The passive premiership
At first they did not notice. After a little while — weeks, months — it struck them. Some ignored it. For others it became oppressive. Those who were honest with themselves admitted they had not known what to expect from Downing Street, or power itself. But it was not this: unnatural, overwhelming silence.
The work of government went on wordlessly behind closed doors as it had since Labour’s election in July 2024. The prime minister liked to work alone in the upstairs room they called the Thatcher study. The Iron Lady stared down at him over the first weeks of his premiership; disturbed, he had the picture taken away. Officials wondered what exactly he had not wanted her to see. If she could have spoken, she would have told them that the prime minster was reading.
Reading time. That, as much as the deathly hush, was the biggest mystery of the new No 10. For hours Sir Keir Starmer sat alone, rigid with monastic intensity, moving word by word through paper after paper. Rishi Sunak had done the same. The last prime minister subjected every document he could find to the microscope, as if searching for a miracle cure to his own political mortality. From his long and lonely hours of research he would emerge demanding action — seized not only of urgent conviction, but a desire to share his latest remedy with advisers, with the cabinet secretary, with anyone prepared to listen and challenge him. Starmer was different. He read everything, then said nothing. “It’s just so odd,” said one senior official who observed Starmer closely, awaiting instructions that never came. “It’s a very oddly passive premiership.”
The winter fuel debacle
After 14 years of estrangement, the Labour Party had reintroduced itself to the people in the worst possible terms. On Sunday July 7, aides from No 10 and the Treasury were mustered in the Cabinet Room. None had expected to inherit the kind of riches the last Tory government had bequeathed its Labour successors in 1997. But what they heard surprised them all: £22 billion in public spending was unaccounted for. Something drastic would have to be done to avoid a run on the pound, or some other implosion on the markets.
Starmer was not there. Nor was his chief political adviser, Morgan McSweeney. The decision fell to Rachel Reeves alone. The chancellor had arrived at the Treasury in a straitjacket of her own choosing. The most significant line in Labour’s manifesto had been a vow of abstinence: no increases in income tax, no increases in national insurance and no increases in VAT.
The Treasury officials of whose orthodoxy the new chancellor was now a prisoner presented her with a list of the implausible and unpalatable suggestions. They suggested she could legalise cannabis for additional tax revenue. The chancellor declined. She alighted instead on what her advisers described as the “least worst” option: means-testing the benefit of which her hero, Gordon Brown, had always been so proud — the winter fuel allowance for pensioners. This was a minefield the Tories had never entered. Yet there was no challenge from No 10. Starmer did not notice the stench of political death. His chancellor had presented him with the numbers, and her answer. The prime minister simply said yes. McSweeney had not been there, he said. This would become a familiar refrain. When failure came knocking at No 10 — and it was to be a regular visitor — the Irishman always seemed to have an alibi.
It increasingly seemed the prime minister was the last person taking decisions of consequence. He only discovered that Sue Gray, his chief of staff, and Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, had given striking train drivers a new pay deal after it had been agreed. The civil servants who had just begun to work with Starmer were baffled at first. Then, as the months ground on, the confounding realisation struck them. Why would Haigh have bothered to consult him? In the frantic meetings after the winter fuel allowance announcement he was a conspicuous, unfelt absence. “We were surrounded by people, who had worked for Blair and Brown,” one adviser said. ‘They would have known exactly what they would have said had they been in a room like that. None of us could say the same about Keir. It wasn’t just that we didn’t know what he would say. We didn’t know whether he would have said anything.”
In time, the public would have its say. So too would Labour MPs who bore the brunt of their fury. “Our public opinion plummeted because of winter fuel,” said one senior adviser in No 10.
By now the public assumed the forthcoming budget would be even worse. “We’d do constant focus- group work on the budget, and people were saying: ‘They’re going to put up every single tax. I don’t know how I’m going to survive this.’ ”
In the Treasury, they asked themselves the same question. How could the manifesto survive contact with the bleak fiscal reality?
Labour’s research team polled every possible tax rise individually, and then head to head, presenting voters with thousands of binary choices. “It was all really unpalatable,” said a Downing Street aide who saw the results. “But some were less unpalatable than others.” The die was cast. On October 30, Reeves stayed true to her word — but only in part. She did not raise income tax, national insurance or VAT on working people. She increased it for their employers instead, and spent the proceeds on the National Health Service. Reeves told herself the budget had at least spared Britain bankruptcy. But after only four months, Starmer’s reserves of political capital were running dry.
