In the coming days, you’re going to hear a lot about Sir Keir Starmer’s first 100 days. There will be newspaper interviews to mark the moment when it arrives on Sunday, a trip to Scotland to convene his new council for the nations and regions and a big investment summit early next week. The PM will be all over the television trying to tell you how he’s changing this country, as the columns land — like this one — dissecting his performance to date.
You might be wondering why we mark this anniversary at all. As the great, late Alistair Cooke explained beautifully in one of his Letters from America radio dispatches, measuring the first 100 days in office is a US convention imported here, in which the media assumes the role of a “vindictive school master” to “mark the President’s paper summing up the first 100 days as if they constitute a dry run for his first term.”
