Keir Starmer’s first 100 days in power have not exactly gone to plan.
Labour’s supposed honeymoon period has been dominated by far-right riots, “Freebie-gate”, rows over winter fuel payment cuts, infighting and Starmer’s own plummeting approval ratings.
But it has also, quietly, begun setting up the national wealth fund and GB Energy, putting a new planning framework in place to facilitate the faster building of essential national infrastructure and more homebuilding. It sought to end the seemingly never-ending series of public sector strikes by agreeing pay deals with unions, introduce House of Lords reform, and started recruiting additional police officers and teachers.
“If you look at the list of what we have already done in 11 weeks,” Starmer told reporters in September, “then I would argue strongly that we’ve done far more than the last government did probably in the last 11 years”.
What did the commentators say?
It is hard to think of a British prime minister who has had a “more catastrophic first hundred days” than Starmer, said The Telegraph. There has been an “almost unprecedented catalogue of misfortunes, almost all of them self-inflicted”. The series of scandals that brought down his chief of staff Sue Gray “and may yet do for her boss, too, were all the result of avarice, greed and insouciance”.
Gray had been blamed for the new government’s “complete failure to set the political weather” since 4 July, HuffPost UK reported.
Elected on a landslide, Starmer should have been “firing ahead” with his policy plans “instead of being embroiled in political infighting, scandal and an overhaul of his Number 10 operation”, said Sky News political editor Beth Rigby. It is a “pretty dreadful start in government”.
Perhaps most worrying for Labour’s long-term prospects is the perception that has quickly emerged that the new government is really not that different from its Conservative predecessors – characterised by corruption and incompetence, but with hypocrisy thrown in to the mix for good measure.
Last month’s Conference was supposed to be a “reset moment”, said HuffPost, “but the row over freebies for senior Labour figures has refused to go away, completely overshadowing the government’s attempts to get back on the front foot”.
What next?
Labour has made more “avoidable mistakes” in its first 100 days than “any postwar government”, said Will Hutton in The Guardian, “but there are signs of a progressive philosophy emerging”.
The party’s aim to “build a strong social floor, ladders of opportunity and a high-investment economy, combining socialism and social liberalism” is a “compelling vision, and to argue for it would reveal the government’s direction of travel.”
By naming election campaign supremo Morgan McSweeney his new chief of staff, Starmer has given his administration a more “explicitly political stamp” and sought to “turn a crisis into an opportunity” by reshaping his wider Downing Street team, said George Eaton for The New Statesman.
This includes a new strategic communications team, “a concession to cabinet ministers and others who have complained that Labour has failed to tell an appealing story about itself” during its first 100 days in power.
Starmer and his refreshed team now have a “serious stabilisation job to do”, said Rigby.
In the face of growing tensions in the Middle East and the much-anticipated Budget on 30 October, it is the “very opposite of what he needs.
“But looking at the first 100 days, this is a prime minister who has probably concluded that things can only get better. He now needs his team to pull together and prove him right.”