The PM fortified his position by ousting Sue Gray as his chief of staff, installing McSweeney as chief aide and courting Donald Trump, re-elected US president on November 5. To those who baulked at this last step, Starmer was later able to point to the sweetheart deal that spared Britain tariffs imposed on other countries. Briefly it seemed to outsiders as if Starmer might succeed in doing politics without imagination — that the world’s most intractable problems could be resolved, as he had always hoped, through competence and courtesy. Yet those who had seen him grapple with domestic politics knew the truth was different.
Scunthorpe and Runcorn
In April 2025, British Steel’s plant in Scunthorpe teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. The Chinese owners had declared themselves content to close the blast furnaces and thus end virgin steelmaking in Britain.
Starmer, just as the Brexiteers had done before him, had promised to reindustrialise hundreds of towns just like this one.
Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, refused to sit back and accept what Beijing’s moneymen said was inevitable. The forbidden word of New Labour — nationalisation — re-entered the lexicon of government. “We are doing this,” he told civil servants, insisting the government would have MPs return from their holidays for a weekend sitting of the Commons if necessary. “I have 400 friends that I will get to London on a Saturday to back me up if we need to.”
He had pored over the Civil Contingencies Act, the law — never used by any government — that gave ministers extraordinary powers to requisition property in the event of a national emergency. Its high thresholds, chief among them an imminent risk to life, had not been met. He would have to legislate to take British Steel into government control himself. At 9am that Friday, Reynolds went to No 10. Around the cabinet table, surrounded by officials and advisers, sat Starmer, Reeves, and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary. Cooper supported the plan. Reeves had found the money. But what did the prime minister think? Without his licence, no action could be taken. And so a circular discussion began. Starmer said there were no grounds to trigger the Civil Contingencies Act, and recalled it had not been used even during the Covid pandemic. Reynolds knew as much already. On and on it went.
“Keir really wanted to know what the right answer was,” recalls one person present. To everyone else it was clear that there was no right answer: only a question of political judgment. Starmer needed to agree to the ends, then will the means. But there they were, again, confronting the obvious as their leader sought refuge in a winding maze of process. Eventually, Reynolds snapped. He needed to know what Starmer believed — what he felt to be right. “We have to decide whether we’re going to let British Steel go down or not,” he said.
That afternoon, Starmer went on television and with conviction. Announcing an emergency Saturday sitting of parliament, he said: “As prime minister, I will always act in the national interest to protect British jobs and British workers.” He went on: “I’ve been to Scunthorpe. I met the steelworkers. I know how important steel is — not just to the region, but to the whole country. It’s part of our national story: part of the pride and heritage of this nation. And I’ll tell you this: it is essential for our future.” Only a handful of his ministers knew that, hours earlier, he had appeared to have no opinion at all.
The political outlook grew uglier with the rise of Nigel Farage and Reform UK. Runcorn, the grey industrial town on the banks of the Mersey, surrendered first. Mike Amesbury, the Labour MP, had been captured by CCTV punching a man to the ground, prompting his resignation and a criminal conviction. In the by-election that followed on May 1, a Labour majority of more than 14,000 evaporated. Reform took one of Starmer’s safest seats by six votes.
Many Labour MPs, now fearing for their own seats, knew who and what to blame. It was all because of the cut to winter fuel, they said loudly. Sotto voce, among themselves, they pointed accusatory fingers at McSweeney. Only he would dare to force a progressive party to disavow its values — its concern for the old and needy — so spectacularly. This, of course, was not entirely fair. It had not been his idea: at first he had not known about it. Once he knew, however, he had spoken as though it had been his creation. As late as that year’s conference, he told one newspaper editor the trouble with Labour MPs was that too many had the mindset of charity workers and civil servants. For him, winter fuel had been a virility test, a reminder that governing required as many difficult decisions as opposition.
But in the days after the result, Starmer met with Reeves. They concluded they had little option but to cast off the albatross around the government’s neck. Within a month, the chancellor had all but reversed the policy she had wasted ten months defending as non-negotiable.
Welfare revolt
Worse was to come. In March, under pressure from Downing Street, Liz Kendall had brought forward proposals to reform welfare. The work and pensions secretary wanted more than anything to make a Labour case for the dignity of work. The politician — whose kamikaze 2015 leadership campaign, run by McSweeney, told the party exactly what it did not want to hear on migration and the economy — had evolved in the intervening decade. She did not want to slash and burn the benefits system, but harboured ambitions to lift the two-child cap at the same time as toughening eligibility for certain payments. Starmer and Reeves presented the public with the opposite. Without her knowledge, her programme of welfare reform was leaked and framed as a £5 billion cut, with recipients of disability benefits paying most of the bill. There would be no lifting of the cap. Labour MPs saw this as evidence that the party had abandoned its soul.
