Labour has been in power for 100 days – and things really must get better

Editorial: The best thing that Keir Starmer and his Tory counterpart can do is to stick to the centre ground of public opinion and work on policies that will improve people’s living standards

Labour’s post-election travails have been serious (AP)

Strange to say, but we’re now 100 days into the new political era marked by the general election – and neither of the main parties has much to celebrate.

What’s more, to borrow the downbeat language of the prime minister in his first keynote speech as premier in the Downing Street garden, for both Labour and the Conservatives it feels very much like things can only get worse before they might get better. As the nights draw in, so do their respective political prospects – at least in the short term.

Labour’s post-election travails have been the more serious, if only by virtue of the fact that they are now the governing party and they thus carry the burden of satisfying expectations.

Sir Keir Starmer and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have made a plausible case that the Conservatives deferred too many decisions on public sector pay, indulged in wishful thinking about spending plans – and bequeathed the new government an unenviable fiscal inheritance: the infamous £22bn black hole.

Yet how to fill that void was (and is) a matter of political choice and calculation. In both respects, the new team have shown an unsure political touch. A cut to the pensioners’ winter fuel payment, which raises relatively little in any case, was almost simultaneously announced with the substantial pay rises for train drivers and junior doctors. It was the wrong context and a bit of a presentational blunder.

The Tories, otherwise in disarray, were gifted some nice lines about putting their “trade union paymasters” ahead of war veterans. Ms Reeves’s perfectly rational reasoning for accepting the independent pay bodies’ recommendations was met with blank-faced hostility, particularly from members of her own party.

Since then, though, the fiscal chatter has actually grown increasingly alarming. Justified or not on wider economic and social grounds, the three principal tax rises Labour proposed in the manifesto – on private schools, non-doms and private equity – look like they’ll raise little more money, or even nothing at all.

If the reports are to be believed, the Treasury is now engaged in a frantic search for alternative sources of funds, with brutal hikes in capital gains tax, inheritance tax, stamp duty and employers’ national insurance contributions being openly canvassed.

Each has the attraction that it wasn’t explicitly ruled out in the Labour manifesto – but each also carries some risk to savings, pensions, investment, enterprise (and, thus, the very economic growth the government is seeking to foster).

For a party that talks so refreshingly about being pro-business – and which is proudly hosting a global investment summit – its deeds are not quite living up to expectations. The emerging plan to borrow to invest by adjusting the definition of the national debt is more encouraging, but cannot relieve the pressure on day-to-day public spending and the taxes needed to find it.

All of those interlinked fiscal struggles will be what defines this administration – and determines its chances of winning a second term to carry on with its “decade of renewal”.

The fuss about Sir Keir’s expensive suits and designer glasses – and Yvette Cooper’s Taylor Swift tickets, to some extent confected by a hostile media – will be long forgotten, provided Labour MPs exercise some self-restraint and the NHS and schools show demonstrable improvements. All would then be forgiven. Ms Reeves’s Budget, not Waheed Alli’s hospitality budget, will set the path for the country.

The role Sue Gray did (or did not) play in the early missteps of the Starmer administration will be a matter for the students of the machinery of government – and will drive few, if any, votes by the summer of 2029. Perhaps to her own relief, Ms Gray will retreat to the relative obscurity she enjoyed before Partygate.

For the Conservatives, the period since their historic election has been something of a hiatus, at best.

Rishi Sunak has placed himself on light duties, skipping even a proper leader’s speech at the conference, and his shocked party has been mostly awol from the national stage. Yet, even with (effectively) no leader, no new policies and a sometimes acrimonious leadership contest, the party has actually edged up in the opinion polls, which may prove something.

Their problems will worsen when they pick a new leader, because they have, through some grotesque comedy of errors, lumbered themselves with a choice between two right-wingers, currently competing in a Nigel Farage impersonator competition.

It is deeply dismaying for the many Tories who still adhere to the One Nation tradition that they are being asked to choose between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. Some say they will boycott the contest to protest. Yet choose they must – for, as Damian Green, a prominent moderate, explains in The Independent there is always a “least bad” option.

For many, on the totemic issue of human rights, it is a choice between someone who says they will take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights but might not in practice do so (Mr Jenrick), against someone who says they might leave it altogether, and whose instincts are definitely pointing towards the exit if she gets the chance (Ms Badenoch). There is a temporary feel about their putative party leadership.

If the Tory party managers planned this extraordinarily long leadership contest in order to erode the lead of the initial frontrunner, Ms Badenoch, in the hope that a more centrist figure – probably James Cleverly – would emerge as the winner, then the plot has spectacularly failed.

The only hope for the Tory party now is that Ms Badenoch or Mr Jenrick decide to form a “unity” shadow cabinet representing all wings of the party – and that the usual centripetal electoral forces push the Conservatives back towards the centre ground.

But the indicators are not good, mainly because of the almost mesmeric hold Mr Farage exerts over an organisation he is pledged to destroy. The more Reform UK go up in the polls, the more the Conservatives attempt to ape them – as they have, indeed, since the rise of Mr Farage’s first vehicle, Ukip.

At that time, the pressure gave David Cameron the idea of an EU referendum to take the heat off his government. Fair to say, it didn’t work out that well – and the lesson has not been learned: that no one can out-Farage Farage.

The best thing that Sir Keir and his Tory counterpart can do is to stick to the centre ground of public opinion and work on policies that will improve people’s living standards, without removing their human rights or weakening British democracy.

It sounds straightforward enough but – as the last 100 days show – it’s far easier said than done.