Two days after the GNU in South Africa officially took office, Keir Starmer became the first Labour prime minister in the UK since Gordon Brown.
Labour was out of office for fourteen years. Starmer, as the new inhabitant of 10 Downing Street, was expected to make the most of his significant political mandate. He is a reputable and seemingly capable former chief of the Crown Prosecution Service, with a massive majority of 174 seats in the House of Commons. He is faced with a severely weakened Tory opposition with not enough seats to properly shadow the roughly 122 government roles held by Labour MPs, and he is the successor to a string of unimpressive Conservative premiers.
It was not to be.
Labour’s honeymoon evaporated fast. Within weeks of taking office, far-right riots triggered the first crisis for Starmer. Despite his prosecutorial background, he was widely considered as having handled the situation badly, delaying a meeting of COBRA, the UK’s grouping of top government ministers and officials responsible for responding to drastic events.
Austerity
Shortly afterwards, Starmer’s chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, announced that the government would cut winter fuel payments to pensioners. The Labour Party, originally responsible for the creation of the modern British welfare state, experienced vicious splits over what was seen internally as a cruel austerity measure targeting vulnerable people ahead of the cold winter months.
Starmer’s problems escalated just as Labour went into its first annual party conference from government since 2009. What should have been an event of renewed confidence for a party with a massive majority turned into a fractious and muted affair, as damaging stories emerged of Starmer and his wife accepting expensive gifts and benefits from a Labour member of the Lords, the upper house of Parliament. It was immediately reminiscent of the type of sleaze that had sunk the premiership of Boris Johnson, whom Starmer had piously cast as his charlatan opposite.
Compounding Starmer’s swift political deflation was infighting within 10 Downing Street between Sue Gray, a former senior civil servant appointed to be Starmer’s chief of staff in September 2023, and Morgan McSweeney, the political operative responsible for the strategy that had secured Labour its parliamentary majority. On 6 October, following weeks of damaging briefings concerning Gray (amongst other things, the revelation that her salary was bigger than Starmer’s), Gray was out, with McSweeney taking her place.
In less than a hundred days in office, Starmer was forced into an embarrassing reshuffle of his top staff.
Other side of the aisle
On the other side of the aisle, the Conservative Party underwent a long leadership election to replace Rishi Sunak, who’d stayed on after the disastrous election as caretaker. The two-phased process started with a series of ballots amongst the 121-strong Tory parliamentary caucus, reducing an initial six candidates to two: former business, housing, and equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, and former immigration minister, Robert Jenrick.
The narrowing of the field last week to these two candidates, both considered to be to the right of the party, came as a surprise. It had been expected that one figure from the centre-left and one from the right would, as per historical precedent, be put through to the party membership for final voting. James Cleverly, former home and foreign secretary, was widely expected to face either Badenoch or Jenrick. Cleverly’s elimination therefore caused audible gasps in Westminster Palace.
The final result of the membership ballot will be announced on 2 November, with Badenoch the clear favourite. Badenoch, known for her combative personality, is running for the leadership on a ticket to fundamentally rethink the Conservative party’s ideological assumptions. She is said to be intent on taming the size of government and in favour of free market principles.
Added pressure
Amidst Starmer’s first stumbling months, some economic indicators have added pressure on the Labour government. However, the party will be in power for at least four more years, giving significant time for Starmer to improve the government’s position.
With the Tories reduced to 121 seats, the real focus in terms of impacts on or threats to government policy will come from splits within the Labour party which, under Starmer, has become a loose coalition of so-called Blairite social democrats, the soft-left with lesser appetite for market competition, and the hard-left: remnants of the politically disastrous leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
The weakening of Starmer’s government so soon after his taking office will likely cause problems for more moderate and centrist factions within the large parliamentary Labour caucus. The hard left will likely see in Starmer’s declining popularity proof that centrism on the economy and matters like foreign policy are a betrayal of Labour voters and the left-wing legacy of the Labour Party.
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