Sir Keir Starmer is hardly the first prime minister to want to make sure they are surrounded by a team at No 10 that is effective; usually, and with little friction, the civil service ensures that that is indeed the case. Many an incoming premier has, in due course, replaced their closest civil servants with people they know and trust better.
The wiring of the Downing Street and cabinet office machine is tangled and confusing to any novice, but – apart from the convulsions caused during the reign of Boris Johnson and his adviser Dominic Cummings – any changes to it can usually be accommodated. So it is with the latest change, the departure of Sir Keir’s principal private secretary, Nin Pandit, who had only been in post for 10 months.
This is one of the most powerful and sensitive roles in the home civil service – more important than many ministers – and with such close contact with the prime minister and other senior colleagues, three fundamentals, at least, are essential: a rapport with the prime minister, an amicable relationship with senior political advisers, and the ability to get things done in Whitehall. When some or all of those elements are missing, things can go wrong.
There is nothing sinister as such in the departure of Ms Pandit, and No 10 is keen to stress that she retains the prime minister’s trust and confidence. Other, anonymous sources say she “wasn’t effective”, which feels unkind. But this is the third such departure since Sir Keir became prime minister.
Soon after he won the election, and apparently in some sort of power struggle with Morgan McSweeney, then head of political strategy, Sir Keir “let go” his chief of staff, Sue Gray. She was the woman who was supposed to help the new government navigate the system, but who found herself lost. Mr McSweeney replaced her.
Last March, the director of communications, Matthew Doyle, also stood down. He is replaced by a former editor of The Sun, David Dinsmore. As a “permanent secretary for communications”, there is much riding on him.
Taken together, these personnel changes – and the steady stream of gossip about the buffeting egos of SW1 – are not the sign of a happy, confident, healthy administration. Sir Keir has reportedly been derided, by Mr McSweeney himself, as more of an “HR manager” than a “leader”, but the irony must be that Sir Keir doesn’t seem to be very good at making best use of his human resources.
Sir Keir’s abiding failure has been less in policy than presentation – the tragic absence of what the comms professionals term a “narrative”. Past governments have managed to survive political weather just as inclement as prevails now with a sense of purpose – a “story” they can stick to until such point as the policies yield palpable changes to people’s lives and they can stand vindicated for making the kind of “tough choices” that fall to any set of ministers.
Such a narrative gives every elected representative and sympathetic media commentator a script with which to persuade themselves, and a sceptical public, that there is some purpose to what they are doing, even if it is not yet successful. On taxation and immigration, in particular, there is no sense of this as yet, and no inkling about what this Labour government is “for”. The collapses on welfare reform, in fact, suggest that the parliamentary Labour Party has a very clear idea of what a Labour government is not for – but, as yet, no sensible collective idea of making social security sustainable.
To take other examples: If the tax hikes are to fix the public finances, and “smashing the gangs” will stop the boats, this message has somehow been lost, and not enough voters understand that the rewards for this patient, practical, painstaking Starmer approach will ever be felt. Much the same goes for the reforms to the NHS, raising standards in schools and the house-building programme. Meanwhile, the promised boost to economic growth remains elusive.
Some time ago, in opposition and in the early stages of government, Sir Keir and his colleagues came up with a convoluted list of “missions”, “pledges”, “steps”, “milestones” – aims that no one, including themselves, could remember, let alone adumbrate. Instead, crisis has followed misstep, and there is more of a hint that the Starmer government is suffering from the kind of “chaos and confusion” they used to accuse the Conservatives of.
The mounting sense of unease about the rising cost of servicing the national debt is adding to the public’s worries about the government’s competence and control of events. Instead, Nigel Farage – an obvious charlatan – has been making the political weather. There is, by the way, no universe in which that is the fault of Ms Pandit.
There have been so many resets since that bright July morning in 2024 when “Change” was in the air that the public has little patience for another one. The term should be avoided.
This autumn, the government – and pre-eminently the prime minister – has at least three opportunities to explain what it is he is doing, why he is doing it, and how he intends to win the arguments: the Labour Party conference, the return of parliament and, most of all, the autumn Budget can all be used to this end. With Mr Dinsmore soon in place, the narrative can be transmitted to an impatient and uncertain electorate.
