Fergus Finlay: Keir Starmer's plans risk losing the dressing room even before half-time

When I look at him I wonder if Starmer hasn’t become the latest victim of a sort of immutable law that seems to apply, especially in this part of the world. Like a law of nature, only it governs the cycles of politics. It goes something like this. Right-wing parties are born to govern, especially because they’re really good at giving tax cuts. So they govern, a lot, and especially in the good times.

But they always make a mess of it. They blow up the economy, or they get mired in sex or money scandals, or they just become generally, and visibly, corrupt. 

Then left-wing parties are asked to come in and clean up the mess. They always inherit a terrible situation and in general they make it a lot better. But never without pain. And as soon as the mess is cleaned up the left is punished unmercifully, and the right-wing tax-cutting parties are brought back again. To start the cycle afresh.

The party I’ve been a member of all my life suffered that fate more times than I care to remember. We always succeeded in rebuilding the country from the economic rubble left behind, and we always got punished.

Only one left-wing party on our side of the world managed to break that duck. The Labour Party led by Tony Blair served three terms and was by any measure incredibly successful, even if Blair’s own place in history will always be coloured by the Iraq war.

Can Keir Starmer avoid the fate that seems pre-ordained for parties of the left going into government? He inherited a country that has never recovered from the crash of 2008, Brexit, and covid. He walked into office to find a mountain of debt and an economy that stubbornly refuses to show any signs of growth.

Look at Starmer and his first few months, and contrast them with Blair, just for a moment. Unlike Starmer, Blair was lucky in his predecessors. Neil Kinnock, and then briefly John Smith, had wrestled the Labour Party back, not from the hard left but from the mad left. 

Blair himself, as part of a series of moves to restore confidence in the economy, took a decision that was widely seen as monumental, and granted operational independence over monetary policy to the Bank of England almost as soon as he got into office.

Then Princess Diana was killed. It was a moment of national trauma, and one that was bound to test a young and inexperienced prime minister. He rose magnificently to the occasion. His language and demeanour, even the impression that he had somehow forced the royal family to acknowledge the pain of the people, drove his popularity into the stratosphere.

Without wishing to sound callous or cynical, Starmer has had no such luck. Instead he has been caught on the horns of two vicious dilemmas (I’m not sure how many horns multiple dilemmas have, but I imagine they’re sharp and painful.) 

First there’s the madness that is Donald Trump. Trump has, for now, turned the world on its head by cozying up to Putin, abandoning Ukraine, launching endless rhetorical attacks on America’s oldest allies, and initiating a series of mindless and damaging tariffs that will do untold damage, including to his own country. 

He and his gang talk endlessly about free speech, while at the same time they are killing it through the use of malign algorithms to brainwash their own supporters.

Starmer is stuck in the middle of all that, trying to save Ukraine from oppression and at the same time to save his own economy from the worst effects of a trade war. It obliges him, he believes, to try to be nice to Trump even while the American president is peeing on him from a height. 

That’s a necessary and brave strategy, but it will be hard to sustain among his own people. If tariffs start to bite and if the insults being casually hurled by Vance and Trump don’t stop, the British people are going to expect their prime minister to bite back.

And then there is the stagnant economy he inherited at home. Though they have only been in office a few months, it seems as if the Labour government has had several mini-budgets already. And each of them has been tougher than the last. 

It looks now as if Starmer is going to have to deal with a revolt in his own party. Because he and his chancellor keep talking about growth, but imposing hardship instead.

A lot of the newspapers in Britain hate Labour. But here’s what a supportive newspaper, the Guardian, had to say after Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement the other day:

“About a third of children live in deprivation. Those with lone parents, or two or more siblings, or in families where someone is disabled are overrepresented among the poorest households. This is hardship of a scale and severity that can be hard to comprehend for those who have not experienced or seen it.

As well as shortages of food, the poorest families face problems with housing and essentials such as clothing, toiletries and furniture. 

"Headteachers have reported pupils being exhausted due to lack of sleep, and distressed by feelings of shame, among poverty’s detrimental effects.” 

That is simply not a sustainable proposition for a Labour government with a huge majority. It seems pretty clear that they have allowed themselves to be trapped by a set of decisions they announced when they were carrying the ming vase – and especially the commitment to no additional taxation. 

Because of that, and because Britain’s debt burden is already so high, they are backed into a corner where they are trying to avoid austerity by cutting public spending. And that’s a contradiction in terms – you just can’t do it.

There might be merit in telling Starmer that he’s only at the beginning of a five-year term and he must remain absolutely steadfast. That advice would work better for me if I had a sense of a coherent strategy, but all I can see, with the best will in the world, is floundering.

In fact the analogy that keeps coming to mind – and I really hope I’m wrong – is the football manager with the cast-iron long-term contract. But his team are slipping down the league table after a series of losses, and there are strong rumours that he has lost the dressing room. 

Managers who find themselves in that position usually don’t make it to the end of the contract. Right now, unless he can find a strategy to return to winning ways, Keir Starmer is putting the dressing room at risk.