Wes Streeting is known to be a Spectator reader. Pinned on the Health Secretary’s office wall, as he revealed in an interview last Easter, is a leading article of ours asking whether he was ‘the Hamlet of the Health Service’. Streeting was ‘so riled’ by our suggestion of inactivity that he put it up to hold himself to account.
It’s thus flattering, but unsurprising, that he also agrees with us about the holes at the heart of the government in which he serves. In WhatsApp conversations with Lord Mandelson, which he released helpfully early this week, Streeting lamented that the government has ‘no growth strategy’ and is not providing ‘a clear answer to the question: why Labour?’.
This magazine has enumerated the many ways in which the government is failing to support economic growth – from a self-flagellating energy policy that gives us the highest electricity prices in the developed world to a tax regime that drives talent abroad and labour market changes that entrench youth unemployment.
If the Hamlet of Ilford North wants to be leader, he needs to show leadership
We have also argued that, on welfare, industrial strategy, defence, foreign policy and countering extremism, to mention just a few areas, Labour has acted entirely counter to the values of the patriotic working-class ‘hero voters’ who gave the government its majority in 2024.
Streeting’s apparent endorsement of our analysis is commendable. His paralysis in acting on that insight is to be lamented. He is intelligent enough to know there is no point, purpose or moral justification for remaining in a government presided over, but hardly led, by Keir Starmer.
Still, he hesitates to act. Instead he is absorbed in calculation about future positioning. And all the while, his party and the country lose. ‘The native hue of Resolution is sicklied o’er, with the pale cast of thought.’ If the Hamlet of Ilford North wants to be leader he needs to show leadership.
The longer Starmer remains as Prime Minister the more he demeans the office, and himself. He sacked Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, and is dismissing Chris Wormald, his Cabinet Secretary, to appease internal critics. He had chosen both men, better men than him, with wiser political instincts, and now asks them to take responsibility for his own political vacuity. David Brent made redundancies with more grace.
The Prime Minister has neither the vision nor ability to lead the country that he professes to love. He has claimed Labour are ‘the party of work’ but crumbled at the first sign of opposition to his welfare reforms. He pledged that Labour would ‘back the builders not the blockers’ but watered down his own planning bill, has made no progress on the Fingleton review of bureaucratic barriers to infrastructure construction and only took action to tackle the dysfunctional leasehold system when goaded by his former deputy Angela Rayner.
The only areas where he has shown any sign of clarity and constancy of purpose have been in surrendering sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and making it easier to end the lives of the elderly.
If not purpose or strength, what does Starmer bring to government? Moral authority? You’d need lenses more powerful than any Lord Alli can buy to discern it, political skills more sinuous than any Peter Mandelson could muster to make that case, a communications strategy more brilliant than any Matthew Doyle could create to argue that particular point.
This country needs a prime minister with the ability and strength to bring public finances under control, take on vested interests in both the public and private sectors, immediately repair our broken military, wean millions off welfare dependency, tackle Islamist extremism, end two-tier policing and make the nation truly resilient to global shocks. Starmer cannot even begin to provide the leadership this country needs. Labour MPs know it. Labour ministers see it daily. The cabinet is face to face with that failure hourly. Yet they won’t act. While they play the Dane, so much remains rotten in the state of Britain. For all the incoherence of his claims around the bond markets, Andy Burnham does at least deserve credit for sticking his head above the parapet.
Some within, and outside, government may think that a change of prime minister is a disruption too far in a world as turbulent as ours. But we need faster, deeper and more radical change to how our country is governed if we are to transcend our difficulties. We are a nation in decline and even that is being mismanaged.
Last year, The Spectator drew attention to what we called ‘Weimar Britain’ and the growing sense that this country is becoming as decadent and dysfunctional as inter-war Germany. When a recent survey found that 18 per cent of 13- to 28-year-olds wanted ‘a strong leader who did not have to bother with elections’, it did not reflect a blossoming enthusiasm for Führerprinzip among Generation Z, but the disillusionment young people feel growing up in a country crippled by anaemic growth, a dysfunctional housing market, out of control migration, an inadequate higher education sector and rewards going to all the wrong people for displaying all the wrong values.
That frustration is shared across the electorate – as compelling research published at the weekend by the consistently prescient Dominic Cummings has shown. For so many citizens, the failure of successive governments to deliver on their main priorities – lower immigration and NHS waiting lists, and higher economic growth – creates the frustration that has put Reform UK ahead in the polls. If Starmer’s would-be successors do not want Nigel Farage in No. 10, they need to act with a resolution so far absent from them all. Hamlet ends with the prince, his rivals and the court a bloodied mess and a new sheriff in town. In delay there lies no plenty. Only defeat.
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