Inside Keir Starmer's preparations for power
Getty Images“A face of thunder.” As opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer would go back to his office after the State Opening of Parliament deeply frustrated after witnessing the Conservatives’ plans laid out year after year. He carried the curse of the leader of the opposition – irrelevance.
He formally became prime minister at lunchtime on Friday, but for a number of months now, he has also known that the British state has been quietly preparing for his arrival in Downing Street.
“We have every hour of his first day, every day of his first week, every week of his first month, mapped out," is how one Whitehall source put it. What promise this victory holds is not going to fail because of a lack of homework or planning.
Such is the level of preparation that the Treasury, in anticipation of the arrival of the first female chancellor, has apparently boxed in the urinal that has long been a feature of the chancellor’s private bathroom. Not exactly bog standard stuff, you could say (sorry!).
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Rachel Reeves is one of the prominent figures in Sir Keir’s team, among them also Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson, who have been deeply involved for months in getting ready to govern. Senior civil servants and their shadow ministers have been talking for some time and Sir Keir and some of his team have been regular attendees at Cobra meetings, and security briefings.
One, now a cabinet minister, told me: “We have got personal relationships with the permanent secretary and the senior officials already.“
The former civil servant Sue Gray, who will now be the PM's chief of staff, has been in regular contact with Cabinet Secretary Sir Simon Case, since the turn of the year. After the headlines of the Labour leader's missions had been turned into policies, they were then made into “implementation plans" for government. The calls between Ms Gray and Sir Simon became almost daily.
There has been some perhaps less obvious assistance, too. At least two former Conservative ministers have been helping them prepare, including one recent cabinet minister who told me: “It’s ridiculous we just hand over a trillion pound budget” without the kind of transition that an American president, for example, enjoys.
The plan for government
Despite the scale of victory, the Labour manifesto, based on Sir Keir’s mission, is not about to be usurped with a huge bold unknown move.
“There are no secrets,” one senior figure told me. Another source told me the election result is a vindication of the PM's cautious approach and it is not a “vote for a more radical, bold approach”.
Expect strong resistance to any calls from the left that the scale of the change “proves” Labour could have been more radical in what they put forward. Some in his party may demand a rapid cessation of arm sales to Israel. Labour losing seats and nearly losing others to opponents standing on a pro-Gaza platform will only make those calls more urgent.
Other demands may include an overt commitment to safeguard public services, a longer-term promise to remove the two-child benefit cap and even regular trade union access to No 10. But with a massive majority, there is no suggestion that Sir Keir will feel he is in the mood to redraft his carefully worked out plans.
Instead the new prime minister has held up the result as a rejection of the Tory Party and a vote for a different type of leadership, and frankly, less drama.
But his style, and the gradual way in which his plans were built over a period of many months, belies some very significant changes Labour wants. These include an expansion of rights for workers, a rapid overhaul of the planning system and a state energy company.
In the short-term, new ministers are likely to do everything they can to talk up how they want to get the economy to grow. It won’t be entirely coincidental if within a few weeks, companies start writing cheques for the UK, or that pent -up investments that were waiting for a change of government start to come through.
And it’s likely that before long there will be new draft laws to give more powers to the government’s independent economic watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility. One of the big first decisions the new chancellor needs to make is when to hold a huge review of the public finances with the teeth clenching decisions it might involve.
The so-called spending review, which portions out cash between departments, expires at the end of the year. It sounds like a dull decision but it is massively important. Ms Reeves will have to decide whether to roll over the existing Tory spending plans for a year, to give her more space to work out a longer-term plan, or crack on with her own review by the end of 2024. Watch this space.
Beware of drift
The Labour mantra in public, and in private has been not just to win, but to be ready to get things done. In their mind are what they see as the lessons of New Labour and Tony Blair’s frustration with the slow pace of change. One new minister tells of a meeting where they briefed the former PM about their plans and he warned them: “I so deeply regret that we didn’t hit the ground running on reform."
“Keir has taken this incredibly seriously," the minister told me.
Appointing the cabinet’s been done, but there are dozens of other MPs to receive government jobs, with advisers and new members of the House of Lords. They include the former Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance who has been appointed as a minister of state at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
I’m told the former health secretary, Alan Milburn, is likely to take a senior, though not ministerial, role at the Department of Health to help drive waiting lists down. Other departments and other appointments might throw up some interesting names.
