For the first time in a long while, the Tory MP was gleeful. ‘Starmer has messed up big time!’ he told me. ‘All those prisoners breaking out the champagne. Then you throw in the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance. It’s filling my emails. This policy is going to turn out to be his poll tax!’
His joy was mirrored in the despondency of one of his Labour rivals. ‘We’re getting the sequencing dangerously wrong,’ a minister told me. ‘It’s one thing to take tough decisions. But you can’t just pile one load of s*** on to another load. You have to give the voters some sort of respite. Or else it comes to define you.’
There’s no doubt that last week was the worst, politically, of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership.
‘Respect to him’: Ex-convict praises Starmer after early release
A prisoner celebrates with champagne after being released early to free up space, on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent
An inmate, in the black T-shirt, is met by friends in a Lamborghini after being given early release
The optics of the prison release were appalling, as drug dealers queued up on camera to personally thank the Prime Minister for handing them their liberty. At the TUC, he was heckled as he tried to defend his pensions raid. An opinion poll found his unfavourability rating soaring to 46 per cent, the joint highest since he became Labour leader.
But for those of Starmer’s colleagues urging him to ease back on the pain, he has a simple and defiant message. Brace yourself. Because there’s more to come.
‘We’re not going to be changing course,’ a senior Labour adviser told me. ‘The Tory fiscal black hole is real. You can argue about a billion here or a billion there.
But people need to wake up. This has to be tackled, and we’re going to be the ones to do it.’
Despite the terrible headlines, Starmer and his team have been bolstered by what they claim is some positive feedback coming from their focus groups. ‘Tough’, ‘hard-a**e’ and ‘decisive’ are three descriptions that have been fed back from voters.
‘We know this isn’t popular,’ an aide explained. ‘But when did you last hear people describing a Labour prime minister like that? In four years’ time, we have to be able to say to the country, “We took the hard decisions. We know you didn’t like it. But it worked.”’
This reference to a four-year strategy is significant. First, it’s a clear indication Starmer is already setting his sights on a 2028 election. But more importantly, after a week that began to look like it had been put together by the scriptwriters of The Thick Of It, when Home Office minister Diana Johnson had her bag stolen at a policing conference, it demonstrates the PM does actually have a political strategy after all.
Which will come as a relief to the Labour MPs I spoke to over the past few days, who had begun to express concern that their leader had become so ‘delivery focused’ he’d forgotten he now occupies the most significant elected office in the country.
‘Keir’s attitude is, “I was Director of Public Prosecutions. I know how to take serious decisions. I know how to get things done,”’ one observed. ‘Well, that’s great. But the DPP doesn’t have to go to a constituency surgery every week and explain to Brenda from Bristol why she won’t be able to turn on the heating this winter.’
Starmer’s allies say their approach over the next few months will involve communicating with two distinct audiences.
The first, and most important, is the British people.
‘The electorate didn’t just chuck the Tories out and give us a landslide because they thought everything was going great,’ one explained to me. ‘They know things are bad. And they expect us to level with them. That was the trap the
