“The problem with being Prime Minister is when ‘everything is your fault’, and physically and mentally you can’t do everything – you keep trying and trying, nonetheless and you end up having not really doing anything”
I’d been talking to a veteran Tory. One who has served a number of Prime Ministers and we were discussing the year ahead, the ‘rewiring of the state’ debate, and the likely fate of our adenoidal overlord Sir Keir Starmer MP, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
We both agreed that Starmer and Sunak have suffered from the same malady, explained in their comment.
Sunak, and his team, with only two years on the clock tried very hard indeed to be across everything, including into the details of things they should, and could, have left to others. The verdict, though patently not entirely directed at them, was the electorate felt we’d done nothing.
If Farage truly wants the job, it’s another systemic issue he’ll have to face and prepare for. Being PM starts off as a fiendishly hard job, and, especially if anyone is unprepared for it, it just gets harder and harder.
For any party leader, being PM really isn’t possible alone, even if you are ‘a talent’. A lot of people rolled their eyes when David Cameron, the then ‘“future, once” said in 2008 when asked why he wanted to be Prime Minister replied
“Because I think I’d be good at it”
To be fair to Cameron, in terms of managing the work load, the process, the dynamics of being in charge, it was a fair self-assessment but as history shows efficient managerialism doesn’t make you ‘good at the job’ and besides Cameron knew how to delegate.
The current incumbent is not ‘good at the job’.
Starmer has been criticised for focussing too much on the international and not enough on the domestic. Now we learn he has set a new goal for his premiership. New Year New mission – old problem.
If as Jack Straw once told me, as he himself had been told, that the Home Office is the department where “every day something comes out of a clear blue sky” – or prosaically as younger officials have put it to me; ‘the Department of shit happens’ – then it’s odd no-one has said it about being bunkered in Downing Street.
The Times has described yet another Starmer reset – to relentlessly focus on the domestic ‘cost of living’ – being derailed and delayed, by nothing more than the very thing he’s been criticised for focussing on instead. 2026 has started with a series of game changing events on the world stage that as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did nearly four years will likely have an impact for better or worse on our domestic politics.
According to the Times, Starmer now wants to stick to domestic.
“He is expected to tell No 10 staff on Monday: ‘The word I expect to define this year is relentlessness. Relentless focus on the cost of living. Relentless delivery of change people can feel. Relentless clarity on the story about how we are changing this country.’”
Well if he doesn’t know something about relentlessness by now; the churn of events, the criticism of his abilities, the grind, he’s certainly not even passingly acquainted with ‘clarity’.
It is both sobering, depressing even, that even I can end up on the same page as Polly Toynbee, whilst on the radio, in agreeing the international rules based order is fig leaf past its sell-by date and we are in a world of big power might, and zones of influence.
I’d humbly suggest that the thought is later coming to Polly than myself but that’s by the by.
Starmer can try to bring the focus back to the cost of living in Britain, but if the Iranian regime doesn’t collapse now, it will soon. If Trump moves on from Venezuela, to Cuba, Columbia and this Rubicon for NATO, Greenland, then frankly ‘good luck with that’.
Besides, within days he’s about to approve a highly controversial – and still suspicious -design for a new Chinese super embassy in London. It is his ticket to meet one of the world’s big men, Xi Jinping as he begs for a trade deal that, hang the security costs might deliver some economic growth.
Growth. That of course was, it seems way back now, the original Starmer mission. A relentless focus on growth. Growth, growth, growth.
Having let his Chancellor all but stifle the chances of that, or people finding a job, it’s hard to see how he’ll actually tackle the cost of living.
Governments can’t fix food prices. Maduro tried that as it happens. The Government claims to be fixing energy prices but, it seems up rather than down. If we are to return to some Wilsonian measure of ‘the pound in your pocket’ then I wish him luck persuading some very angry parts of society that they feel better off.
First, feeling better off is not the same as being better off, but second, as with so many trumpeted Labour policies, even when they’ve claimed it’s all part of the plan to attain that aim, they’ve had to come to a screeching U-turn.
It’s enough to send you to the pub to drown your sorrows. If it isn’t closing or the landlord so stressed it turns the beer sour.
Here’s the danger for the Conservatives. Their strategy has been clear last year and for this year. Stick to the economy and opposing the Government. Do it as a team not one man, and, to borrow a phrase, relentlessly focus on the economy and by extension the cost of living.
The opportunity is laying out policies, as they have done, to cut public spending, deregulate and free up business and afford the necessary defence bill Labour can’t. Oh the irony having made up a £22bn national black hole that didn’t exist that Labour have recently been informed of a £28bn real one just in defence.
The problem is still stark, even if you get that right. Necessary cuts to public spending in order to boost growth and fix the public finances may make a great deal of economic sense but how you sell that to people feeling the economic pinch, whatever their income, is daunting.
The giveth bit was always easy it’s the taketh away that’s hard.
It will have to be an honest argument that whatever it is you may have to give up will benefit all, and especially those you care about in order to fix what is not working now.
Labour should crack on with trying to lower the cost of living, I genuinely wish them success, but so far, they don’t seem to have any solution that doesn’t end up with the state borrowing more, and spending more. Polanski, and to an extent Farage, actually advocates that.
There is one place the Government could find over £30bn pounds now. Not giving it in state pension payments to pensioners worth over a million.
However that’s a topic for another day. Enjoy yours.