By May 8, eighty of them had signed a letter to Starmer’s chief whip, in which they declared the cuts unconscionable. Less than a week later, the number of refuseniks had passed a hundred. Defeat became inevitable and the whips told McSweeney so. As ever, Starmer was the last to realise the enormity of what he had done.
On the eve of the vote, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting bumped into one another in a Commons corridor. They were both on the way to tell the prime minister that his MPs were willing to inflict the biggest defeat of his premiership. Starmer’s emissaries, led by Rayner, went cap in hand to the rebels. Starmer was not present for the talks. Reeves had no option but to agree to a peace deal that, almost comically, ended up increasing spending on welfare.
On July 2, the week of the first anniversary of the election victory, the chancellor arrived in the Commons for prime minister’s questions in a state of heightened emotion. It had been a difficult morning at home. The weight of circumstance, political and personal, bore down on her. On her way into the chamber, she passed the Speaker’s chair.
Sir Lindsay Hoyle remonstrated with her over a perceived slight to his authority some days previously. She told him: “I’m under a lot of pressure.” The Speaker exploded. “You think you’re under pressure?” he shouted. Reeves took her seat beside Starmer with puffy, bloodshot eyes. Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition, asked whether the prime minister had confidence in his chancellor. He laughed it off without answering. The benches opposite responded with derision. The chancellor began to weep. It was all too much, yet Starmer was oblivious. The nation was not.
A search for answers
The summer recess in late July came as blessed relief to Starmer. Insurrection by his MPs had badly damaged his standing. He was bitter, dejected, frustrated. To one friend he wondered aloud whether he remained the right person for the job he had coveted so much. Nothing seemed to work. The man who prided himself on his ability to reform the most outdated of institutions — first the Bar, and then the Crown Prosecution Service — struggled to make sense of the impasse before him. One of his closest advisers says he saw government as a horologist would see an antique clock. Tuned correctly, each cog and gear could fit together and keep perfect time. So long as he found the right parts, the machine would whir back into life, however broken it may have appeared. Yet the British government did not conform to that approach.
Aides found themselves summoned to Chequers with little notice. Starmer wanted answers. At last he appeared alive to the existential peril he had spent a year sleepwalking into. Yet solutions were in short supply.
In early September Rayner resigned from government over a tax scandal. In the reshuffle that followed, No 10 sacked Lucy Powell, the leader of the Commons, who was baselessly blamed for every leak or briefing from within cabinet. She had her revenge a month later when Labour members elected her to Rayner’s old job as deputy leader, making her a tribune for Starmerism’s many losers — all those MPs and members whose sense of self and autonomy the prime minister and his advisers had undermined. Said one leading Downing Street aide, ruefully recalling the comparison to a driverless London train with which one of McSweeney’s intimates had once condemned Starmer: “Morgan has been replaced by Lucy Powell as the driver of the Docklands Light Railway train. It’s Lucy Powell’s world now.”
A man of little compassion
By the autumn of 2025, MPs began to wonder aloud how long he would last. The prime minister was running out of other people to blame.
Cabinet ministers and No 10 advisers strained for loyalty. But it proved too difficult for some. “He is,” said one influential aide upon their departure from Downing Street, “the least intellectually curious person I have ever met.” Said another politician upon whom Starmer relied heavily: “He can only prepare by reading briefing books for hours on end. He doesn’t brainstorm. He has no fixed views on anything. There’s no clarity because there’s no belief. There’s no belief because there’s no understanding. There’s no understanding because there’s no curiosity.” Said a senior civil servant who observed him closely: “He is not a compassionate man. He’s careless about people around him. It’s just not warm. He just doesn’t think very hard about other people.” A once-close adviser, witheringly: “I don’t think he has a theory of power. I don’t think he’s ever sat down and read any history, or has any idea of how power works. I just don’t think he would be attracted to the kind of historical figures who got stuff done.”
McSweeney was depressed. As the wreckage of the welfare rebellion smouldered around him, he had told an old friend over dinner: “I’m drowning out here, I need help.” The riptide of the prime minister’s urge for self-preservation began to pull him away from the Irishman. In McSweeney’s weakest moments, he confessed to those closest to him that Starmer remained unknowable. In the hours before Lord Mandelson’s sacking as the British ambassador to Washington in September, McSweeney told one intimate that his guess was as good as anybody’s as to where Keir would “end up” on a given issue.
