After a challenging start, can Labour pull a rabbit out of the hat?

Peter Cardwell, Senior Counsel
7/10/2024

It may seem a political lifetime ago, but it’s just 13 weeks since Sir Keir Starmer led Labour to a historic victory involving the election of no fewer than 411 Labour MPs, giving him an initial working majority of 174.  At the time, the Observer’s leader column, expressing the paper’s institutional opinion, wrote: "The grownups are back in Westminster. The Tory psychodramas inside No 10 have been replaced by a serious Labour government focused on delivery. It’s going to take time for all of us to make the adjustment.”  How hollow those words seem to many now given all that has happened.

Instead, Labour that has had a particularly bad adjustment from opposition to government.  The problems for Sir Keir Starmer are immense and it is striking how few of them are very much to do at all with the actual business of governing the United Kingdom.

Amongst many other challenges, not least dealing with a burgeoning conflict in the Middle East, Sir Keir has had to suspend MPs, has faced an ongoing scandal in regard to gifts and in the past 24 hours has lost his chief of staff, Sue Gray, after associated dire headlines and internal pressure.  One poll even puts the approval rating of Sir Keir’s administration below that of the Sunak administration it succeeded, to say nothing of the Prime Minister’s own bad personal approval ratings.  Saying that, he is in fact the most popular politician in the UK currently, although that is slightly like saying he’s the tallest of Snow White’s housemates.

Over the past fortnight, I have been in both Liverpool for the Labour conference and Birmingham for the Conservative conference.  Labour might well have been expected to be triumphant, buoyant and in a celebratory mood, but, in contrast, it was one of the tensest of these affairs I have been to.  There were few smiles – though a few parties, granted – but the mood was one of gloom and disappointment at the early weeks of the Labour administration, even from the people who made the victory happen by campaigning for it.

Birmingham was totally different.  The Conservatives are at their lowest ebb for over a century and yet the party delegates seemed buoyed by the four leadership contenders.  I get the sense that was because there were four people in Birmingham offering to rescue the Conservatives, to drag them away from the doldrums.  Perhaps that optimism was because for the Conservatives, dare I say it, things can only get better.  Tomorrow and Wednesday they will whittle the four contenders down to two and perhaps get more coverage as the contest will be more focused.

Focus is also what Labour needs.  The Budget is less than a month away.  Hamstrung by this, Labour’s conference had little in the way of policy announcements as to not preempt the dramatic interventions that appear to be promised by Chancellor Rachel Reeves.  Taxes will go up, borrowing may mushroom and further problems stored up as Labour attempts to reform public services, stem strikes and get the country back on the road to stability again.  It’s a huge task in the best of times, but, as Sir Keir had found in just a few short weeks, these are not the best of times for him economically or politically.

Within a week of the Budget, there will be a new leader of the Conservatives to snap at Sir Keir’s heels, a new American president to do business with and the new economic framework Rachel Reeves will have outlined.  That is the key moment of reset which Sir Keir needs to grasp.