https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/0 ... his-wreck/
Keir Starmer has begun to adopt the demeanour of a prime minister who has been in power for six years, rather than only six months. One can only hope that his winter break in Madeira has enabled him to recover his mojo and banish the tetchiness that has begun to define his public utterances.The fact that Starmer helped to prosecute grooming gangs is of course not mentioned.
It is certainly true that, far from enjoying any sort of honeymoon period, Starmer’s first six months in office have been challenging, to say the least, not helped by apparently not knowing which levers to pull to make things happen. He’s not alone in that. Most of his Cabinet don’t either.
As the Prime Minister looks ahead to 2025, his political fate may well be determined by those Cabinet ministers who deliver, and those who don’t. If they have shown no signs of turning things around by Christmas this year, the long-term prospects for a second Starmer term will look even more shaky than they do now. And Nigel Farage won’t just be licking his lips, he will be positively salivating.
There can’t be any more failed resets or relaunches. No more talk of foundations, milestones or missions, which mean little to Joe Public down the Dog and Duck, and little more to think tank wonks. It leaves voters scratching their heads, thinking politicians like Starmer live on a different planet to the one they inhabit.
This is evidenced in a new Deltapoll survey, which shows that 69 per cent of people think the country is heading in the wrong direction. A mere 18 per cent disagree. If that doesn’t cause alarm bells to ring loudly in Downing Street, nothing will. One third of voters also believe Starmer won’t be prime minister by the end of the year, with his approval rating sinking to its lowest ever levels.
Talk privately to Labour MPs, and indeed some Labour ministers, and there is a growing frustration that most of the errors made by the Government have been unforced or self-inflicted. All governments can be blown off course by “events”, but this one seems to revel in making mistakes that anyone with half a political brain can see will not end well. And too many of these mistakes are being made by the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Where are the greybeards and wise old owls who urge caution before it’s too late? Instead, as in the previous Conservative administrations, too much reliance is being put on 20-something, inexperienced special advisers.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, is one of the few who seems to know what he’s doing and can pull the levers of change. Yet over the weekend he launched yet another “independent commission” to look into social care, when the sector is in crisis. It won’t report until 2028, the most likely year of a general election. There is already a consensus about social care, it just needs political leadership to decide how to reform and fund the system. The last thing that is needed is another three-year-long talking shop, even if it is being chaired by the excellent Louise Casey.
On the day that Parliament returns, Keir Starmer finds the murky waters of the child grooming gang scandal lapping around his feet, partly courtesy of Elon Musk, partly because his safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, failed to explain adequately why she wouldn’t agree to a proper inquiry, rather than just a local one in Oldham. If this isn’t gripped, and properly accounted for, the issue has the potential to topple a prime minister, and I don’t say that lightly.
Starmer’s record on this as Director of Public Prosecutions at the Crown Prosecution Service had better be squeaky clean – but as his evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee seemed to show in January 2013, he has displayed a worrying degree of nonchalance and buck passing.
The mistakes of 2024 must not be repeated in 2025. No more tax rises without a full explanation of how a tax rise will grow the economy. (Clue: it never will.) No more handing the NHS £22 billion with no guarantees of improvements. No more new quangos, leading to an ever-increasingly bloated state and ever more regulation. It really does come to something when the Prime Minister appeals to regulators for ideas on how to stimulate economic growth. The irony beggars belief.
It’s a make or break year for Keir Starmer. I wonder if he realises it.
