(Bloomberg) -- As Keir Starmer worked to reassure Labour members about his “calm, determined” leadership at his party’s annual conference, behind the scenes in Liverpool senior aides and lawmakers were privately sounding the alarm bells and urging him to get a grip after a shaky start to his premiership.
The prime minister acknowledged in his speech on Tuesday the early setbacks, which include a row over donations, feuding staff and a backlash over his decision to cut winter support for pensioners. “Service doesn’t mean we’ll get everything right. It doesn’t mean everyone will agree,” he said. He called for patience as well as unity, saying “every decision we take, we take together.”
But what people close to him want to see is Starmer stamping his authority on his administration. While they defend him as a new leader getting up to speed, they said a lack of overarching political narrative coming from his office has created a vacuum for negative media coverage to proliferate.
Starmer’s leadership style is to delegate significant responsibility to his senior team, including Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves and his chief of staff, Sue Gray, according to multiple government officials. He’s also dismissive about the fixations of Westminster politics. He thinks voters will reward a competent government, rather than one relying on what he described in his speech as the “noisy performance” of previous Conservative administrations.
“You can call it populism — many people do — but I prefer to call it the politics of easy answers,” Starmer said. Instead, the Labour government would be about finding “practical solutions that work,” he continued. “Not the easy answers that may well move a crowd but do not move a nation forward.”
Yet Labour’s recent slump in the polls illustrates the risk facing Starmer, whose party won a landslide election victory in July in terms of seats in Parliament but with a small share of the popular vote by historical standards. A small shift in public opinion could leave Labour vulnerable.
Even while in New York for United Nations meetings, Starmer continued to face questions about gifts he has accepted. He told the BBC that he took accommodation recorded as being worth more than £20,000 ($26,700) from wealthy donor and Labour peer Waheed Alli because his teenage son needed a peaceful place to study for exams.
The problem, say allies of Starmer who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss their personal views, is that the prime minister’s emphasis on realism leaves it to others define the government’s mission. Reeves, for example, has been the one to steer the main messaging on the economy and what she calls Labour’s dire inheritance from the Tories.
Her repeated warnings about what she’ll have to do in next month’s budget to repair the UK’s public finances have been blamed for depressing consumer and business confidence. Two surveys released on Thursday showed a sharp drop in hiring confidence among employers, as well as household expectations that the economy will deteriorate.
“Somehow Keir Starmer, who I think is a good politician, a serious guy, has overdone the grimness so much that he’s forgotten that key, function of liberal democratic politics — which is to say there is light at the end of this tunnel and I am going to get you there,” Michael Ignatieff, former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, said during a discussion about the challenge facing centrists in power on Bloomberg’s Voternomics podcast. “We badly need somebody who has that magical quality to inspire hope and belief and confidence.”
Reeves’s decision to strip winter energy assistance from millions of pensioners triggered criticism of the government’s political acumen. Labour members voiced their dissent at the policy in a non-binding vote at conference. Senior party figures told Bloomberg that Starmer’s office should have recognized the political risk and stopped the Treasury from announcing it.
In the same way, Gray’s critics say her civil service background contributed to Starmer’s struggle to move past reports on the free clothes and other gifts that he, his wife and other Cabinet ministers received from a Labour donor. In recent weeks, only Energy Secretary Ed Miliband had offered a sense of direction and a “feel good” message in his policies, the people said, including lifting the ban on onshore wind.
Both Starmer and Reeves used their time in Liverpool to try to lift the mood. The chancellor, smiling throughout her speech, promised a budget that would show “real ambition” and hinted at an accounting change that could unlock billions of pounds of investment in clean energy and other key infrastructure. More funding for childcare to enable more parents to return to work is also expected to feature on Oct. 30.
Starmer, too, tried to flesh out the link between the pain of fixing the economy in the short-term, and the government’s ability to deliver on its “national renewal” project that includes fixing the National Health Service. The remit was some of the election feel-good factor, and he listed progress on clean energy, planning rules and legislation to bring railways into back into public ownership as early achievements. There were more announcements in conference, including a plan to send elite NHS units to tackle waiting lists in areas with the most long-term sick, designed to show a government getting things done.
The “work of change has begun,” Starmer said. Yet there are still doubts about whether Starmer has done enough. One ally said that while the prime minister usually reaches the right decision on tough political choices, he can take too long.
Another suggested a blind spot had emerged on Starmer’s ability to carve a political narrative for the country and make timely decisions, including on the pre-election move to water down Labour’s clean energy pledge, and the row over letting veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott stand in the election.
Some people around Starmer also want him to make a decision on whether to scale back the decision-making powers he’s delegated to Gray. Some aides have speculated that Gray might resign after conference, Bloomberg previously reported, an idea dismissed by some close to her, while one another linked the relative success of the conference to her absence.
But others, including Health Secretary Wes Streeting, believe the aides responsible for briefing against Gray should be the ones to lose their jobs. “The prime minister can’t stand leaks, briefings, any sort of self-indulgent personality politics, he’s got no time for it,” he told The News Agents podcast.
Starmer’s yet to make a decision and it’s unclear whether he will make one soon. One senior lawmaker described him as stoic and stubborn, who has a habit of making poor hiring choices and then having to manage their exit.
Some aides and MPs also worry that while Starmer and his team appear to have acknowledged the need for a mood shift in the prime minister’s speech, they’re pinning too much hope on the budget to set out a political narrative.
In his speech, though, Starmer called for patience — a message he appeared to direct at Labour and the people around him as much as voters.
“This is a long-term project. I never said otherwise, not even in the campaign,” he said. “The patient, calm, determined era of politics as service has begun.”
--With assistance from Joe Mayes and Lucy White.
(Updates with BBC report on free gifts in sixth paragraph, consumer confidence concerns in seventh paragraph.)
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