What could a Starmer government possibly achieve now?

What is the point of Keir Starmer’s government now? Morgan McSweeney’s departure may have been an attempt by the Prime Minister to buy some extra time, like a patient bargaining for expensive life-extending drugs, but it doesn’t change the diagnosis: this is a government that no longer works.

Ministers who had previously been very loyal to Keir Starmer had been privately saying it was only a matter of time that he went a couple of months before the latest revelations about Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. But even before that scandal first blew up in the autumn, MPs and some ministers had started to lose hope, having already stopped trusting the Prime Minister. It wasn’t just the repeated U-turns over policies that many of them had only just defended on the airwaves. It was the policies themselves: they were empty, or didn’t make sense. It was in the summer that their loss of faith became obvious, when Rachel Reeves ended up weeping in the Commons following the gutting of her welfare cuts. The collapse of that welfare ‘reform’ might not have happened had the Prime Minister had any sense of what he really wanted to do beyond the headline ambition of cutting the benefits bill and getting people into work.

It was almost as though Starmer didn’t really know what he wanted to do in government beyond doing things better than the Tories. He might argue that the Conservatives at their worst still had more psychodrama than his own government, but that hardly means Starmer has succeeded in keeping his leadership boringly stable. So if the only ‘change’ he was really offering was a departure from politics as a blood sport rather than as the business of getting things done, then he has failed on that metric too.

What could a Starmer government possibly achieve now? It doesn’t have the loyalty or trust of its MPs to be able to answer the big questions facing this country, whether on immigration, public service reform, benefits or the even longer term problems like social care. Those who are still trying to save Starmer are circulating lines to take about ‘incremental change’, but it’s not clear what even the increments might be as Labour MPs are not prepared to give their leader the benefit of the doubt on small things, let alone the big calls. He could quite feasibly continue in office but not in power, but what’s the point of that? Starmer had to teach his party that being in opposition is comfortable but pointless: now he needs to realise that being in government without the means to govern is hardly better.