The paranoid style
With every reset and reversal, the prime minister sends his party deeper into confusion and anxiety
If we have learnt one thing about Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership since the general election, it is that he cannot hold a position. Whenever a policy becomes too politically difficult to defend, or meets organised resistance within the parliamentary Labour party, he retreats. More than policy incoherence, he lacks a governing project, and this weekend, after another week of chaos, the prime minister has never appeared more isolated as even once-close allies turn against him.
The list of Labour U-turns is already long. It includes: retaining the two-child benefit cap (loathed by the soft left but expected to be lifted at a cost of £3.5 billion); welfare reform (abandoned before the summer recess after a backbench rebellion); cutting the winter fuel benefit for most pensioners (subsequently and correctly reversed, notably while Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was abroad); the “island of strangers” immigration speech (attacked as Powellite and ultimately disowned by Starmer after colleagues had been sent out to defend it); and now the proposed rise in the base rate of income tax in the 26 November budget (prepared for, then abruptly dropped).
Starmer would call his style pragmatic: if the facts change, or resistance is strong enough, or his north London progressive friends are unsettled enough, he will change his mind. “I don’t have any ideology,” he once told colleagues. “There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be. I will make decisions one after the other.”
What he should have said is: “I will make decisions one after the other and then reverse them.” Just when you think this government has reached its nadir, it lurches into yet another self-inflicted crisis. As I wrote here last week, ever since the botched “reset” in early September, Starmer has been presiding over a state of permacrisis. It goes on and deepens.
Now imagine if Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, had summoned the media to Downing Street before the markets opened last week simply to brief us on her budget proposals for a “smorgasbord” of smaller tax rises. The response would have been bewilderment. Why the need for an urgent, “scene-setter” speech there was no requirement to make?
Reeves spoke instead of national crisis and the need for national sacrifice (“each of us must do our bit”). She blamed external forces beyond her control for a projected £30 billion shortfall in public finances. Meanwhile, our much-travelled prime minister was in Brazil, with Ed Miliband and Prince William at a pre-Cop jamboree, although he had been advised not to attend by senior colleagues and his chief of staff.
Starmer is a happy tourist but unhappy prime minister. Small wonder he wants to get out of the country. In his absence, Reeves was sent out alone to bring bad news about the budget. After last year’s tax-raising budget, she told voters she would not “be coming back with more borrowing or more taxes”. Now she was coming back for more and preparing for the Big One – a manifesto-breaking rise in income tax.
She later told the BBC that “it would of course be possible to stick with the manifesto commitments. But that would require things like deep cuts in capital spending.”
Many Labour MPs were dismayed, not only by the prospect of breaching a totemic manifesto pledge that should never have been made, but also by how voters would react to both an income tax rise and the abolition of the two-child benefit cap, a change long opposed by Reeves and by Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff. Raising income tax to fund higher welfare spending, when spending on health and disability benefits are already out of control, is poison for the self-styled party of work.
As it is now claimed, Reeves had prepared two budget “scenarios”. The first broke the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax, VAT or employees’ national insurance. The second offered what “officials” later called a “smorgasbord” of narrowly drawn tax rises, together with an expected extension of the freeze on personal tax thresholds (which would break the spirit of the manifesto in any case). On Friday it became clear the government has gone for the second scenario after the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) ruled that the shortfall in public finances is closer to £20 billion than £30 billion.
But this isn’t political strategy: it’s government by the OBR. Why had Reeves allowed speculation about manifesto-breaking tax rises to run out of control? The melodrama of her “emergency” Downing Street speech now looks even more absurd. This is unserious politics, Brownite methods with no ends. The build-up to the budget has been farcical and Labour MPs are raging.
After coordinated briefings on Tuesday against Wes Streeting, the health secretary, Labour is now gripped by paranoia - inside 10 Downing Street, the cabinet and the parliamentary party, which has fragmented into competing factions as colleagues await the post-Starmer era.
Streeting wants to lead Labour and therefore be prime minister, but he was not preparing to launch an imminent challenge to Starmer. The prime minister is meant to be the first among equals, but Starmer knows that as a communicator and storyteller Streeting is superior to him. He needed taking down – or so some close to Starmer believed. The briefings against Streeting were orchestrated but ultimately self-defeating: he ended the week enhanced while Starmer was diminished.
No Labour politician I spoke to in recent days believes Starmer will lead the party into the next general election but nor do they think the time is right for a leadership challenge. If Starmer was toppled so early in the parliament (we have not even reached midterm), his successor would immediately be confronted by a question of democratic legitimacy. The psychodrama – the endless feuding and plotting, the coups and resignations - that destabilised the Conservative Party from 2016 to 2024 would be played out all over again.
“Consider,” one longtime Starmer ally (now disaffected) said to me this week, “if we’d actually deepened our support by governing well and with popular consent.” The remark was poignant because it referred to a lost future, something that was promised but never happened.
For now, Starmer goes on. He is sustained by indestructible self-belief, but he leads a zombie government. “The boss has no politics,” is a popular refrain. No matter, Starmer’s allies used to say, he will offer competence, stability, moral clarity, strategic discipline. No one can claim that after the events of recent weeks.
“All roads lead back to Morgan McSweeney,” one senior Labour MP said to me, blaming the chief of staff for everything from briefings against Streeting to the dysfunction of the government. But McSweeney is a proxy for Starmer, who sets the mission command or should do, and tolerates a culture of anonymous briefings against senior colleagues while simultaneously disavowing them.
Margaret Thatcher once remarked: “The Old Testament prophets did not say, ‘Brothers I want a consensus’. They said, ‘This is my faith and my vision. This is what I passionately believe. If you believe it, too, then come with me.”
The prime minister, by contrast, has shown us what he believes, which is very little. There are not many who would follow and come with him now. As Starmer and Reeves stumble haplessly towards budget day, the party grows angrier and more confused, and the country ever more distrustful.