Starmer’s first resignation will draw a line under Labour’s bumpy start

KEir Starmer’s government has reached another unwanted but inevitable milestone: the first Cabinet resignation.

Louise Haigh’s quick departure at least limited the damage to Starmer, who was true to his pre-election pledge not to tolerate any rule breaking. He told his biographer Tom Baldwin: “People will only believe that we are changing politics if I fire someone on the spot… It doesn’t matter who it is, they will be fired.”

To many Labor figures, the treatment of the popular Haigh seems harsh, but there could only be one answer when the Prime Minister asked his first question on the subject.

An awful lot has happened in a government that is only five months old: a baptism of fire with the summer riots; controversy over a decision to means test the winter fuel surcharge for pensioners; unrest in Downing Street, ending in the resignation of Sue Gray, the prime minister’s chief of staff; and damaging headlines about freebies.

Ministers hoped that last month’s budget would provide a reset. But it sparked a backlash from businesses and farmers that is not over yet.

Now the Prime Minister is about to attempt another relaunch. He won’t call it that; politicians hate the word because it indicates that they are stuck in the mud. He will give a major speech next week in which he will unveil a “plan for change”, setting out new goals for his government. They will be more tangible than his five rather vague missions, such as achieving the highest sustainable growth in the G7, which have hardly set the country’s pulse racing.

The new targets will be accompanied by a public dashboard that will allow voters to see whether the government is on track. They will reflect Starmer’s new priorities – the living standards people experience in their everyday lives; immigration; and NHS waiting times. The first two were the dominant issues in the US election, and Labor strategists are determined to learn the lessons from the Democrats’ crushing defeat.

There will also be goals on housing, child development, safer streets and clean energy. The missions will survive, as Starmer was reluctant to throw them away, but in name only; insiders tell me they will be “token” and displaced by the new goals.

This approach is not without risk. Some goals will be difficult to achieve – such as building 1.5 million homes in five years and increasing real disposable income (which is expected to rise by only 0.5 percent per year). The media will magnify the failures and not devote much space to the successes.

But Morgan McSweeney, the new No. 10 chief of staff, hopes the government will get at least some credit for making progress toward the tough targets. He sees delivery as the best way to combat the threat of populists like Nigel Farage.

The relaunch comes unusually early in the government’s life and is a tacit acknowledgment of its bumpy start. It’s all proving much more difficult than many shadow ministers imagined in the heady days of opposition, when they didn’t have to translate easy promises into difficult, detailed policies. In another sign of this, Rachel Reeves has postponed her government-wide spending review, expected in April next year, until June. This is sensible because there was a risk that the spending plans would not fully reflect the new objectives, which would have been a back-to-front government and given the Treasury all the reins.

The Chancellor reckons that big savings to the social security budget could be made by many of the 9.2 million ‘economically inactive’ people of working age – that is, those who are not in work or looking to do so – to get a job. A study in it Barnsley Led by Alan Milburn, the former Health Secretary who now advises Wes Streeting, it suggested that 4.5 million of them could find work with the right tailored support.

In a white paper on Tuesday, the government rightly took this path, but postponed the difficult decisions until next spring. I sense that some ministers and many Labor backbenchers miss Reeves’ appetite for the tough decisions needed to rein in benefits for the sick and disabled.

The targets mark a return to the centralised, Downing Street-driven approach of the Tony Blair era – no coincidence after Starmer recruited key former Blair advisers including self-styled ‘deliverologist’ Michael Barber, Liz Lloyd and Jonathan Powell.

Initially, Starmer’s instinct, under the influence of former senior civil servant Gray, was to let ministers ‘get on with it’ in their departments. But this did not deliver the joint, cross-departmental cooperation that the missions were intended to ensure, and it made it more difficult to deliver a disciplined message. The new targets are also intended to tighten the government’s communications – and that’s not long ago Starmer and Labour’s falling opinion polls.

Starmer now realizes that he and his government must continually tell a ‘story’ to have any hope of bringing voters along. There’s a lot riding on the reset. If it doesn’t work, the danger for Starmer is that he will lead a one-term government and not get the chance to complete the “decade of renewal” he wants.