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Sir Keir Starmer went to north Wales on Thursday to announce the building of a new nuclear power station. This is a significant policy event, with local and national implications. However, the prime minister did not spend much time in Wales promoting solutions to UK energy needs. Instead, he spent it trying to draw a line under the Labour leadership briefing row, telling reporters that No 10 had not, in fact, briefed against the health secretary’s ambitions earlier this week.
As such, Sir Keir’s day was a microcosm of what his prime ministership has now become more generally. On the one hand, he wants his government to be doing, and to be seen to be doing, important things. On the other hand, he is unable to achieve this because of the way he – and to an extent the country more generally – now does politics and government.
Sir Keir cannot change the culture of politics on his own, but he can do something about his own role in it. The plain fact is that he could run the centre of government far better than he does. If he did this, he might find that the country was in less despair about his government than it is, and that he was getting his messages across more successfully.
Some of the problems in Downing Street are about individuals. The personal dynamics of any No 10 regime are hard to know well from outside. But it seems obvious that Sir Keir does not make good personnel choices, or stick with them. Perhaps he is too busy. Perhaps he is not really interested. But he needs to up his game, not do things slowly or by halves.
He dithered about giving the key job of cabinet secretary to Chris Wormald. He made Sue Gray his chief of staff, then replaced her with Morgan McSweeney. He brought Darren Jones in from the Treasury as his chief secretary. His communications chiefs have chopped and changed. Political and policy advisers have come and gone. It is a mess.
All premiers spend too much time abroad and on foreign affairs, where Sir Keir should delegate more, and too little talking to parliamentarians and listening to the public. Premiers also spend too much time doing media, which Sir Keir compounds by doing it poorly. But premiers cannot claim to be surprised when their political appointees, who tend to be party activists or politically ambitious, cross lines or become the story, as Mr McSweeney (like Dominic Cummings before him) now has.
The biggest issues, though, are structural. It would be good to think that Sir Keir read the Institute for Government’s March 2024 report on reforming the centre of government. His failure to grip these issues last July or since suggests he did not. The often abject experience of Labour’s time in office suggests IfG proposals like restructuring the roles of the Cabinet Office and No 10, and separating the jobs of cabinet secretary and civil service head, are now urgent.
The political pre-eminence of prime ministers far outdistances the support available to them. As a result, everything currently suffers, and much is done badly or neglected. This is not Sir Keir’s fault alone. He is the victim of past failures as well as the author of present ones. But those who hoped Sir Keir might get a grip on the centre and take the machinery of government seriously have been disappointed. Sadly, the biggest loser from this failure is Sir Keir himself.
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