“It’s definitely not a relationship where the chief of staff is the voice and the eyes and the ears of their principal,” a colleague of both men ruefully concluded. “The room where decisions are taken doesn’t exist. You would think that it was a deliberate thing, that Keir thrives in chaos. But it’s not, and he doesn’t. It’s very, very strange.”
On the night of the September 2025 reshuffle, the cabinet retired to Ed Miliband’s north London home, streets away from the house to which Starmer had never invited them. The prime minister and his chief of staff were not present. Before long the ministers were talking about the leadership, and how long their prime minister might last.
Cooper v Reeves showdown
The 2025 budget offered the government a stay of execution. If the prime minister could not tell the country who or what his premiership was for, his chancellor could show them.
Reeves delayed it until the end of November — going long, in the hope that the UK’s negligible rates of economic growth would rise and inflation might fall. But she faced what she described bitterly as “an impossible set of choices”. Some were of her own making. In a fit of opportunism as shadow chancellor, she had lionised the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the budget watchdog whose pessimistic readings of the public finances sharply constrained her room for manoeuvre. Its economists refused to say that her embrace of planning reform to stimulate housebuilding and desperate wooing of the European Union would boost Britain’s growth, and with it the national current account. Other concessions were forced upon her by mutinous Labour MPs who refused to support her on welfare, on the hated two-child benefit limit, or on anything else that made them feel uncomfortable as loud and proud progressives of the kind McSweeney had once derided as insipid librarians. Cabinet colleagues provided little comfort.
In June, tense negotiations over the spending review that preceded the budget had ended in bitter recrimination. Yvette Cooper asked for more money to fund the new police officers promised in Labour’s manifesto, and to fulfil pledges to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls. The home secretary came to the Treasury to set out her position to Reeves and Darren Jones, then chief secretary to the Treasury. The discussion was scratchy and fractious.
“The truth is, Yvette,” Jones said, “you should have never promised to increase police numbers in the manifesto when we didn’t know how things would look in government.”
Cooper had not come for a dressing down. “I’m sure everyone made promises in the manifesto that look a bit more difficult to stick to in government,” she replied, archly. “But we are where we are.”
Reeves exploded. She gathered her papers. “This meeting is over,” she said, storming out of her own boardroom. As she left, those present heard her complain that Cooper was “trying to lecture me on economic strategy”.
Jones, rising to leave, declared: “Well, that’s it.” Cooper persisted, continuing to explain her position to a Treasury official frozen in their seat by second-hand embarrassment. Jones ordered the official to get up. He turned to the home secretary: “That’s it, the chancellor has asked you to leave, you need to leave.”
Budget day
By November 26, there were no surprises left. Almost all of the chancellor’s speech had been briefed and leaked to the newspapers in advance. In a final act of unhelpfulness, the OBR accidentally uploaded its own costings of her decisions to its website some 45 minutes before Reeves rose to speak in the Commons.
Reeves had told Labour MPs that she would cut NHS waiting lists, the national debt and the cost of living, and she declared victory on all three. The grim projections of her impartial masters said the opposite: that debt would rise, growth would stagnate, and household disposable income would fall. The tax burden, already at its highest level since the Second World War, rose again. Millions of workers were dragged into higher rates of income tax when Reeves reneged on her promise to increase the tax bands in line with inflation.
But still the MPs who were once the vanguard of Starmer and McSweeney’s changed Labour Party were in raptures. Reeves told them they could have their way and abolished the two-child cap on welfare. Once, opposition to such generosity from the state was the purity test of the Starmer project. Barely a year earlier, seven Corbynites had been exiled for voting for the policy Reeves now heralded as the government’s crowning achievement. This was change, but not as promised. All the right people were cheering the wrong thing.
It was as if Morgan McSweeney had never existed, and the long, brutal war for supremacy over the left had never happened. The Labour Party had not changed at all. In an instant, it all meant nothing: every promise, every speech, every slogan. The project had never belonged to Keir Starmer, but for years those around him had maintained the tenuous fiction that he was its leader. No longer.
Yet still he was smiling, rooted to the front bench, the ageing face curiously untroubled, as if he were back on the DLR — the passive prime minister, content to be driven to his destination by strangers who held him in contempt. The difference now was that even they did not know where the Labour Party was going.
