Time is short for Starmer and Labour

Some early missteps on touchstone issues have not helped the cause of a government that needs quick victories

Photo: Number 10 / Wikimedia Commons

In the months leading up to the recent general election, I said many times that this did not feel like a ‘1997 moment’ – by which I meant that, while it looked certain the Labour party would be returned to power, I didn’t detect anything resembling the upbeat and positive sentiment – remember Cool Britannia? – that accompanied Tony Blair’s victory.

It was true that Blair had inherited a healthier economy than that bequeathed to Sir Keir Starmer, as well as a country that generally functioned better. So there were reasons to be more cheerful back then. But I don’t think that entirely explains why the Starmer government enjoys little of the goodwill shown (in the early days, at least) towards the Blair government. There is also the hard reality that most senior figures in the current government simply don’t hold the gravitas, or command the respect, that certain new Labour big hitters did. And, though I was no great fan of Blair or his project – the party’s relationship with the working-class sustained much damage in those years – I am sure that Labour in 1997 was, unlike Labour in 2024, not seen as so wildly out-of-step with mainstream Britain on what I suppose we must now describe as ‘culture war’ issues.

Labour’s recent victory at the polls, while handsome, amounted to what one commentator described – accurately, in my view – as a ‘loveless landslide’. That being the case, it should hardly come as a surprise that Starmer’s government has enjoyed no honeymoon period (Blair’s, by contrast, seemed to last for months).

Moreover, I think the current government has made things harder for itself by making some serious missteps, and thereby conveying precisely the wrong message, on four key issues.