Newspaper Reader’s collection of ‘The Bad News’
Jan 13, 2025
Headline: Keir Starmer’s Bafflingly Bad Start as the U.K.’s Prime Minister
Sub-headline: The Labour government’s first hundred days in power have been characterized by mistakes, infighting, and drift.
By Sam Knight
October 12, 2024
Editor: Tony Blair’s and his Neo-Liberal Lite cadre are the arbiter’s of Responsible Govervance? Mrs. Thatcher called Tony Blair her greatest acomplisment. Yet Starmer is Blair’s dead-end?
This week, as the hundredth day of Starmer’s government approached, it was impossible not to compare the sense of drift with the dynamic early months of Tony Blair’s Labour premiership, in 1997, which followed a brisk “route map” of policy announcements. “Government is not just about the technocratic delivery of policy and change,” Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former press secretary, told the B.B.C., when he was asked about the performance of the new government. “It’s about the relentless, endless, never-ending conversation that you’re having with the country about what you are trying to do for the country. And I think it’s fair to say that that bit has been largely missing.” Another official from the Blair era told me, “It’s a little bit unforgivable to come in without a plan of some sort. I mean, that is the point of being in government. You have to actually want to do something.” The official despaired of the donations fiasco. “They say we have abided by the rules, so what’s wrong with it? They don’t think about how this actually looks, and that’s the politics of it,” he said. “If you’re missing that bit, it makes it a whole lot worse.”
Starmer’s own behavior has been erratic. He has veered between attempting to stay aloof from petty criticism and giving long, overwrought explanations. (The Prime Minister said that he needed to borrow Alli’s eighteen-million-pound apartment during the election campaign so his son could have somewhere quiet to study for his high-school exams. “Any parent would have made the same decision,” he told Sky News.) In September, at the Labour Party conference—a noticeably sombre affair, given the Party’s landslide election victory—Starmer gave a creditable and, by his standards, warm speech, in which he reflected on his love of playing the flute as a teen-ager. “Even now, I turn to Beethoven or Brahms in those moments when, how to put it, the reviews aren’t so good,” Starmer said, before waiting a beat. “I’ve got some Shostakovich lined up for tomorrow.”
I asked Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, for his impressions of the Prime Minister’s early struggles. Baldwin served as a communications director under Ed Miliband, the Labour leader prior to Jeremy Corbyn, and he is sympathetic to Starmer. But he acknowledged that the Prime Minister has an ungainly style as a politician. “I have used this metaphor of a minefield,” Baldwin said. “He takes one step forward, two steps to the side, one step back, two more steps to the side. It is inelegant and uninspiring—confusing even. But it’s the best way to get to the other side. In opposition, the other side was victory. In government so far, he’s looked more like a man wandering around a minefield without a clear sense that he’s getting somewhere.” Baldwin observed that Starmer has been in comparable situations before—both early in his time as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service and as Party leader—and that he was able to get it together. “It kind of almost needs to get quite bad with him before he does recognize a change of course is necessary,” Baldwin said. “But, when he recognizes there is a problem, he’s quite ruthless.”
On October 2nd, Starmer announced that he had paid back some six thousand pounds’ worth of gifts that he had received since becoming Prime Minister and that the rules on hospitality for ministers would be modified. Four days later, Gray quit as Starmer’s chief of staff and was replaced by McSweeney. There were signs that Starmer was finding his direction. Westminster bubbled with talk of a relaunch and “Starmer 2.0.” “It’s good to have a serious Prime Minister. I don’t think that’s changed since before or after the election,” the Blair-era official told me. “This is come-able back-able from. People writing off a government after two months, when they got a huge majority and five years, is just ludicrous.” Baldwin suggested that Starmer return to the language of “Five Missions” which had framed Labour’s election campaign— economic growth, green energy, public safety, education, and the N.H.S.—but which has since got lost in the noise. “I don’t think he can turn around now and say, I’ve discovered a new fundamental purpose for this government,” Baldwin said. “There’s a very real danger he’ll be ridiculed if he does that. And the missions are personal to him. They’re important.”
