No prime minister plans to spend the first hundred days in Downing Street learning how not to govern for the next hundred.
The intensity of the job is famously relentless, but it’s also supposed to be exhilarating. The confident stride of a triumphant leader should mask initial missteps. For Keir Starmer to look already winded, however, suggests that something has gone badly wrong. The departure of Sue Gray, his chief of staff, confirms it.
Gray was hired from the civil service last year to coordinate preparations for government. It was her responsibility to make sure the new administration looked focused, professional, ready to deliver. In other words, she was meant to orchestrate a transition exactly unlike the one that has actually happened. No wonder she has gone.
Officially, Gray has resigned to take on a new role as envoy for the nations and regions. In Westminster parlance that means exile from court. The new chief of staff is Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s campaigns director and architect of the project that propelled Labour from a pit of electoral gloom to a record parliamentary majority.
McSweeney’s admirers naturally see the new Downing Street arrangement as a positive development, clarifying chains of command and removing someone who was an origin of internal strife and a magnet for unhelpful publicity. Ask government insiders about rumours of rivalry between McSweeney and Gray and you will probably be told that those stories are wide of the mark. The real antagonism was between Gray and everyone. No 10 was not functioning as a dynamic political operation because, it is alleged, the prime minister’s gatekeeper restricted officials’ access to the prime minister while unofficial relations were contaminated with mistrust imported from her previous career as a senior mandarin. Downing Street has denied these claims.
Gray also has defenders, especially among Labour MPs. They see a powerful woman whose primacy at the centre of government was resented by a swaggering clique of entitled young men (“the boys’ club”). Viewed from that angle, the reshuffle of senior advisers is a coup – the culmination of a campaign of malevolent briefing and leaks, containing more than a whiff of misogyny.
One thing everyone agrees on is that the system wasn’t working. Something had to change. A choppy start was foreseeable and, to a degree, unavoidable. The new prime minister was never going to get an easy ride from newspapers that treat the mere fact of Labour rule as distasteful at best. A foul economic legacy was always going to subdue the national mood.
But even with those headwinds, a new government with a massive majority, facing a despised and divided opposition, should have enjoyed a phase of full-spectrum dominance. It should not have been forced into a defensive crouch within months.
The stream of stories about senior Labour figures being showered with gifts and freebies should have been gripped harder and faster. Some of the reporting has reeked of partisan spite. Donors donating is not corruption. But resentment of media bias seems to have blinded Starmer to the gravity of the wound being inflicted – the projection of moral equivalence between his fresh new government and the rancid old one.
In a climate of entrenched cynicism about all politicians and their motives, literal adherence to rules over donations or uncertainty about what was permitted is no defence. Nor is there any protection from the self-certified ethical superiority that some Labour folk assume as a marker of being on the left, and not-the-Tories. Most voters don’t lavish the benefit of the doubt on ministers simply because their flag is red.
Gray’s critics locate her at the origin of the strife. She is close to Waheed Alli, the benefactor whose contribution to Starmer’s wardrobe has caused endless grief. She was also in charge of the grid – the timeline of announcements that is meant to get the news cycle turning to a beat set in Downing Street. It hasn’t worked. There have been a few scattered set-piece speeches. Mostly the canvas on which Starmer’s defining purpose should have been drawn has been left blank, to be filled by people who want him to fail.
But blame heaped on an adviser always contains a portion of frustration with the leader. An accusation that the chief of staff thwarts action is also a charge against the prime minister for failing to assert his own priorities. A dysfunctional chain of command expresses vagueness about the will of the commander. This is a revival of an old complaint about Starmer’s lack of political acuity, or rather his disdain for the tradecraft of politics – campaigns, party machination and media management. After a faltering start as leader of the opposition, he came to appreciate how essential that stuff was and yielded to the people – McSweeney paramount among them – who could make it happen.
But once he was installed in Downing Street, the formal functions of the office naturally took precedence. First, crisis management when race riots erupted across England and Northern Ireland. Then foreign travel dominated the diary. High-minded statecraft, diplomacy and bureaucracy – things Starmer likes and is good at – crowded out the more combative side of politics that he prefers to leave to other people.
The Labour leader’s political antennae might be slow to detect danger signals, but one of his strengths is acting decisively – and ruthlessly – when the message finally gets through. A pattern of his leadership has been to resist reshuffles and course corrections until it is painfully obvious that the current team on the present trajectory are not getting him where his ambition wants to go. Then the axe falls.
There were a few such moments in opposition. The most critical came after the May 2021 Hartlepool byelection. The Tories won a majority of nearly 7,000 on a 16% swing in a seat that had been Labour for half a century. Starmer had been in the job for little more than a year and considered quitting. He was persuaded instead to regroup, redraw his inner circle, seek a more thorough understanding of why voters were rejecting his party and do whatever it took to change their minds.
Senior Labour figures now compare the prime minister’s recognition of Downing Street dysfunction to that Hartlepool epiphany. It is, they say, consistent with a method that can be agonisingly ponderous but gets to the right place in the end.
In government, as in opposition, Starmer is building the plane while flying it. That was hard enough when the task was simply defined. Winning a general election was not a straightforward undertaking, but it gave a clear, all-encompassing purpose for the project. Seizing power was the supreme goal to which other demands on Starmer’s loyalty could be subordinated. It dictated his priorities. If something or someone got him closer to being prime minister, they were in. Whatever or whoever set him back was out.
That test can’t be applied so neatly to the question of how to deploy power once it has been won. There is no single goal, but a writhing mass of contradictory public demands, inter-departmental feuds, competition for budget resources and any number of domestic and foreign crises just over the horizon.
Starmer has made an emergency intervention to get the Downing Street engine firing more effectively. He has understood the limits of the civil service autopilot function. After a shaky takeoff, the plane can now climb more steadily.
But what is the destination? There is no cruising altitude in government and limited fuel. Prime ministers need to set a course that the rest of the crew understands, keep a firm grip on the controls and constantly monitor the instruments. The alternative is mutiny, constant turbulence and a deadly spiral back down to earth.
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Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist