Let me start by wishing him well. Unless he’s struck by lightning, Sir Keir Starmer will be moving into Downing Street later this week and we all need him to do well. Whether we like it or not, the rest of this decade will be shaped by him.
He’s right to worry about the impact on his family. No 10 is relentless and living above the shop makes it even harder to carve out space and set some boundaries.
But his greatest challenge will be honouring his central political pledges — to do things differently. On specific policy issues he’s lowered our expectations miserably, but the promise of change has been absolute.
So what will change when junior doctors hold their next strike? Will he sign off the 35 per cent rise that they’re demanding? Will he save the steel workers and support their indefinite walkout next week? These are live and sensitive issues where most of his party and its union paymasters will expect real change from a Conservative approach. Anger and disillusionment could come fast.
Then there’s the small boats. Whatever we think of the Rwanda policy, we can all see how the prospect of heading for Kent and ending up in Kigali might make us think twice about paying a fortune to climb into an overcrowded rubber dinghy. But with a human rights barrister cancelling the flights and rolling out the red carpet, that Channel crossing on a sunny day looks pretty attractive.
There will be calls to world leaders within hours of meeting the King, so what will he say to Joe Biden? Well done on that polished performance last week, or please step aside and give your party a fighting chance of seeing off Donald Trump? How will he comfort Emmanuel Macron as a Lefty president who has just given the hard-Right their best platform for decades?
Will he lean on Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to address the catastrophe in Gaza? Or will we all continue to watch these global motorway pile-ups in painfully slow motion?
Students might enjoy making some money in summer jobs but they will still be charged eight per cent on their loans and the same punitive interest on the interest. No change is due there.
An early priority, apparently, is to set up a new quango, Great British Energy. Civil Servants will love that — more paperwork, new branding with a
copy, paste and tweak from plans I witnessed Boris Johnson signing off two years ago for Great British Nuclear. His came with a specific commitment to eight new reactors by the end of the decade, but I can’t see Sir Keir pushing the pace. Back then 44 per cent of civil servants regularly worked from the office in Whitehall, something the team I was part of had started to clamp down on. In Labour-run Welsh government, only 10 per cent turned up then and Sir Keir has told us repeatedly that Wales is the blueprint. I won’t go on but you will notice that I’m yet to mention the legislative programme for the King’s speech, nor Rachel Reeves’s first budget. None of this might bother you if the change you’re voting for is basically the colour of the rosette or you simply want to vent your frustration with recent Conservative governments. You might well mutter “partygate” as you put your cross in the box, and think you’re drawing a line. If so, ponder this.
More than 90 per cent of the people who “partied” are still there. They were civil servants, answerable to Sue Gray who is now Sir Keir’s chief of staff. The police who carried out a thorough inquiry found Johnson in a technical breach of the law on only one occasion — like his teetotal chancellor at the time, Rishi Sunak.
Labour speech writers will now be racking their brains to sum up the moment this Friday when victory is theirs, and wonder if they can even replicate Tony Blair’s twilight oration, “A new dawn has broken, has it not”. Back then it felt like a tectonic shift, but there’s actually a new dawn every day and this time it may feel more deja vu than dramatic.
