Whatever you say about it, don’t call it a relaunch. Sir Keir Starmer will fanfare a new “Plan for Change” this Thursday and it is being bigged up by Downing Street as a momentous event, no less than “the most ambitious delivery plan in a generation”. His aides are wary of the dreaded r-word because many observers are going to interpret this, fairly or not, as a desperate attempt to turn the page on recent troubles.
It is a truth now pretty much universally acknowledged within the government that it has got off to a much stickier start than it expected. In too many areas, it has hit the ground not running, but stumbling. More definition of Labour’s goals was provided by the budget, but at the price of rousing a lot of extremely vocal opposition, especially from those being asked to pay more tax. The latest squall to buffet Number 10 has been the enforced resignation of Lou Haigh. She could never be described as a soulmate of the prime minister, which helps explain the clinically unsentimental way in which the transport secretary was taken out of service. Losing a relatively junior member of the cabinet will have next to no impact on Labour’s eventual fate. Her fall nevertheless adds to the impression that the Starmer government is being serially surprised by embarrassing revelations and knocked about by events.
Another concern within Number 10 is that the impassioned debate over assisted dying has been a diversion from framing the government’s core agenda and presenting it to the public. While no-one in Downing Street will deny that this is a hugely important issue, and Friday’s Commons vote towards legalisation a historic step, it is also recognised at Number 10 that it has not been a great look to have had cabinet ministers scrapping about it with each other in public.
So one purpose of this week’s prime ministerial event that you mustn’t call a relaunch is to demonstrate that he has a firm focus and tight grip on the domestic agenda. That’s also because, since he arrived at Number 10, there have been many days when Sir Keir has been absent from the building on trips overseas. Downing Street is perturbed to hear that voters in focus groups have started remarking that “Starmer always seems to be abroad.” I’m told that the prime minister himself has been heard to get off planes groaning about how many air miles he has clocked up.
Within the building, the long round-trip to Samoa at the end of October for the Commonwealth summit is seen as a particularly unproductive use of his time. Truth to tell, he has not had much choice about this. Not flying to the Pacific for the Commonwealth summit would have aggravated those who did go. King Charles would not have been amused. Dates in the diary for international summits are non-negotiable and a new prime minister had to introduce himself to his global peer group. But it has accentuated the feeling among his team that he needs to show he’s at home deploying all of Number 10’s firepower to make things happen.
The “Plan for Change” will add detail to what Labour hopes to have achieved by the time of the next election and it will unveil new goals linked to the “five missions”. This is an acknowledgement that its future fortunes are inextricably linked to whether it can improve living standards and public services, as well as levels of voter satisfaction with both.
Targets to be announced by Sir Keir will include, I’m told, ones covering attainment levels among schoolchildren, crime rates and bringing down waiting times for NHS treatment. There was originally a plan to launch a publicly available performance “dashboard”, but that has been abandoned as unfeasible. What we will be promised are metrics by which voters can measure progress towards “delivery milestones”. All of which comes with upsides and downsides.
There is a case for a carefully selected number of properly focussed targets. Done well, these can provide stars for government departments to steer by, and prompts to energise ministers and their officials. One cabinet member argues: “Even if you don’t fully achieve them, if you get 80% to 90% of the way there, you’ve done better than you would have done if you didn’t have a target.”
The case against them, especially if they are poorly chosen or if there are too many of them, is that targets become not a spur to performance but a distraction, which distorts activity in a damaging way. One political peril is that Sir Keir’s goals will be derided as unambitious if the bar is set too low. Aides are adamant that this won’t be the case. “The targets are designed to be very stretching,” says one. “This is supposed to concentrate minds across government.” If the goals are genuinely demanding, the hazard is that they become hostages to future fortune. His opponents and hostile elements of the media will ignore any successes and crow over any failures.
The prime minister will be putting himself very visibly in charge of delivery on Thursday. This is in part the result of a view within Number 10 that the effort to make good on the missions has been too sluggish to date and now needs to be driven harder and faster.
There’s fear that change simply won’t happen if the job is left to clunky committees of ministers and civil servants. Note also the reconfiguration of the personnel and the philosophy at Number 10 since the removal of Sue Gray as chief of staff after just 92 days in post.
Morgan McSweeney, the architect of Labour’s election campaign who supplanted her as chief of staff, is bringing a much more political edge to the job than the former civil servant he replaced. Colleagues report that he is ferociously obsessed with what he thinks Labour has to get done to win a second term. Jonathan Powell, who was chief of staff during Tony Blair’s time as prime minister, has been made national security adviser. Mr Powell has told me in the past that one of his greatest regrets about the Blair government is that it didn’t put much more effort into improving the machinery of government.
Sir Michael Barber and Liz Lloyd, both staffers during the Blair years, have been brought in with briefs to make domestic reform effective – which they are doing in concert with Pat McFadden, also a New Labour veteran, who is the minister in charge of the work on the missions being done by the Cabinet Office.
“Sue’s view was that the centre needed to be weaker and the departments needed to be stronger,” says a person highly familiar with Number 10’s thinking. “But there is no substitute for having a strong centre if you want to drive change.” During Ms Gray’s time, cabinet ministers were encouraged to think of themselves as semi-autonomous entities. The regime now in place believes that vigorous reform will simply not happen unless Downing Street asserts itself by forcing ministers and officials to think outside their departmental boxes. Peter Hyman, one of the principal architects of the programme, has published a punchy piece contending that much of the civil service simply doesn’t get the missions and that permanent secretaries are resisting the use of outside expertise. He urges Sir Keir to appoint “a radical reformer” as the next cabinet secretary. A different ally suggests that the “Plan for Change” is the result of the prime minister realising “how difficult it is to renose the Whitehall machine in the direction that you want to take it”.
So Thursday’s big event is not just aimed at the public. It is also designed to be an electric jolt to Whitehall to get with the programme. The external story will try to convey to voters what Labour hopes to achieve over the course of this parliament. The internal one, in the words of one cabinet member, is about injecting a lot more urgency into the civil service by “galvanising Whitehall and getting it to focus on the government’s priorities”.
The prime minister will be pinning his reputation to delivery this week. Another way of putting it is to say that he is acknowledging the reality of presidential modern politics. Voters hold the man (or woman) at the top responsible for the performance of the government as a whole. Since that can’t be ducked, it might as well be embraced, risks and all. Because if he can’t produce the change he’s promising, Sir Keir’s “delivery milestones” will be hung around his neck.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
