“Keir cannot afford another fiasco like welfare,” one Starmer loyalist told me, recalling the government’s humiliating climbdown on proposed cuts to disability benefits after a revolt by Labour MPs. The prime minister knows the episode showed his way of governing is unsustainable. He is consulting people widely this summer about how to turn things round.
There's a fierce internal debate. In Keir Starmer’s right ear, Morgan McSweeney, his influential chief of staff, tells him to focus on wooing back voters in the red wall from Nigel Farage. In his left ear, soft left cabinet ministers urge a more progressive approach to woo centre left voters who have deserted Labour for the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. They argue that these lost voters outnumber defectors to Reform by a margin of three to one. The soft left’s allies in Downing Street want Starmer to emulate Bill Clinton, who fought back against a right-wing populist – Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives – after a rocky start to his first term in 1993.
