“If I hear one more of our people saying that deckchairs are being shuffled on the Titanic,” a government supporter of Keir Starmer confided to the Daily Mail, “I will scream.” No need for shrieks. The prime minister’s No 10 hokey cokey on Monday wasn’t so much shuffling the deckchairs as restructuring the deck crew and announcing that some fresh faces will enable the team to work with new focus towards their ultimate goal of reshuffling. Expect the first strategy whiteboard to be broken out 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.
For now, hold on to your aperitifs and continue to dress for dinner, because the erstwhile chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, becomes something called chief secretary to the prime minister. To Starmer, Darren is a Mr Fixit; to many of his cabinet colleagues, he is a Mr Fuxit. That’s not the official line Downing Steet is going with, preferring instead to claim that yet another reset means Starmer is focused on “relentless delivery”. Delivery of what? They’ve barely passed any legislation. Hand on heart, meanwhile, I’m not sure the word “relentless” means what Starmer reckons it does. All he ever does is relent, on both staff and policy. The role of his comms chief, for example, is now essentially a gig economy job, while doing a monthly U-turn is the only thing he hasn’t U-turned on. We are watching a movie in which it’s not clear what the main character wants. Unsurprisingly, it has turned out to be box-office poison.
But look, maybe it just needs a better tagline! Certainly, Monday found the Starmer administration toggling between new official and unofficial slogans. We have “delivering growth people can feel in their pockets”, which sounds suitably masturbatorial, and “just fucking do it”, which sounds suitably devoid of strategy. Both, however, are preferable to the way one member of Starmer’s inner circle characterised the latest reboot of the franchise, telling the Times that “this is about bringing the grownups in”. Oh no – not the dreaded grownups. Just as Batman reboots only ever promise to be even darker and even grittier, so Starmer reboots only ever promise to send for more grownups. Starmer has been claiming the grownups are coming since 2017. Doing it again now suggests he spent the first 14 months of government running an administration staffed by kids.
Then again, non-cinematic inspiration was available. “We’re not pitching you a new Netflix series,” explained the then shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds in the run-up to last year’s general election. “We’re not putting on politics as entertainment.” Finally, a pledge on which the government has delivered. Unfortunately, as I suggested at the time, it would have been much better if the government had emulated Netflix in one crucial regard. When the streamer greenlights a series, it tends to know how much it is going to cost, and precisely how it will all be paid for. Keir Starmer’s government remains “on a journey” on that front, and it is this more than anything else that is going to do for him. Or, if you prefer, has already done for him.
It was barely nine months ago that Rachel Reeves was defending last year’s budget to the CBI, declaring: “I’m really clear: I’m not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes. That is why at this budget, we did wipe the slate clean to put public finances and public services on a firm footing, and as a result, we won’t have to do a budget like this ever again.” Spoiler alert: they’re going to have to do a much worse one. Yes, in a development that was both clearly predictable and clearly predicted, the promise not to raise any of the three biggest taxes – but to give Britain a far better lifestyle than that to which it had become angrily accustomed – has not come off. In related news, Britain is now much angrier. And it’s going to be a whole lot angrier still come the budget. People will be quite within their rights to say they never voted for any of the things Reeves is going to have to do. It’s extremely difficult to see how she survives that.
During the last election campaign, Rishi Sunak’s claim that Labour would have to raise taxes was treated like some whopper for the ages, with Starmer calling it “absolute garbage” and hotly claiming that the then PM had broken the ministerial code by suggesting that a £2,000 tax hike per person across the parliament would be the way a Labour government would fill a £22bn hole. “He knew very well what he was doing,” sniffed Starmer. “He lied about our plans. And that is a true test of character. As we go to the polls it is important for voters to know about the character of the two individuals who want to be prime minister.”
Well quite. And yet, it is genuinely difficult to suspend one’s disbelief enough to be able to believe that the current economic position can be a surprise to Starmer. He must have known that what he was promising in the run-up to the election – an election he was always going to win – didn’t add up. And if he didn’t, he and his chancellor are even more incompetent than they have so far come across. Their lofty promises amount to a form of populism almost as corrosive as the ones they say they disdain – indeed, it may end up the midwife to them.
Evasions this big should simply be called lies. Unfortunately, every single political party’s manifesto majored on them last time round. During the Brexit years, the term cakeism was popularised to sum up the prevalent mood that everything could be acquired without cost. Boris Johnson famously announced that he was “pro having it and pro eating it” – yet despite seeing how that turned out for everyone from Theresa May to Johnson himself, Starmer and Reeves’s economic promises were cakeism of the first water. These days, so are Reform’s. Nigel Farage has already promised £80bn of new spending with no remotely serious suggestion as to how it will be funded. Mister Honest is lying to the British people, just like he did in the run-up to the referendum on Britain’s EU membership, and if he does make it into No 10, we will yet again see where kicking the can down the road gets us.
Except perhaps by then, we will have run out of road. Someone, at some point, is going to have to approach a position of honesty with the public – but the appetite for self-delusion suggests the time where that would be a winning position is some way off. Until then, we will become ever more stuck – trapped in a never-ending episode of The Great British Cakeism-Off.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
