For the first time in a long while, the Tory MP was gleeful. ‘Starmer has messed up big time!’ he told me. ‘All those prisoners breaking out the champagne. Then you throw in the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance. It’s filling my emails. This policy is going to turn out to be his poll tax!’
His joy was mirrored in the despondency of one of his Labour rivals. ‘We’re getting the sequencing dangerously wrong,’ a minister told me. ‘It’s one thing to take tough decisions. But you can’t just pile one load of s*** on to another load. You have to give the voters some sort of respite. Or else it comes to define you.’
There’s no doubt that last week was the worst, politically, of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership.
A prisoner celebrates with champagne after being released early to free up space, on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent
An inmate, in the black T-shirt, is met by friends in a Lamborghini after being given early release
The optics of the prison release were appalling, as drug dealers queued up on camera to personally thank the Prime Minister for handing them their liberty. At the TUC, he was heckled as he tried to defend his pensions raid. An opinion poll found his unfavourability rating soaring to 46 per cent, the joint highest since he became Labour leader.
But for those of Starmer’s colleagues urging him to ease back on the pain, he has a simple and defiant message. Brace yourself. Because there’s more to come.
‘We’re not going to be changing course,’ a senior Labour adviser told me. ‘The Tory fiscal black hole is real. You can argue about a billion here or a billion there.
But people need to wake up. This has to be tackled, and we’re going to be the ones to do it.’
Despite the terrible headlines, Starmer and his team have been bolstered by what they claim is some positive feedback coming from their focus groups. ‘Tough’, ‘hard-a**e’ and ‘decisive’ are three descriptions that have been fed back from voters.
‘We know this isn’t popular,’ an aide explained. ‘But when did you last hear people describing a Labour prime minister like that? In four years’ time, we have to be able to say to the country, “We took the hard decisions. We know you didn’t like it. But it worked.”’
This reference to a four-year strategy is significant. First, it’s a clear indication Starmer is already setting his sights on a 2028 election. But more importantly, after a week that began to look like it had been put together by the scriptwriters of The Thick Of It, when Home Office minister Diana Johnson had her bag stolen at a policing conference, it demonstrates the PM does actually have a political strategy after all.
Which will come as a relief to the Labour MPs I spoke to over the past few days, who had begun to express concern that their leader had become so ‘delivery focused’ he’d forgotten he now occupies the most significant elected office in the country.
‘Keir’s attitude is, “I was Director of Public Prosecutions. I know how to take serious decisions. I know how to get things done,”’ one observed. ‘Well, that’s great. But the DPP doesn’t have to go to a constituency surgery every week and explain to Brenda from Bristol why she won’t be able to turn on the heating this winter.’
Starmer’s allies say their approach over the next few months will involve communicating with two distinct audiences.
The first, and most important, is the British people.
‘The electorate didn’t just chuck the Tories out and give us a landslide because they thought everything was going great,’ one explained to me. ‘They know things are bad. And they expect us to level with them. That was the trap the last government fell into.
‘Boris, Truss and Rishi were doing their boosterish “great days are ahead of us” shtick and people simply thought, “These guys are so out of touch with my life it’s a joke.”’ That’s why the Prime Minister resolutely rejects calls to deploy his own sunny vision of Starmerism.
But there is another reason he intends to stick with his bleak message of ‘tough decisions on the horizon’. He has to ram it home to his own Cabinet.
‘What we need our ministers to grasp is that we don’t have scope for big tax rises,’ a Labour aide explained, ‘and we can’t keep spending the way we have been. So we need them to be digging down into their departments and finding out where the real money can be saved.’
I’m told there are three key areas that have been identified as upcoming crunch points.
The first is welfare. Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall and Chancellor Rachel Reeves have been closeted together looking at ways of tackling the burgeoning benefits bill. And they believe it’s time for some tough Labour love.
‘We’re going to have to get people back to work,’ a Labour insider told me. ‘There’s no way round it. It’s just not sustainable.’
A second highly contentious area is going to be the provision for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson believes the current system of hiving off children with special requirements into separate educational facilities is too exclusionary, and is committed to pushing ahead with some form of reintegration.
‘This is another huge problem we’ve inherited,’ a Whitehall source told me. ‘The last government ducked the issue. Bridget is prepared to grip it.’
A third major flashpoint will be immigration. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has told colleagues her priority is to finally break the backlog of outstanding asylum claims. Under the last government this spiralled to a staggering 100,000 outstanding cases, at an annual cost to the taxpayer of more than £4 billion.
Cooper intends to eradicate this by finally deporting those whose claims are invalid. But that will also mean a small but significant number of additional asylum claims being granted, with all the attendant issues of integrating the successful applicants into local communities.
‘The Tories deliberately let the asylum system grind to a halt,’ a Home Office official explained. ‘They wanted to ensure as few people as possible were granted asylum to show they were being tough. Yvette isn’t going to play these games any more.’
This weekend, Labour MPs are nervous. Having basked in the luxury of being able to beat up on an increasingly demoralised and dysfunctional Tory administration, the reality of government is starting to bite.
‘People are starting to see we’re playing in the big leagues now,’ one minister conceded. ‘And, to be honest, a few of my colleagues aren’t really up for it.’
Tough. They need to get up for it, because the political outlook is about to be a whole lot tougher for them, and the country. Things can only get better? Not if ‘hard-a**e’ Starmer gets his way.
