Keir Starmer has declared war on whoever has been in charge since July

The PM’s ‘plan for change’ is like a manifesto for throwing out the rascals who have been wasting time for the past five months, writes John Rentoul

Today’s event in Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire looked and sounded like the launch of a manifesto. Anyone tuning in without being told might think that the petition for an immediate general election had been successful, and that Keir Starmer was campaigning against whoever had been in charge since July.

He complained that productivity in the public sector had declined – a decline that would not be tolerated in the private sector. “I’m not going to subsidise it with ever-rising taxes on the British people,” he said, having just raised taxes on the British people.

But the more strenuously he proclaimed his “huge” and “ambitious” plan for change, the more striking was the contrast with the confusion, uncertainty and caution of the past five months.

He has found himself in the same trap as Tony Blair in his first year as prime minister. Blair was frustrated to find himself in what he called the “post-euphoria, pre-delivery” phase. Starmer is in the same bind, but without having ever experienced the euphoria.

He is making the same mistakes that Blair made, too, but unlike Blair, he doesn’t have the money to fix things later. Blair admitted he had very little idea of how to turn round public services to start with. He protested that he felt the “scars on my back” from trying to drive change in the public sector.

Today, Starmer complained that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. Like Blair, he tried to counter the inertia of the system by exhortation. At least Blair was good at inspiring people and could communicate a clear sense of the kind of country he wanted us to be.

Under questioning from journalists, Starmer’s gears started to grind as he admitted how hard it would be to hit the target of building 1.5 million homes, but ended up sounding like Donald Trump. “We’re going to go for it. We’re going to do this,” he said. “It will be an incredible thing.”

But Blair found that making speeches wasn’t enough; he needed the right people and the right policies to deliver better public services. That made the lineup of cabinet ministers in the front row especially interesting. They were humiliated by being shipped out to Buckinghamshire to clap like seals for the TV cameras, but also to have their hands dipped in the blood of recalibrated targets, which have mostly been decided in 10 Downing Street.

The other mistake Blair made was not getting the right people in his cabinet to start with. Partly, that was unavoidable because it is only in government that good ministers shine and weak ones sink. As we surveyed the front row for Starmer’s speech, it was notable how many of them had already taken a battering. Rachel Reeves, charged with raising living standards (with the fastest growth in the G7 demoted to a sub-clause), has seen her stock falling since the decision to cut winter fuel payments, which I am told even Starmer now thinks was “a mistake”.

There is already low-level murmuring in Westminster that Wes Streeting, in charge of one of the most important targets, namely clearing the NHS backlog, is better at communication than delivery. Of the ministers in charge of the targets that matter, only Yvette Cooper, charged with “reducing immigration, legal and illegal”, has had a good start in government. Yet she faces an impossible task in cutting the numbers arriving by small boat, which is the most visible part of her brief.

The logic of a manifesto launch five months after an election is not mistaken. One of the lessons of the Blair period is that you have to start campaigning for the next election as soon as you have won one. Government has to be a permanent election campaign, alongside the unglamorous task of administration. But the setting of targets repeatedly, especially if they keep being adjusted, added to and subtracted, should be an inward-facing activity, not a public one.

The general public are not interested in such events. Their attitude is “show, don’t tell” – in other words, “come back to us when you have actually delivered some of your pledges”. And journalists regard them as simply a chance to spot contradictions, waterings down and hostages to fortune.

The most telling moment today was when the prime minister engaged in a close textual dispute with LBC about the order in which the words “foundations”, “missions” and “milestones” had actually been deployed.

If Starmer is back in another five months with another exercise in renaming and recalibrating his targets, we will know that the game is up.