(Read on, or view here: https://youtu.be/ANVsUtpyBOg)
A hundred days into its existence, Keir Starmer’s government is daring to hope that things might just be starting to look up. At the same time moderate-minded Tories are wondering whether they’re digging themselves into an even deeper hole. As our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, both sides may be crossing the Rubicon.
Everyone agrees that the Prime Minister’s honeymoon with the voters was beyond nasty, brutish and short. Like hurricanes in Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, it hardly happened.
Barely a twinkling of an eye after Labour’s historic win, a More in Common survey put them just one point in front of the Conservatives. And YouGov gave Starmer a personal rating of minus thirty-eight. His lowest in years.
No great surprise, given that his bold strides into transforming the nation’s landscape – literally in the case of his new housebuilding promises – all but vanished behind a fog of sleaze allegations.
His nice new glasses and his wife’s lovely new clothes turned out to be not such a good look when it became clear that they were freebies. Along with lots of other things.
The problem being not so much that he wasn’t allowed to accept them, because he was, more a matter of the way he floundered along without apparently the faintest idea how to bury the story.
Cue Sue Gray, his head honcho at Number Ten, who in shortish order vied with him to become the top line in the bad press that had right-wing headline writers throwing their hats in the air.
Dark tales of how much everyone hated one another behind that bombproof black door neatly slotted in with the reality sticking out a mile – that Starmer’s political savvy was down there with Rishi Sunak’s.
No one will ever really know how much of it was her fault, and whether there was an element of nasty boys ganging up on defenceless girl behind it all.
But what is now plain to see is that she’s out. Not only that, she may also be planning a bit of a career break. Who knows, maybe even heading off to run a pub somewhere? She’s done it before.
Equally clear is that for all her credentials as former civil servant who knew how to get things done, her replacement, Morgan McSweeney, is a past master at political PR.
On top of that, it does make for efficiency having just one rather than two top bods trying to run the show, maybe in the process running one another into the ground.
Certainly a sign of Number Ten getting its act together came within hours of the shakeup. Come Prime Ministers Question Time on Wednesday Starmer’s tone was markedly different from how it had been.
Suddenly, instead of moaning on about what a mess he’d inherited from the last lot, he was cheerily talking up how he was going to make everything better.
One thing he cited was the sea change in workers’ rights heralded in the new law announced next day resetting industrial relations. Bits of it will take time to work through, but it’s still a big deal.
He also talked up this week’s international investment summit that aims to bring in private money, loads of it, to turn major infrastructure projects into achievements.
Another cog in this wheel looks likely to manifest itself in the budget in a fortnight or so.
The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has been doing some nifty finger work with her calculator, and come up with a different way of working out what counts as money owing and what doesn’t.
Upshot being she may stand up at the end of the month and announce she’s got anything up to fifty-seven billion pounds extra in her kitty to splash out on roads, rail and other things that might be topped up with private money.
Jiggery-pokery? Doesn’t look like it, given that it’s got the backing of the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney.
That said, she won’t be able to divert any of this cash into day-to-day spending on vital items like the NHS, councils and prisons. Which is why top economists say she’ll still have to whack up taxes. A lot.
Right now her people straining every sinew to work out two things.
One is to make good and sure they don’t goof, ending up losing more than they gain with whatever they have in mind.
And the other is how to raise the vast sums they’ll need without either breaking pre-election promises about where the axe won’t fall or seeming to be coming down too hard on any particular section of the population.
Which brings us back to that popularity problem, that the Tories are also up against as they try to figure out who best might lead them back into favour with the punters.
They lowered the list of potential candidates to two last week, after what certainly did look like an awful lot of jiggery-pokery.
James Cleverly, the guy with the likely broadest appeal to the nation, and who ran what few disputed was the most effective campaign in the conference, got knocked out.
If, as some say, the Conservative party is the most sophisticated and duplicitous electorate there is then it certainly strangled itself with its own not very clever cleverness this time.
Anyway, it now falls to the grassroots membership to make the final choice next month between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, neither of who have signalled any intention to head for the centre ground.
Shouty Kemi has claimed there’s too much maternity pay and that one in ten civil servants should be in prison. And Robust Robert’s top priority’s pulling out of the European human rights system.
Her obvious strength is her ability to make headlines, though whether they’ll be helpful or hostile is another matter.
His, by contrast is a naked determination to scoop back right wing Tories who drifted off to Nigel Farage’s Reform party. Forgetting in the process all those on the moderate wing who lent their vote to the Lib Dems.
He’ll also face serious problems right up to Shadow Cabinet level if he tries to steamroller through his hardline approach to the EU and immigration.
Neither of them, meanwhile, had much to say about matters uppermost in most ordinary voters’ minds, like NHS waiting lists and the cost of living.
So much then for Cleverly’s central plea in his pitch for the job at the party conference. ‘Let’s be more normal.’
Fat chance, in the view of almost everyone else in the country.
YouGov impishly asked folk what they thought of the hundred-and-forty thousand or so Tory members who’ll decide on the nation’s behalf who should be leader of His Majesty’s Official Opposition. Did they: ‘Seem like normal people?’
Two per cent said they did. The remaining, er, ninety-eight per cent thought they didn’t.
Still, even the venerable Auntie Beeb gets things wrong sometimes.
One day last week her weather app informed the nation that the temperature in Nottingham would be four times the boiling point of water. And winds in Lincoln would top fifteen thousand miles per hour.
‘Oops, don’t be alarmed by some of our data this morning,’ the corporation’s top meteorologist hastily tweeted.
Calls to mind Private Eye’s long-running riff on drunken or lisping editors: ‘Shurely shome mishtake.’
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