There is a way out of the doom loop for Labour

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is an FT contributing editor

It is harder than it looks. The adage has it that politicians campaign in poetry, but are obliged to govern in prose. For Sir Keir Starmer, the five months since Labour’s election victory has more closely resembled a journey from the parade ground to the trenches.

The latest incoming fire comes from women protesting against the timing of increases in the state pension age. In opposition, Starmer had been on the side of then 60- and 70-something aged women claiming they had been unfairly treated. Independent experts agreed with them. That is as it may be, but now the prime minister says the government cannot afford compensation.

These Waspis (women against state pension inequality) are not alone. The scrapping of the annual winter fuel allowance for all but the poorest pensioners prompted a backbench rebellion. Business leaders, courted assiduously while Labour was in opposition, now complain bitterly that a steep increase in national insurance contributions will harm investment and recruitment. Farmers have taken to the streets against the imposition of inheritance tax on agricultural land. Starmer’s poll ratings have slumped.

The economy is not helping. Labour has bet the bank on a revival of growth. Rachel Reeves’ Budget restored credibility to the management of the public finances. It also provided much-needed funds to keep the NHS afloat and begin the repair of broken public services. But the package has not revived confidence. Growth has stalled and inflation is proving stubborn.

A glance at the sorry economic legacy of the Conservatives says the Treasury has been more right than wrong. Handouts to affluent pensioners and tax breaks for investors buying up agricultural land do not make sense at the best of times. And who can blame ministers for the mantra that it was the Tories who crashed the economy? The mistake is to imagine Labour will be thanked for the pain of putting things right.

Ministers cannot expect the benefit of the doubt from the media. The five-prime-ministers-in-eight years psychodrama of the post-Brexit Tory implosion and the rise of instant-judgment social media have turned the reporting of politics into a game of “gotcha”. The common currency is hyperbole. A government going through a bad patch is deemed to be engulfed by crisis and a power struggle between aides proof of a collapse of prime ministerial authority.

Those with longer perspectives will recall that even successful prime ministers have bad spells. When, in the autumn of 1980, Margaret Thatcher offered a defiant pledge that “the Lady was not for turning” much of the country and a fair chunk of her own party were in revolt against her shock therapy economic policy. Tony Blair’s premiership was marred early on by a much more serious rebellion against welfare cuts than that faced by Starmer. Five months into his first term, Blair felt obliged to publicly claim he was a “straight sort of guy” amid charges of cash-for-influence sleaze.

None of this is to say that Starmer’s government has not made mistakes. If Labour did not know the precise size of the fiscal hole left by the Conservatives, it was evident enough before the election that rebuilding public services would require big tax increases. Too many ministers still seem to think that it is enough to blame the Tories. A surfeit of campaigning and not enough governing — that’s how one old Whitehall hand puts it. Over time, good policy begets good public relations. The reverse does not hold.

Things are going to get rougher. Unpopular choices between tax increases and spending cuts will not go away. Foreign policy scarcely figured in Labour’s prospectus. In office, Starmer has discovered that Britain faces the biggest national security threat since the end of the cold war. Faced with Vladimir Putin’s menace and Donald Trump’s disdain for the Nato alliance, the government will have to spend more on defence. A lot more. The money will have to come from somewhere.

The government will also need to invest political capital in rebuilding Britain’s relationship with the EU. The economic and security cases for a much closer arrangement speak for themselves. But thus far Starmer has been unwilling to leave behind the campaign mindset that saw Labour running scared of charges it would “sell out” to Brussels.

The news is not all grim. The government has an impregnable majority. Reduced to just 121 seats in the House of Commons, the Conservatives have chosen in Kemi Badenoch a leader in whom many of its MPs have little confidence. In denial about its own culpability for defeat, the party remains badly divided about how to respond to what looks like a growing threat on its right flank from Nigel Farage’s Reform.

So Starmer has time to navigate the storms. The danger is not so much a prolonged spell of unpopularity, but a sense that the government is a prisoner of circumstance. The prime minister will never be a great visionary. And vision is not really what Britain needs at present. But in tough times, governments need to show an organising purpose that reaches beyond the usual array of individual policies. There is a perfectly good story to be told about how Britain can find its way to prosper again as a modern, and significant, European state. It needs a narrator.