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/keir-starmers-bafflingly-bad-start-as-the-uk-prime-minister
Headline: The Problem With Keir Starmer
By Tom Blackburn
Editor: The Reader might wonder at this Blackburn introductory paragraph:
Keir Starmer is posing as the Labour Party’s unity candidate, appearing prime ministerial while sticking by the party’s left-wing policies. But if elected, he would be forced to choose between these priorities — and it’s clear the left policies would lose out.
https://jacobin.com/2020/02/keir-starmer-labour-party-uk-leadership
Editor: Starmer is the creation of The Neo-Liberal Lite Tony Blair!
December’s general election was undeniably a hammer blow to Labour activists. It’s fair to say that most probably weren’t expecting to be beaten as badly as we were. Since the election of 2017 all the talk had been about what a socialist-led Labour government would do in office, and although a Commons majority always looked unlikely, many Labour members will have at least fancied their party’s chances of forcing a hung Parliament.
These heightened expectations make the scale of the defeat that materialized, and another five years of Tory government, all the more bruising. Now the Labour Party is facing up to the question of how to respond. Some aspiring leadership candidates have toured the TV studios volunteering to abandon high-profile policies from the 2019 manifesto — not because they’re unpopular, which they aren’t, but implicitly bargaining with the media and offering them the chance to set the boundaries of Labour policy in return for more favorable (or just less vituperative) coverage.
Regardless of this, support for existing Labour policy remains strong among the party’s rank and file, shortly to be voting for a new leader, and the prospect of any drastic retrenchment from the current manifesto is unlikely to be favorably received. Hence the different tack taken by Keir Starmer in his leadership campaign, positioning himself as the unity candidate working to bring Labour’s draining four-year civil war to an end and take the party back into government on a left-wing program at the next time of asking, presumably in 2024.
This, to be sure, is an appeal which might hold some allure to Labour members — among them many erstwhile supporters of Jeremy Corbyn — especially those still disorientated and demoralized after last month’s election. But there are major problems with it, not the least of these being that a sizable minority of Labour MPs have no intention of making the kind of compromises Starmer appears to be asking of them.
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Editor: this reads like Robert Colvile in The Times:
Headline: Keir Starmer’s reset shows his premiership is already in crisis.
Sub-headline: Less than 100 days after taking office, the Labour prime minister has already been forced to shake up his team.
October 8, 2024
https://www.politico.eu/article/keir-starmer-no-10-downing-street-civil-sue-gray-pm/
Editor: File this under the rubric of Political Chatter!
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One longer-serving MP said McSweeney did not have Whitehall experience, “which could come back to bite us,” while “Starmer lacks people skills, and has surrounded himself with people with the same problem.”
McSweeney had a previous spell as Starmer’s chief of staff in opposition, but was removed amid accusations that the Labour leader was foundering on his watch without a clear vision.
The same MP complained there was now a “boys’ club” at the heart of No. 10, with those now in full charge of Downing Street blaming Gray for what had gone before. “Everything was always conveniently Sue’s fault, and not the lads’, despite all the major issues in Keir’s office predating her arrival,” she said.
One of the McSweeney allies quoted above rejected those claims, pointing out that Hollie Ridley, recently installed as Labour’s general secretary, had been one of his most senior lieutenants.
He also has two new and well-regarded female deputies in Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson.
For now, Starmer still has a host of considerable advantages on his side, notably a hefty parliamentary majority and a chief of staff with a proven winning record. But his early forced reset hints at the need for something more.
Editor: The reader can see very clearly, from this collection of political commentaries, that Tony Blair’s political catamite ,Kier Starmer, is not just a failure but an incompetent. The Reader can only conjecture what steps Blair can take, if any, to redress his utter failure of judgment?
Newspaper Reader.
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