It is the sort of thing a backbencher who is trying to be loyal would say. Which is damning, and particularly so from the prime minister himself, because a core part of his job is communicating the government’s “story”.
He was asked in Canada on Wednesday what his biggest mistake had been in his first year in government. “We haven’t always told our story as well as we should,” he said.
Most politicians would have bristled at the obvious trap laid by Beth Rigby of Sky News, but Keir Starmer is a surprisingly low-ego politician. No other British prime minister would have bent down to pick up the trade deal papers that Donald Trump dropped.
Most other prime ministers would have ignored Rigby’s invitation to criticise themselves, especially as the second half of a two-part question, but Starmer came back to it willingly after answering the first part (what are you most proud of? “Three million extra appointments in the NHS”).
He is not self-important, which I admire about him, but he is ruthless and confident. Confident enough not to notice or care that the photographers are recording him scrabbling at the president’s feet, and confident enough to give a serious answer to an obviously silly question.
Unfortunately for him, it was a bad answer. Communication is not an optional add-on to democratic politics; it is the essence of it. Poor communication is usually an excuse not an explanation. It is the code to be used when a government becomes unpopular but people do not want to imply that the leader is the problem. Poor communications and bad advisers get the blame.
It was ever thus: when parliament criticised Charles I’s advisers; when Margaret Thatcher was told to get rid of Alan Walters, her economic adviser. Charles I was urged to get his message across better to MPs by denouncing popery; Thatcher was urged to sell the poll tax better by calling it the community charge. In both cases, it wasn’t the advisers or the communications that were the problem.
So it is with Starmer. MPs grumble about Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff. They blame him for the “right-wing” policies that they don’t like. They have all read Get In, the book about how Labour won the election by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, which portrays McSweeney as the mastermind and strategic genius behind a campaign for which Starmer is often the passive figurehead.
This is often developed, by MPs who “didn’t come into politics to cut support for the disabled”, into a fairytale in which Starmer, a proper socialist who shares Ed Miliband’s politics (like them), has been taken prisoner by his Blairite chief of staff. If that is an attempt to avoid direct criticism of their leader, it fails, because it makes him look weak and dishonest.
But it is also wrong. In the end, the leader always takes responsibility for decisions. Nor is Starmer simply McSweeney’s puppet. A telling report in the Financial Times on Wednesday revealed that the plan to treat Nigel Farage even more publicly as the real leader of the opposition came from Starmer himself, and not McSweeney: it was the prime minister’s idea to travel to St Helens to deliver a speech as a direct response to Farage’s pitch for Labour votes.
Farage is the main threat to Labour at the next election, but it may be that McSweeney has doubts about the prime minister himself saying so in public.
The “poor communications” line is just as bad – and it is a defence that Starmer deploys himself. What does he mean when he says “we” could have “explained our decisions in the way that might in retrospect have been better”? Could he have said to pensioners on modest incomes, “We’re going to take away your winter fuel payment, but don’t worry, next year we will pretend that the economy is getting better and give it back to you”?
The reason his government’s decisions have not been explained better is that they were bad decisions. In retrospect, as he put it, he should have stopped Rachel Reeves cutting the winter fuel payment. Looking back, he shouldn’t have promised to “smash the gangs” with no idea how to do it. Looking further back, he should have put someone with his full authority in charge of preparing for government.
These are not examples of failing to tell the government’s story “as well as we should”: they reveal a government with no story to tell, or even, quite often, with the wrong story to tell.
Starmer has shown that he can learn, and he seems to have no fear of U-turning from the wrong policy to the right one. So maybe he can recover from the false start of his first year – but it will be achieved by making better decisions, not by “telling a better story”.
