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Prime Minister Starmer Needs To Be Very Different To Opposition Leader Starmer
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Those of you who have joined The Ruffian in recent weeks should be aware that I don’t usually write this much about politics - it’s just that there’s a lot of politics going on right now.
Labour’s landslide victory, five years after what could have been an extinction event, is the most remarkable turnaround in British political history. It’s also true that it was not the product of enthusiasm for the party’s leader, or of a mass conversion to social democracy. Keir Starmer has the favourability ratings of a loser and most of his MPs are well to the left of the median voter. Starmer is in No.10 because the Tories were in office for too long and inflicted an unforgivable degree of damage on the country. Thursday’s vote was an act of national retribution.
Labour will do well to remember that its imposing parliamentary majority is an artefact of our electoral system and gives a misleading impression of solidity. What looks like a cathedral is, as the pollster James Kanagasooriam puts it, a sandcastle which will one day be washed away. Unless Labour governs competently and effectively, that day may come surprisingly soon. Come the next election, Starmer will be judged on his success in delivering his promises.
Delivering good government is a lot easier to write than it is to do, especially in the current moment. The new Prime Minister inherits a polycrisis. Public services are in the red zone; economic growth is stuck in low gear; global conflicts, ongoing and potential, demand attention. Most new PMs face crises on one or maybe two of these fronts; the trifecta is unusual. In these circumstances, competence doesn’t mean a calm hand on the tiller, steady-as-she-goes stewardship. It means making far-reaching changes as fast as possible. This will be an almighty struggle. The problem is not just that there is a vast amount to get done, it’s that the British state makes it very hard to get anything done. When Starmer pulls on the levers of power he might find that all he gets is an ominous rattling noise.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the Civic Future conference, which was attended by people who have worked at Number 10 or as departmental civil servants or ministers, from and under different parties; people interested in the mechanics of change as well as the direction of it. The official theme of the conference was Britain’s role in the world when the liberal democratic order feels as if it’s disintegrating. Inevitably, however, given an election campaign was underway, there was much discussion of how the new government would fare domestically. What came up over and again was how hard it is for any government to enact reform, even reforms on which both parties broadly agree.
The British system of government moves with the nimbleness of Joe Biden in the morning and trips on its own shoelaces. It is too easily outplayed and overwhelmed by vested interests, lobbyists, and activists. Its executive arms are pinned down by a dizzyingly complex web of laws and regulations, many of which exist for no good reason. There are too many agents in the system with the power to stop things happening and with no incentives to get things done. The result is that everything takes too long and costs much more than it should.
The transition from opposition to government is a culture shock. Labour’s new ministers are taking over a vast corporation without knowing its arcane rules and obscure procedures. They can be well prepped, but actually sitting in a room at the supposed centre of power while being told that you can’t enact perfectly sensible policies from your manifesto, for seemingly absurd reasons, is baffling. One politician described it to me as like starting on Game of Thrones midway through season four: you spend a lot of time trying to work out what the hell is going on here. Why does that prince want to kill his sister, what is this ‘Valyrian steel’, and why are there dragons?
In Labour’s case the psychological and cultural shift required is immense. On one side of the equation: a series of interlinked crises demanding urgent and bold action. On the other, a leader who has spent the last four years moving carefully, patiently and fastidiously. As someone at the conference put it to me, as soon as Starmer enters Number 10 he will have to drop the Ming vase and run like hell. This doesn’t mean shredding his reputation for prudence; it does mean he and his team will need to think and act very differently to opposition. They will have to take risks, be imaginative, and push for change aggressively, relentlessly, resourcefully - because if they don’t, they will be pushed back. They are now in a constant battle to govern the system rather than allowing the system to govern them.
Liz Truss (RIP) wasn’t right: there is no “deep state” in the sense of a secret government with its own political agenda, led by malign civil servants. But there is a multi-headed bureaucracy with its own self-serving norms, a dense thicket of regulations and legal procedures - particularly in planning and procurement - and an organisational culture of (small ‘c’) conservatism. As Tony Blair put it recently, talking about government in general, “the system is a conspiracy for inertia”. When combined with what will soon be a hostile media environment, making the system deliver Labour’s “missions” will be very tough.
