Keir Starmer’s unhappy anniversary
It should be a moment of celebration — instead there’s a sense of crisis around Downing Street.
Just a year ago, Labour won a crushing majority — two-thirds of all the seats in the Commons. But they pulled this off with the support of just one-third of voters. Keir Starmer took power with a vast numerical advantage at Westminster, but a desperately shallow level of public goodwill.
The chaos surrounding the government’s welfare reforms is the kind of thing that happens in the dying days of an administration barely hanging onto power — yet Starmer has a vast majority and four years until the next election. How on earth has this happened?
The Prime Minister admits he got the tone wrong in those early weeks, with doom-laden warnings that things would get worse before they get better. Rachel Reeves highlighted a hole in the public finances as if it had been a massive secret, and they set about filling it by targeting some of the most vulnerable people in society.
All governments push through their least popular measures as soon as possible — hoping conditions improve and voters forgive. But the one-third who did vote Labour last year couldn’t have imagined they were voting to pick pensioners’ pockets, before grabbing cash from the sick and disabled.
Cue a series of u-turns, each piling on more pressure, more embarrassment. A government with a supposedly impregnable majority now looks fragile and accident-prone, willing to be bossed around by its backbenchers.
After backing down on Winter Fuel Allowance and welfare reforms, Labour now needs to find new ways to save billions, on top of finding billions more to meet Donald Trump’s demand for a big boost in defence spending.
It means tax rises, spending cuts or a combination of the two — with every option likely to spark another internal rebellion. The alternative, loosening self-imposed fiscal rules, plays into the opposition narrative that Labour can’t stop spending public money.
This isn’t just about Keir Starmer’s popularity. As Labour sank in the polls, Reform UK rose to the top. An election now would likely end in a hung parliament, with Nigel Farage as prime minister.
The way things are going, this could be Starmer’s lasting legacy — the man who let Farage into Downing Street.
