When Labour got into trouble soon after the election, Sue Gray was the scapegoat. Some of the failure to prepare for government may have been her fault, and her replacement, by Morgan McSweeney, as the prime minister’s chief of staff certainly ensured a clearer political message from No 10.
But it didn’t take long for the caravan of blame to circle round and roll over her successor. This week, some Labour MPs privately blamed McSweeney for handling disability benefits reform so badly that more than 100 of them were preparing to vote against their government.
They think McSweeney and his “overexcitable boys” are responsible for a lurch to the right, aiming to balance the nation’s books on the backs of the disabled in order to appeal to voters who might be tempted to defect to Nigel Farage.
But this is displacement activity. The idea that all Keir Starmer needs is a new set of advisers is the cry of the supposedly loyal dissident through the ages.
It cannot be long before someone suggests that No 10 should “Let Starmer be Starmer”, the starry-eyed slogan of people who have watched too much of The West Wing and who imagine that, if only the prime minister could be unleashed from his Blairite prison warders to express his true Ed Miliband brand of socialism, all will be well.
But it cannot be much longer after that that the critics realise that the prime minister himself might be the problem. Already, some otherwise loyal MPs are beginning to grumble. Starmer has voted in the Commons only seven times in his first year, they complain (BBC research found that even Tony Blair voted 13 times and Boris Johnson did 57 times); he doesn’t talk to MPs; he doesn’t understand parliament.
The ultra loyalists point out that Blair rode out huge rebellions, winning the votes on foundation hospitals (2003) by 17, and on tuition fees (2004) by five. But those were after he was on his second term, and had been in power for six years. And suddenly, Starmer’s seems like an old government rather than a new one.
An old hand from Blair’s whips office gave me an indirect answer when I asked this week where Starmer had gone wrong: “Tony Blair was a prime minister who knew what was going on, and who took risks based on good information.”
In Blair’s time, it was assumed he would win a third election, which he did in 2005, despite the BBC reporting daily, pretending to be impartial, that his “authority was draining away”. I know politics is said to have sped up, but we have reached that stage five years earlier with Starmer – and the big difference is that most people expect Labour to lose its majority at the next election.
Today’s mega-poll from YouGov, a seat-by-seat model that suggests Reform would be the largest party in a hung parliament if there were an election “tomorrow”, is “only a bit of fun” at this stage of a parliament, but the implications are far from fun for the prime minister.
Many Labour MPs expect to lose their seats and “want to leave the Commons standing tall and proud”, in the words of one rebel quoted by George Eaton of the New Statesman.
Talk of Starmer’s fall is premature, of course. Governments with three-figure majorities rarely lose votes in the Commons – if only because they offer concessions to the rebels and, if that doesn’t work, they postpone the vote.
In this case, though, making concessions or postponing the vote will only make matters worse. The public finances are already crumbling, only a few months after Rachel Reeves “fixed the foundations”. Any concession will cost more money that the chancellor does not have.
And the only reason she and Starmer are in such trouble in the first place is that they are “reforming” welfare to make savings, rather than making savings as the happy by-product of reform designed to help people into work.
No wonder a former senior civil servant to whom I spoke this week was gloomy about the prospects for the government and the country: “It feels like the end of days, even though we haven’t even reached the first anniversary.” This ex-mandarin added: “The government’s security review says that we must prepare for war at home. It looks like it has already begun.”
