Keir Starmer a one-term prime minister? A rocky start has raised the question

At the end of a difficult second half of the year for the Labour leader, he will find it difficult not to ponder what has gone wrong – but he still has one key asset, time to turn things around, says Andrew Grice

At a pre-Christmas social event, senior Labour figures – including ministers – found themselves discussing this question: will Keir Starmer be a one-term prime minister?

It was remarkable in two senses: not just because Starmer won a majority of 174 less than six months ago, but also because the premise of the question was not Labour losing the next election, but that Starmer – who will be 66 come spring 2029 – will have had enough by then. So much for his desired “decade of renewal”...

That the prospect is even being discussed reflects his government’s troubled start. As he approaches the new year, Starmer will find it hard not to ponder what has gone wrong.

I’m afraid I don’t buy his “je ne regrette rien” statement to the liaison committee of senior MPs. Asked if he would have done anything differently knowing what he knows now, he replied “No” in an effort to avoid headlines about admitting mistakes – of which there were several. Labour was woefully unprepared for government.

Starmer entrusted his then chief of staff Sue Gray with too much power. “If there was a plan for government, it existed only in Sue Gray’s head,” one Starmer ally told me ruefully. Gray departed after an internal power struggle – which, along with a controversy over freebies that Labour was slow to close down, derailed the government.

Labour’s woes can’t all be laid at Gray’s door though. Rachel Reeves’s first Budget in October was delayed for far too long. Some senior Labour figures now think she should have postponed her ill-fated decision to means-test the winter fuel allowance from July until a September Budget, so that this apparent attack on pensioners did not become emblematic of the new government.

Some ministers think the chancellor was too addicted to making her “£22bn black hole” argument from day one. With hindsight, her Budget could have announced that the nation’s books were in a much worse state than the Treasury expected. She could then have spread her tax rises more widely, and not relied so heavily on the £25bn hike in employers’ national insurance, which has ruptured Labour’s relationship with business.

Labour has a story to tell about its rotten inheritance and its own project, but has not told it well. “We haven’t answered the ‘Why?’ question,” one Labour MP admitted. Blairites grumble that Starmer has not adopted Tony Blair’s mantra of ensuring that his policies hang together “like the washing on a line”.

Indeed, there is a disconnect between the government’s soft-left actions and its much tougher rhetoric. A shift to a European-style economy, with higher tax and spending; renationalising the rail industry; a state-owned energy company; an extension of workers’ rights and higher minimum wage – these all seem at odds with the centrist instincts of the powerful triangle who, ministers say, usually call the shots: Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff; Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister; and Wes Streeting, the ambitious and energetic health secretary.

Starmer’s tough language on immigration, aimed at countering the threat from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, is disliked by soft-left ministers, who point out that more migrant workers will be needed if Labour is to have any hope of delivering its promised 1.5 million new homes in five years. Nor did the soft left like Starmer’s unwise criticism of the civil service – an attempt to compete with Farage as a “disrupter” by attacking the system. It backfired, and Starmer had to backtrack.

The underlying tensions broke the surface when Streeting criticised Ed Miliband, unofficial leader of the cabinet’s soft-left faction, for his refusal as opposition leader to back military action against the Assad regime in Syria in 2013. Streeting’s friends deny claims that he is on manoeuvres of his own designed to ensure he succeeds Starmer.

Those on the soft left were alarmed by the rather bizarre enforced resignation of Louise Haigh; one of their own. They say the former transport secretary was one of the cabinet’s best performers, and suspect that Starmer would not have sacked an ultra-loyalist if they had acted in the same way.

Whose side of Labour’s ideological divide is Starmer on? Even his cabinet ministers don’t know. He is a technocrat rather than a party politician. He is not – yet – a good storyteller, and, his allies admit, has not stamped his personality on the government.

Voters knew what Margaret Thatcher and Blair stood for, even if they didn’t like them. People don’t feel the same about Starmer. Labour’s direction under Blair was fixed before his 1997 landslide; the party knew where it was heading in government. But one Starmer adviser admitted: “Keir didn’t resolve the internal debate in opposition. I thought it would be decided by the government’s actions, but it has still not been settled.”

The PM still has one asset – enough time to turn things round. But he surely has no more time to waste. It’s time for everyone in the government to get fully behind Starmer, build the Labour brand around him, and forget the faction-fighting over the party’s direction.