Is Starmer’s election honeymoon over already?

The doom-mongers and end-of-honeymooners are all around the new prime minister. It won’t last, they say. You can see the cracks opening up already. I have done a bit of this myself, pointing out that Keir Starmer won’t be able to stop the boats; that the rebellion against the two-child limit on benefits from his own MPs is coming early in the new government; and that Angela Rayner will be the focus of internal opposition in the Labour Party. All this is true, and governing will be difficult. But Starmer has already shown that he understands politics better than some of his critics. The idea that he is going to crash and burn, a one-term prime minister whose majority proved as fleeting as Boris Johnson’s, is mistaken, I think.

First, he is ruthless. He saw a route to power that ran through Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. It doesn’t matter if it was his idea or his adviser Morgan McSweeney’s: it was Starmer who executed the plan that took him to No 10. On Monday, Labour Together held a champagne reception to celebrate the new government. It is the organisation set up by McSweeney to act as a “shadow” Labour Party while the real thing was controlled by the Corbynites. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was the guest of honour and she thanked Labour Together, which “stood by us, when lots of people had given up”. But even she had “given up”, in that she refused to serve on Corbyn’s front bench. The party needed someone such as Starmer to work with Corbyn so that he could win the leadership on a “unity” ticket. It was, as the Corbynites now realise, a cynical and dishonest operation, but as the non-Corbynites now realise, an absolutely necessary one.

So when it is suggested that Starmer is really a “soft lefty” with the politics of Ed Miliband, which will inevitably lead the Labour government into the quagmire of unworkable policies, I disagree. Milibandism would be a disaster for the country — but I think that precisely because it would be a disaster, Starmer will avoid it. Anything in the manifesto that turns out to cost a lot of money or to be a bad idea will be abandoned. Already minor bad ideas such as votes at 16 and a retirement age for peers have been ditched — I’m sorry, I mean “postponed”. Next to go will be major ideas that sound decent and right but which would be counterproductive in practice, such as protection from unfair dismissal from day one in a new job or a ban on “no-fault evictions”.

The retreats will not be elegant. Starmer is not an agile or exciting politician, but those are qualities that are overvalued by the commentating classes. George Osborne, the former chancellor, complained on his podcast with Ed Balls on Thursday that Starmer had said and done “nothing unusual or surprising”. This is true, and it may be one of the government’s greatest strengths. After the tumult of the past few years, people want a plain vanilla government that gets on with the job.

That is why Starmer’s honeymoon may last a little longer. The voters may be in a distrustful, anti-politics mood, but there is a basic rule of fairness that gives a new government a chance to prove itself. I think that will see Starmer and Reeves through the most difficult decision they will have to make, in the Budget in September. My view is that they will have to raise taxes. Pay rises for public sector workers are the biggest fiscal time bomb left by the Conservatives, but Labour will have to find the money somehow to have any chance of turning the NHS and other public services round. This will look like a breach of the promises Starmer and Reeves made in the election, but Reeves will use the same language as Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, when she announced the early release of prisoners from dangerously overcrowded prisons: “There is now only one way to avert disaster. And, believe you me, I do not choose to do this because I want to. I have to do this, because only one option is available to me.”

Labour won’t be able to use that excuse for long, but it may be enough to get them to the next phase, of slow but steady improvement. At which point competence becomes the test, which is why Starmer is taking the risk of offending long-serving Labour MPs by promoting seven newly elected MPs straight into ministerial office. Look where ruthless competence has got Starmer so far. It may take him a lot further yet.

The Independent