Starmer’s ship is sinking, and no volume of officials and advisors thrown overboard will save it

We read in this morning’s Telegraph that Sir Keir Starmer has been accused of creating a “toxic culture in Downing Street” following his briefings against the Cabinet Secretary:

“Reports emerged on Tuesday that Sir Chris, who has been in post for less than a year, was in line to be sacked by the Prime Minister after failing in his mission to “rewire the state” and make the Civil Service more agile.

“Critics say he has been too slow to implement some of Labour’s top priorities, and insists on holding lengthy consultations before enacting new policies.”

Now the Prime Minister’s frustrations with Sir Chris Wormald may be well-founded; it would certainly not be surprising if someone who has risen to the most senior position in the current Civil Service does not see any especially urgent need to ‘rewire the state’.

But on balance, one can’t help but feel that the Cabinet Secretary’s nameless ‘allies’ are making a good case – and not just because some readers might remember when Liz Truss dismissed a senior civil servant (Sir Tom Scholar, then permanent secretary at the Treasury) and there was much breathless commentary, including from Labour, about how shocking this was. No, the really telling blows were landed here:

“They said: “The Prime Minister chose Chris over other candidates who are less experienced but probably more radically-minded, and knew exactly what he was getting, so this is all very bemusing.” The source added that Sir Keir had “developed a habit of hiring people, blaming them and then firing them” and that criticism of Sir Chris was the “latest in a long-established pattern of behaviour”. “As Prime Minister, he has done it with his political team, press team, policy unit and civil servants,” they said.”

Whatever the truth of Sir Chris’s failings, this seems right on the money about the Prime Minister, a man who entered Downing Street so self-consciously un-radical that his government was described to me once as the closest this country has ever come to direct rule by the Civil Service.

It’s an open question how much of this was due to Starmer’s own temperament and how much to the long shadow of the 2017 election, when Labour learned (by way of teaching Theresa May) that even a commanding 25-point lead in the polls could evaporate if a party was foolish enough to try to do anything about the trajectory of the public finances. Either way, the result was a government with no popular options and no mandate to do anything unpopular.

As such, it has not taken long for Starmer to reach that stage of a doomed premiership wherein the ranks of advisors and officials are purged, purged, and purged again, with each tranche blamed in turn for the woes of the prime minister who would, the theory runs, otherwise be very popular. I can’t immediately recall an instance of this tactic actually working, ever, because it is almost always displacement activity to avoid confronting the actual problem.

This time is no different. Last month, I wrote about the Prime Minister’s decision to bring new economic advisers into Downing Street during his last great clear-out and asked the obvious question: what use was it bringing in new people if he wasn’t going to listen to them? Darren Jones, who led for the Treasury during the spending review, might well give Starmer good advice on public spending – but Starmer had already demonstrated, with the u-turn on welfare cuts, that he isn’t prepared to give effect to such advice.

Another problem with hitting the rocks this quickly is that Starmer now needs transformative change on a far shorter timeline than that on which it can actually be delivered. ‘Rewiring the state’ is a good idea, but it’s a big and complicated job; perhaps Wormald was never going to deliver it, but pity anyone expected to deliver it in less than twelve months.

We can see this also in the over-rapid redeployment of the Government’s troubleshooter, Shabana Mahmood. Today’s Times reports that she has described the Home Office as “not fit for purpose” in the wake of a damning internal report by Nick Timothy which describes the department as “dysfunctional” and defeatist on immigration.

Just as with the broader goal of ‘rewiring the state’, it’s hard to deny that the Home Office in particular needs a serious overhaul; I myself wrote last year a paper for the Adam Smith Institute calling for it to be split up. One fundamental problem is that it has a vast range of responsibilities, disproportionately replete with minefields, and only a very small political team (ministers and advisors) at the top to oversee it all.

But even if the Home Secretary gets the green light from Starmer to attempt such an overhaul, will she have time to do it? Mahmood was making a good start at Justice, but wasn’t in post nearly long enough to actually fix anything (which involves building lots of new prisons, rather than the short-term expedient of letting people out of them). Delivering serious change at a sprawling department such as the Home Office will likewise take years; it simply can’t be done on the sort of timescale the Prime Minister (and in mitigation, today’s attention-deficit media environment) demands.

(Nor can Mahmood actually deliver a political fix on immigration by herself; as the Tories repeatedly failed to learn in office, it is no good sending a tough talker to the Home Office if you then allow the departments of Education, Business, and the Treasury to endlessly bid up the numbers.)

A close-knit team, with a clear plan and sense of purpose, might be able to ride all this out, especially if buttressed as Starmer is with an historic majority in the House of Commons and four years until the next election. But Starmer was elected without either a plan or even, as far as one can tell, a clear idea that Britain had any problems deeper than the Conservatives being in charge of it, and his subsequent quest for purpose – and scapegoats – will make developing such cohesion impossible.

Those of us who remember Labour’s pieties during the closing years of the previous government might be forgiven a little schadenfreude at Starmer’s karmic comeuppance. But alas, we all need to live in the country he is trying, and failing, to govern.