But for all the preparation and experience, the receipt of power and responsibility is huge.
One official said of incoming prime ministers: “They come in exhausted from this now-seemingly endless campaign, they come in elated, they appoint their cabinet – that is a great moment for them. And then sour-faced people like me say, ‘now, can I talk to you about the end of the world!’”
Sir Keir is in a hurry not just to show the public that his government can actually get things done after years of visible political shambles. But he’s also been counselled to make the most of the early goodwill from his vast ranks of new victors, before, inevitably in time, however long, the Parliamentary Labour Party starts to flex its muscles.
One former Labour adviser told me, he should "Go quick! Go fast, before they find the loos!"
It is true that his team has tried very hard to control the quality of candidates, and many loyalists will be picking up their pass for the first day in the big palace soon. But as former prime ministers have found, bright-eyed new recruits don’t stay eager forever.
Problems and Pitfalls
Labour’s scale of victory is something they could have hardly dreamed of not so long ago. But their elation this weekend doesn’t make some of the very tricky realities of governing go away.
Whenever she’s been near a microphone in recent months, Ms Reeves has been warning of what she calls the "worst economic inheritance since the Second World War" or as she said at her election count in Leeds "there is not a huge amount of money".
Waiting lists are sky high. Prisons are overcrowded. Millions of families are struggling to make ends meet. This was an election result driven partly by voters’ clear feeling that nothing works.
That sense is not confined to public perception. As one senior Whitehall official told me: “Things really are worse on the inside than you can see from outside."
Labour’s ministerial teams have been discussing how to tell the public how bad, in their view, things really are. No sooner had Mr Streeting been appointed health secretary than he said: “From today the policy of this department is that the NHS is broken.”
A sceptic might also say Labour will be keen to brand the problems once and for all as the Tories’ fault.
The mission
What of the new PM himself? It’s not lost on the public, or his political critics, that he has been willing to junk old promises, and indeed, to junk old colleagues if need be. His backers say it’s a sign of strength, and was a lesson he had to learn - ditching what one source described as “nauseating” pleas for party unity for a clearer priority, the desire to win.
It is no easier now to get to the bottom of what Sir Keir believes in than it was when I first sat down with him. Back then he was pitching for the leadership of his party, when his aim to get them back into power looked fanciful.
He and his team had come up with the phrase “moral socialism”. Then, as now, it sounded like a slogan designed for a Guardian newspaper headline rather than something the public could latch on to. He told me he wanted to persuade people that Labour and politicians could be a “force for good and a force for change“. That’s a line that could feature in one of his many interviews or speeches four years later, where still, you might be searching for a grand ideological mantra.
But perhaps to hunt for an ideology is to miss the point. He is not a factional politician who’s been in the trade, man and boy, not a product of student union elections, decades of party conferences, fevered debates about the purity of particular policies.
For his backers, that arguable absence of an ideology is his huge advantage. “He’ll be the most normal PM we’ve ever had,” says one insider. One minister tells me he belongs not to any faction but to the party. “He is theirs,” the new minister says. Whether Sir Keir can make the public feel that kind of direct connection with him as a leader seems ambitious and highly uncertain.
He sometimes apes Tony Blair, saying he’ll return politics to serve the people through what he terms national renewal. But despite the size of the majority, there is little sign at this moment that he could achieve that kind of incredible personal popularity the 1997 victor saw.
A second term?
It was Sir Keir’s belief that the modern electorate could be incredibly volatile that led him to have faith that he could turn the 2019 disaster round.
The willingness of so many voters to change their minds has been Keir Starmer’s friend at this election but if that volatility is here to stay, it could become his foe.
In time, and perhaps soon, Labour will start plotting privately how this term in office can be extended into what Starmer has already set out as his goal of a “decade of renewal“. Just before polling day, one insider joked: “I’m never not thinking about winning the next election.”
By any traditional measure, a majority on this scale would see a prime minister securely locked into two terms of office. But in 2024 that feels less certain.
For now for Labour, there is a moment of profound celebration. No more the impotence of opposition. No more the pain of losing yet again. No more “face of thunder” for the new prime minister, or the frustration of being irrelevant.
As we saw in Downing Street yesterday, after all the waiting, he can allow himself a smile.
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