As the Budget began to unravel, and the polls started to pick up on the visceral anger from the public, Keir Starmer’s allies launched a desperate rearguard action to insulate him from the political fallout.
One of them, Starmer’s Attorney General Lord Hermer, was dispatched to pen an article for the Left-wing New Statesman magazine, which contained the following, staggering conceit: ‘A working-class budget from a working-class prime minister. Keir Starmer understands the challenges working-class people face because he’s faced them himself.’
The most furious response to this work of fan-fiction came not from irate voters reeling from the latest £26billion tax bombshell, but from members of his own government. ‘Have you seen this horse****?’ one texted me. ‘There’s no one in Britain who looks at Starmer and thinks that.’
Then, yesterday, the Prime Minister delivered a speech that attempted to get to grips with the escalating fallout from the revelation that Rachel Reeves lied to the country over the state of the finances in the run-up to the Budget – to give her a reason to break the promise she made 12 months ago not to increase borrowing or taxes. And it backfired spectacularly.
‘It’s a disaster,’ one minister told me. ‘Keir’s lashed himself to Rachel’s lies. There’s no way out of this for either of them now.’
Up until this moment, the perception in Westminster has been that Starmer couldn’t afford to ditch his Chancellor, because she was effectively acting as his human shield, absorbing the criticism for Labour’s floundering economic and fiscal strategy. But the growing feeling on Party benches is that he can no longer afford to keep her.
‘She’s too radioactive,’ one minister told me. ‘She’s contaminating him and everyone around her.’ Another said: ‘Keeping her there has become a form of cruelty. It’s not fair on anyone. She’s out of her depth, she can’t do the job, she’s been captured by the Treasury, and everyone knows it.’
Until the weekend, the mood within the Cabinet was black. But there was a sense amongst ministers that they had no option but to go out and defend Reeves and her Budget.
But the revelation that the Chancellor had directly – and deliberately – misled the British people over the scale and nature of the ‘black hole’ in the public finances changed everything. Ministers began to brief journalists that they felt personally betrayed because they too had been kept in the dark. As one told me: ‘The things Rachel was saying publicly about the deficit were exactly the same as what we were being told by her privately. Misleading the voters is bad enough. But misleading your own colleagues is a very, very dangerous thing to do.’
But there wasn’t even a hint of contrition from Starmer in his speech yesterday morning. The Budget had been a moment of ‘personal pride for me’, he boasted, before insisting it was ‘fair, necessary and fundamentally good for Britain’.
That is not the view on the Labour benches. Many of them are alarmed at the breach of the tax pledges and the skulduggery that accompanied them. But if anything, they are even more worried at the dramatic shift signalled in the Budget over Starmer’s welfare stance.
Again, there was a mistaken perception – shared within No 10 – that Labour backbenchers would react ecstatically to the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap. But the opposite is true.
Some hard-Left MPs such as John McDonnell have hailed it as a victory brought about by their summer rebellion over cuts to Personal Independence Payments. But many of his colleagues view it as a pyrrhic one.
As one backbencher in a marginal Red Wall seat told me: ‘Why the hell are we doing this? My voters will hate it. They back the cap.’
Another, who broadly supports axing the policy, said: ‘It’s just one more example of how Keir operates. A few months ago, he was marching us all up the hill to cut welfare. Now he’s saying he’s on a crusade to boost it. It’s just not leadership.’
Other Labour insiders are pointing with alarm to what Starmer’s screeching welfare U-Turn means for the broader strategic direction of the Government. One told me it indicates the power struggle raging inside No 10 between Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, and Tim Allan, his Director of Communications, and Tom Baldwin, his biographer and confidant, has been won decisively by the two former Blairites. ‘Morgan has been manoeuvred out of control,’ one of McSweeney’s friends told me. ‘All he’s doing now is sending Keir memos about how disastrous the new strategy is.’
Watching Starmer’s address, it was clear to me that the Prime Minister is not simply starting to lose touch with the public mood, but increasingly appears to be relinquishing his basic grip on reality. All politicians mislead and dissemble. But time and again – such as with his manifesto pledge not to raise taxes on working people, or his new welfare policy, his words seemed to be delivered in genuine and total ignorance of the speeches, articles and policies he has been articulating for the past 16 months.
For example, today he claimed, without any caveats or contextualisation: ‘I am proud we scrapped the two-child limit. I am proud we’re lifting over half a million children out of poverty.’ Increasing benefits to protect families with young children was his personal ‘moral mission’, he declared. Yet, back in June, he was telling the country: ‘Everyone agrees that our welfare system is broken, failing people every day. Fixing it is a moral imperative.’ To emphasise his steely commitment to cutting the welfare bill, a number of his MPs who stood against those cuts even had the whip withdrawn.
It’s as if Keir Starmer has somehow convinced himself he is Will Smith from the film Men in Black. At the end of the movie, Smith’s Government agent removes a futuristic device from his pocket called a Neuralyzer and flashes it in the eyes of his colleague Tommy Lee Jones. In that instant, everything Jones has seen and heard up until that point is miraculously erased from his memory.
Starmer currently seems to be attempting to Neuralyze the British people. Or maybe he has been Neuralyzed himself, and sincerely has no memory of what he’s been saying and promising to the nation since he was elected.
Either way, as one of his MPs told me: ‘He may have forgotten what he’s told everyone. But the voters won’t. They’re going to remember.’
As are his own Members of Parliament. Starmer and Reeves aren’t just asking their ministerial and back-bench colleagues to go out into the country to lie on their behalf, they’re asking them to lie about a lie. As one disillusioned minister put it: ‘How can I go out on the doorsteps and say to my constituents, “Oh no, Rachel Reeves didn’t lie to you about the Budget”, when she stood in front of me and lied to my face about the Budget?’
Yesterday Keir Starmer lashed himself to Rachel Reeves’ lies. Now it’s clear that if he doesn’t disentangle himself quickly, the Party will make sure they fall together.
