how Keir Starmer fumbled his first months of power

Friends of Sir Keir Starmer say the Prime Minister needs a holiday. After a year of electoral victories and a steady decline in support – with no downtime in between – the UK Labor Party high command appears exhausted.

“He needs a break, they all need a break,” said one confidante. “These are people who have not had a holiday for a year. They are crawling to the finish line.” Faced with big questions Starmer Can he come back fresh from the foreign New Year break and revive his ailing administration?

The Financial Times spoke to ministers, allies, business leaders and Labor MPs – mostly speaking anonymously – to piece together what went wrong for Starmer after his landslide election victory on July 4 and whether the prime minister can turn things around.

His ambition to lead a “government of service” has been thwarted by almost constant distractions or mistakes: the summer riots, the clothing donation scandal, the departure of Sue Grey, the fallout from the budget.

“He’s really disappointed with the way the first few months have gone,” said a Downing Street insider. “Not just a waste of time, but a waste of political capital.”

Publicly, Starmer is defiant. Asked by the House of Commons Liaison Committee last week if she would have done anything differently, the prime minister said: “No.” He listed reforms in planning, pensions and railway nationalization among his government’s achievements.

Yet no prime minister in recent memory has seen such a catastrophic decline in public support in such a short period of time. Some Labor MPs have started discussions about who could replace Starmer and lead Labor into the next election.

There is now widespread agreement in Number 10 and the Treasury that the £1.5 billion cut in winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners at the end of July was a major political mistake, sowing the seeds for many of the next government’s problems.

“We should have asked more questions,” an official involved in the decision admitted, adding that Chancellor Rachel Reeves was too ready to take on a cost-savings idea that was promoted by the Treasury.

This decision created a sense of urgency around Starmer’s new government the labor It will be little different from the Conservatives, who were ousted after only 14 years in power. Starmer’s receipt of a £32,000 freebie suit and glasses added to that narrative.

John McTernan, a former Labor Downing Street aide, said: “The winter fuel payment was a serious error because it was taken out of context in the long, four-month gap between the election and the Budget. It had a fundamental effect on fixing a perception of this government.”

Reeves hailed the fall in winter fuel payments as evidence of the need to take “tough decisions” to deal with what he claimed was “the worst economic legacy of any government since the Second World War”.

Senior Labor figures admitted that the down-to-earth message had been overdone, contributing to a loss of business confidence. A cabinet minister said, “We were very depressed. “We may have done the right thing but we lack a story to explain why we are doing these things.”

Ministers admitted that the party was also not ready for government. “The talks didn’t start early enough before the election,” said one minister, referring to the talks between opposition politicians and the civil service to prepare a plan for the government.

Gray, Starmer’s former chief of staff, is widely blamed in Starmer’s circles for the lack of preparation, not just in terms of policy, but in terms of personnel. A minister said, “The whole process of appointing ministers was shaky.

Gray was eventually forced out of his job by Starmer in October, shortly after the prime minister returned from a Labor conference in Liverpool, which looked more like a wake than a winning party.

“After the conference, Kier was determined to change things,” said a labor official. “People were just in shock. The shock of being in government, then the riots, then the party convention. It wasn’t all Sue’s fault.”

Then came Reeves’ Budget on October 30, an event that created a huge rift with a business community that had been heartily courted by Labor before the election. Economic stagnation And falling business confidence has followed.

The sense of betrayal caused by Reeves’ £25bn National Insurance increase on employers was huge, but it also had a knock-on effect on the economy. Surveys measure manufacturing confidence and Recruiting plans have gone awry The economy is sharply flat

“He’s just not up for the job,” says one FTSE 100 boss. “The collapse of confidence in the business world has been catastrophic. I think it’s overdone, but it happened.”

The cumulative effect of all these setbacks undermined morale at the center of the Starmer administration. “There’s a bit of a confidence problem,” admitted one person who works closely with Starmer.

Starmer set out six policy “milestones” to focus his government’s energy and resources, which saw an attempt at a relaunch in December, but he made more headlines with his claim that some civil servants were “comfortable in the deep bath of managed decline”.

A minister said, “I don’t understand where it came from. “I’d be bored.” Starmer later had to write to angry civil servants to try to calm the row.

Starmer’s supporters believe he can turn things around in 2025. The prime minister’s biographer Tom Baldwin says that “every big job he’s done, he’s had a rocky start,” referring to the awkward beginnings in his role as Labor leader as director of public prosecutions.

“He tries different things until he finds something that works,” Baldwin said. “It’s not glamorous or inspiring, but it’s probably not only the best way to get yourself out of a hole, but also the best way to run the country.”

Starmer’s top team is finally taking shape, with veterans from the Tony Blair era brought back into the centre. Jonathan Powell and Liz Lloyd, stalwarts of Blair’s Downing Street operation, are being brought back to reprise their roles on foreign policy and domestic reform respectively. Lord Peter Mandelson, a New Labor veteran, will take a key role As US ambassador.

Pat McFadden, a Cabinet Office minister and former Blair fixer, and Lord Spencer Livermore, a veteran adviser to Gordon Brown, met regularly with Strummer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, to strategize and smooth out political rows. Media team has been strengthened.

Starmer’s allies say he will “roll up his sleeves” and get to work, although any deterioration in the economic outlook – or the damaging effects of US President-elect Donald Trump’s trade policies – could force Reeves to return to a more politically charged 2025. Harmful tax increases.

There is some optimism in the Starmer camp that Tory leader Kimi Badenoch has not yet turned out to be the political threat they initially feared. A Downing Street insider said: “He was worried about how things would look in the House of Commons – so he could ‘man up’ like a white man to a black woman. He handled it well.”

Starmer, however, is worried about the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which may initially threaten Badenoch’s right but which Labor strategists fear will eventually emerge. a serious danger At his party too. “People are super-nervous about reforms,” ​​says one minister.

Starmer’s team said they would not make the mistake of deploying the “Pied Piper tactics” adopted by US Democrats before the 2016 presidential election, when they actively spoke to Trump in the hope it could destabilize Republicans and lead them down a populist rabbit hole. .

According to Labor strategists, trying to talk to Farage in the hope that he can drag Badenoch into reform-populated territory could easily backfire: “If you do that, you suddenly ask yourself ‘what have we built?’,” said one. Another said: “The centre-left has no template for bashing the populist right.”

Starmer’s party admits the prime minister needs to roll up her sleeves and prove to voters that a mainstream centre-left government can still deliver. “He’s disappointed, everyone is disappointed,” said a Downing Street insider. “We need to show people that we are on their side.”

McTernan said the Labor government reminded him of Eric Morecambe’s joke “All right notes but not. . . In the right order”, adding: “The fundamentals are right, the communications weren’t as good, but it’s better than the other way around.”

Should Starmer and Reeves be trying to inject some optimism in 2025 into a political debate that has become depressing, almost deadly? A Labor minister seemed unsure: “I’m not sure if Rachel and Kier are optimistic people.”