SARAH VINE: Relaunch? This was same old Keir, like a headmaster telling a school on the last day of term that the holidays have been cancelled_Nhy
By holding his non-relaunch relaunch at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, no doubt the Prime Minister hoped to inject a bit of showbiz pizzazz into his speech. There was even a joke about being the next James Bond, which might have worked in other circumstances but in the hands of Sir Keir, a man so lacking in Bond-like magnetism and charisma, fell somewhat flat. Double-oh-seven, licence to bore? Please God no.
Bless him, though, he was trying. Someone’s obviously been doing their speech prep, but as ever with Starmer you get the impression he’s acting out a persona – that of the principled, passionate politician – that deep down isn’t really him. Technically, you can’t really fault him; but he just lacks authenticity in his delivery.
This means he can’t really carry off any sort of rhetorical flourish. At one point he started talking about fixing the damp in your wall with a hairdryer, and it just all felt a bit confusing. He’s much better – and more comfortable – when he’s just droning on about targets and chastising others (the previous Conservative government) for their failures while studiously failing to mention any of his own (winter fuel allowance, Lord Alli and the freebies, National Insurance hike, farmers tax, small boat crossings etc).
Personally, if I had presided over such a catastrophic start to government, the first thing I would have done was apologise. Come out and say: ‘Look, I know we’ve not got off to the best start, and I’m sorry about all the free clothes and the freezing pensioners and the migrant hotels, but I’m here to steady the ship and show you how we’re going to do better going forward.’ Or words to that effect.
Instead, it was same old Keir. He was like a headmaster telling a school on the last day of term that the holidays have been cancelled, it’s double maths and then everyone must stay late to clean out the gym block toilets.
That’s certainly how it would have felt to any civil servants watching. Having finished blaming the Tories for everything, he then set about blaming Whitehall for ‘wallowing in the tepid bath of managed decline’.
As ever with Starmer you get the impression he’s acting out a persona – that of the principled, passionate politician – that deep down isn’t really him, writes SARAH VINE
He said it was a government of M&Ms. I pictured the Prime Minister’s face on one of the red ones, with Angela ‘Ange’ Rayner as an orange one, Ed Miliband the green (obviously)
He was throwing down a gauntlet (he is, after all, a knight of the realm), he said, and it was going to land on desks across Westminster. Hmm. We’ll see what the PCS, the civil service union, has to say about that. They’ve been pushing hard for a four-day week (slogan: ‘Same pay, shorter working week’ – and no, I’m not joking, that’s the actual wording on flyers posted across government departments), and we all know Labour’s record on standing up to their union paymasters. In any case, so many of them now work from home that it’s unlikely they’ll even realise said gauntlet is on their desks at all.
The election had been about missions, he explained, this was now about milestones: in other words, a government of M&Ms. I pictured the Prime Minister’s face on one of the red ones, with Angela ‘Ange’ Rayner as an orange one, Ed Miliband the green (obviously). Miserable Yvette Cooper, who had been tasked with doing the media rounds that morning, would have to be blue.
In the end that’s just what this was: a bag of treats designed to pacify not so much the voting public (who currently don’t matter all that much, despite a three million strong petition demanding another general election) but the Westminster bubble and Labour’s own core supporters who have been deeply rattled by the Government’s performance so far. In other words, a political sugar high designed to detract from the real issues. They’ve banned junk food advertising; how about junk political advertising?
Starmer was trying hard to paint himself as a political risk-taker, a bold visionary who won’t take no for an answer and who will drive through change. And that’s great. But the problem he has is that so far what we’ve seen from him is the opposite. That may well change, and I hope for the sake of the nation that it does. But the truth is that voters don’t really care how things get done, they just want them done. And no amount of fine words and grandiose projections can take away from the fact that, so far, the Labour souffle has failed to rise.
For all the talk of a ‘new kind’ of politics, this Government has shown itself to be virtually indistinguishable from the previous lot. The freebies, the nepotism, the hypocrisy, the reneging on promises: this is what disappointed voters have come to expect of politicians, and Labour are guilty of it all.
Having once praised small businesses as ‘the next generation of wealth creators’, Starmer has clobbered them with a triple whammy of a National Insurance rise, increased minimum wage and ramped-up employees’ rights. Having delivered many a lachrymose homage to pensioners, Starmer has deprived millions of them of their winter fuel allowance. Having promised no changes to Agricultural Property Relief, lo and behold inheritance tax on farms worth over £1million is in the Budget. I could go on, but I don’t want to bore you.
Elections are about speeches; government is show not tell. Despite having been Prime Minister since July, it’s clear Starmer is still in election mode, still stuck at the drawing-board phase rather than getting down to business. If he really wants to win back the confidence of the British people, the best thing he and his Cabinet can do is get their heads down, get on with their jobs, deliver results – and, above all, stop making excuses.
