a short period of time. Some Labor MPs have begun discussing who might replace Starmer and lead the Labor Party at the next election.
There is now broad agreement in the Treasury that the £1.5bn cut in winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners in late July was a major political mistake, one that sowed the seeds of many of the problems the government later faced.
“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 pick up on the cost-saving idea long promoted by the Treasury.
The decision raised a feeling around Starmer's new government that… exhaustion It wouldn't be much different from the Conservatives, who were just ousted after 14 years in power. Starmer accepting £32,000 worth of free suits and glasses added to this narrative.
John McTiernan, a former Labor aide in Downing Street, said: “Cutting winter fuel payments was a huge mistake because it was done out of context, in the long four-month gap between the election and the budget. It had a fundamental effect in stabilizing perception of this government.” .
Reeves hailed the cut in winter fuel payments as evidence of the need to make “difficult decisions” to address what she claimed was “the worst economic legacy of any government since the Second World War”.
Senior Labor figures admit the pessimistic message was exaggerated, contributing to a loss of confidence in business. “We were very pessimistic,” one minister said. “We may have done the right thing but we lack the story of why we did those things.”
The ministers admit that the party was also not ready to form a government. “Pre-election access talks did not start early enough,” one minister said, referring to discussions taking place between opposition politicians and the civil service to prepare a plan for the government.
Gray, Starmer's former chief of staff, is widely blamed in Starmer's circles for a lack of preparedness, not just in terms of policy but also personnel. “The entire process of appointing ministers was a mess,” one minister said.
Gray was eventually forced out of her job by Starmer 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 turn things around,” one Labor official said. “People were just in shock. There was the shock of me being in government, then the riots, then the party conference. It wasn't all Sue's fault.”
Then came Reeves' Budget on October 30, an event that caused a major rift with the business community that Labor had courted so strongly before the election. Economic recession A decline in business confidence ensued.
The sense of betrayal caused by Reeves' £25 billion National Insurance increase on employers was enormous, but it also had a knock-on effect on the economy. Surveys measure confidence in manufacturing and Recruitment plans fell through The economy is sharply stable.
“It's not up to the job,” said one FTSE 100 manager. “The collapse of confidence in the business world has been catastrophic. I think it is exaggerated, but it has happened.”
The cumulative effect of all these setbacks has been to erode morale at the heart of the Starmer administration. “There is a slight trust issue,” admitted one person who works closely with Starmer.
An attempt to relaunch the government in December saw Starmer set six policy “milestones” to focus his government’s energy and resources, but he generated more headlines by claiming that some civil servants were “comforting in the tepid bath of targeted decline”.
“I can't understand where that came from,” one minister said. “I would have been upset.” Starmer was then forced to write to angry civil servants to try to calm the row.
Starmer's supporters believe he can turn things around in 2025. Tom Baldwin, the prime minister's biographer, said that “in every big job he's ever had, he's had a very difficult start”, referring to the awkward beginnings in his role as Labor and Labor leader. As Director of Public Prosecution.
“He tries different things until he finds something that works,” Baldwin said. “It's not glamorous or inspiring, but it's probably not only the best way to dig yourself out of a hole, but it's also the best way to run the country.”
Starmer's top team is finally beginning to take shape, with Tony Blair's veterans restored to the centre. Jonathan Powell and Liz Lloyd, two stalwarts of Blair's operation in Downing Street, have been brought back to retake their roles in foreign policy and domestic reform, respectively. Lord Peter Mandelson, a New Labor veteran, will take on the lead role As ambassador to the United States.
Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister and former Blair fixer, and Lord Spencer Livermore, a veteran adviser to Gordon Brown, meet regularly with Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, to plan strategy and defuse policy differences. The media team has been strengthened.
Starmer's allies say he will “roll up his sleeves” and get on with the job, although any deterioration in the economic outlook – or the damaging fallout from US President-elect Donald Trump's trade policy – could force Reeves to return later in 2025 for more policy. Harmful tax increases.
There is some optimism in Starmer's camp that Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, has yet to turn out to be the political threat they initially feared. A Downing Street insider said: “He was worried about how things would look in the House of Commons – that he might look like a white man 'cursing' a black woman. He handled it well.”
However, Starmer is concerned about the rise of Nigel Farage's UK Reform Party, which may initially pose a threat to the right in Badenoch, but which Labor strategists fear will eventually pose a threat. Serious danger For her party as well. “People are feeling very nervous about reform,” one minister said.
Starmer's team says they will not make the mistake of deploying the “pied piper strategy” adopted by US Democrats ahead of the 2016 presidential election, when they actively talked about Trump in the hope it would destabilize Republicans and send them down the populist rabbit hole. .
Trying to talk about Farage in the hope that he can pull Badenoch into the populist reform arena could easily backfire, according to Labor strategists. One of them said: “If you do that, you may suddenly find yourself wondering: What did we create?” Another said: “There is no model in which the center left beats the populist right.”
Starmer's team acknowledges that the Prime Minister must roll up his sleeves and prove to voters that a mainstream centre-left government can still deliver results. “He's frustrated, everyone is frustrated,” a Downing Street insider said. “We have to show people that we are on their side.”
McTernan said the Labor government reminded him of Eric Morecambe's joke about hitting “all the right notes but not…”. . . In the right order,” he said, adding: “The fundamentals are right, the communications were not good, but this is better than the opposite.”
Should Starmer and Reeves go into 2025 trying to inject some optimism into a political debate that has become somber, almost murderous? One Labor minister seemed unsure: “I'm not sure whether Rachel and Keir are optimistic people.”