Starmer has a peculiar kind of challenge in that he has to take on people like himself. He is a left-wing lawyer in charge of a government that will need to hack away at regulations and legal obstacles if it is to build houses, power plants and data centres. In opposition, you cultivate relationships with as many “stakeholders” as possible; in government you have to upset some of them (and not just by accident). Starmer will have to take on interests within the public sector, the third sector, and the Labour Party, as well as in business. He’ll have to risk the seats of MPs in NIMBY constituencies. He will have to face down a thousand media-generated faux-crises in order to address the real ones.1 He’ll be doing all this without an insulating layer of enthusiasm for his new government, or the funds to dispense largesse and placate critics.
Can he do it? Yes. For better and for worse, Britain has a top-down system with a strong executive. A determined Prime Minister - and Starmer is nothing if not determined - sitting on a large majority can get a lot done. But I have questions.
My first question is whether Starmer can operate against the grain of his own temperament. He is a cautious man by nature - ambitious, dogged, but cautious. As opposition leader, he edged his way by inches towards firm positions, and sometimes wobbled when he got there. He usually landed on the right answer but often via a circuitous route. In opposition, moving slowly is not a major hindrance to success, since, not being in charge of the country, you don’t get the blame when things go wrong. As Prime Minister, the spotlight is on you every time the outrage machine cranks up, which is often. You have to be quick and responsive, without losing strategic clarity.
You also have to take a lot of decisions every week - decisions about policy, national security, political management - and if you spend too long mulling them you become a bottleneck for a system that is already too slow. These decisions come to your desk pre-mulled by ministers, officials and advisers and the PM’s role is not to trigger further discussions but to rubber stamp the proposals he agrees with and push back on the rest (or in some cases to cast a deciding vote). To do this well and at pace, a Prime Minister needs strong instincts about how they want to govern so that they can act fast on thin information. Does Starmer have those instincts? We’ll see. He has shown he has the slow-twitch muscles required for the endurance event of opposition; now we’ll find out if he has the fast-twitch muscles of an effective PM.
Of course, it helps if you have the right team of ministers and advisers. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is clearly an asset: nobody will be more relentless in the pursuit of the government’s goals. But Reeves, like Starmer, is cautious by nature. Now, the Chancellor should be cautious, but the system works best when the PM is pushing for more risk and the Chancellor is pushing back (the tension can be collegiate and collaborative, rather than descending into Blair-Brown-style turf warfare). Starmer ought to recognise that and adjust his style accordingly, so that he and Reeves don’t succumb to groupthink. The danger is compounded by Starmer’s decision to hire another cautious operator, Sue Gray, as chief of staff. Gray is a veteran civil servant and knows how to work the system. That’s good, but she also shares its innate conservatism. While in the civil service she argued against Sunak’s decision to take on Nicola Sturgeon over gender ID law, on the grounds that it was unprecedented and would push voters towards the SNP. It proved to be one of the few brave and successful decisions that government took.
As for Starmer’s wider team - the rest of the cabinet, junior ministers, and advisers - they must learn to think like him, although he’ll need to show them what that means. When everyone in power has a good feel for what the leader wants then the system moves more quickly and smoothly. Those pre-mulled decisions arriving at Starmer’s desk can be approved faster if his people are skilled at second-guessing him. But this begs the crucial question: will they know what he wants? Will Starmer send clear enough signals to the system, in public and private, about his preferred mode of operation? For instance: to be ambitious and bold; to simplify the system rather than complicate it; to ruthlessly remove roadblocks to change.
If I were a minister or official and I had to guess what Starmer might want on any given policy question based on the training data of his record in opposition, my rule of thumb would be to pick the most cautious available option. But that way lies paralysis. That way lies failure. An excess of caution is the biggest risk Starmer’s government faces.
After the jump: the best and worst things about the election result; a funny - and instructive - story about governing from Michael Gove; a timely essay on why we need to cultivate elites; the latest on Biden; why the east sides of UK cities tend to be poorer; a revealing clip of Paul McCartney, and more. If you haven’t yet taken out a paid subscription, try it now, it’s quick and easy and gives you access to the best stuff. You’ll also be supporting my work. I couldn’t write The Ruffian or much else without the help of paid subscribers.
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