Who is dreading the new year more: Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves? Most people look forward to the turn of the year as a chance that better things might be on the way, but it’s hard for the prime minister and chancellor to glance ahead to the next few months and expect 2025 to be any more fun than the latter half of 2024. Reeves has a spending review where she is expecting ministers to find 5% efficiencies in their departments, so is nailed on for another 12 months of being the least popular person at the cabinet table. For Starmer, though, the misery isn’t inevitable. Or at least, it might not be if he changed the way he operates, as most people try to at this time of year.
One of the reasons Labour has managed to make governing look quite so hard is that both Starmer and Reeves are playing the bad cop at the moment. Good cop, bad cop is supposed to work as a negotiating tactic when one half of a partnership is negative and hostile while the other partner comes across as upbeat, friendly and encouraging. The bad cop is supposed to start the negotiating, and then the good cop sweeps in to appear as though they’re on the side of the person the pair are trying to win over.
The bad cop work started as soon as Labour came into government: the narrative about the £22bn black hole and the mess left by the Tories being worse than expected was essential to making the Conservative party’s route back to power much longer. But by now, the good cop should have emerged. He hasn’t. Starmer is still stuck in complaining about the Tories, rather than enthusing about his own vision. Prime minister’s questions is often a series of exchanges about which party is not quite as bad as the other, rather than Starmer confidently steamrollering a depleted Tory party that has adopted a strategy of saying nothing at all about what it wants to do for a long time.
Kemi Badenoch’s refusal to get into specifics about policy should make it easier for Starmer to set a contrast between his government and the opposition, but instead he seems quite happy to spend more time talking about the opposition than he does about what he is doing. The most positive he gets is when there is some vaguely cheering economic news, and he demands that Badenoch welcome it: something he may not be able to do very much of in 2025 if the economy continues to flatline.
His recent not-a-relaunch speech was supposed to set out “measurable milestones” on what he wanted to do that would change Britain for the better. But he couldn’t quite help turning it into a bit of an extended moan, riffing endlessly on the mistakes his predecessors had made, and even being negative about the civil service for being “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.
For her part, Reeves acknowledged in the autumn that she had been too gloomy, and started peppering her speeches with phrases designed to sound optimistic about the future. She told the Labour party conference that her “optimism for Britain burns brighter than ever”, and then said in the budget that “my belief in Britain burns brighter than ever”. Come spring, she will be professing the sort of “burning passion” normally reserved for teenagers writing their university personal statements. But whatever her language, Reeves can’t be the good cop: that’s not what chancellors are there for.
No, she shouldn’t talk down the economy, which was one of the earlier complaints from business about her approach (they’ve now moved on to complaining about her tax hikes). Within government, the job is not about being everyone’s best mate, but about sticking to the spending priorities of the government. That necessarily involves cheesing off cabinet ministers who all have pet projects they think are more important than the ones of their colleagues, and who can’t understand why the Treasury doesn’t agree.
It also involves upsetting backbenchers, many of whom still seem bewildered that government gives you power – but only to choose between two unpalatable options that will annoy everyone. The recent upset in the party over the refusal to compensate Waspi women was a perfect example of that: had Reeves agreed to the £10.5bn bill, there would have been a backlash from another section of the electorate who don’t expect to be able to retire at any point.
So Starmer has to be the good cop, though even cabinet colleagues aren’t quite sure he has got it in him. They say that nothing seems to animate him more than identifying areas of bad practice and talking about how to make a system or an organisation work better. Turning up to meetings on time, making sure protocols are followed, having a head of the civil service who appears to respect the civil service: all these things are important to Starmer. Even longstanding allies accept that, while doing things properly is important, you still need more than that. Specifically, you need to know what the things are that you want to do. It’s still not clear that Starmer knows that.
The team around Starmer has changed a lot recently, with experienced hands such as James Lyons joining as a strategic communications chief to beef up a part of the operation that has been seriously struggling. But again, you can have the best comms operation in the world and you still won’t succeed if you’re not clear with yourself about what you want to communicate. In fact, the “measurable milestones” underlined that, while Starmer is clearly obsessed with project management phrases, he still isn’t fully sure what his project is, other than doing things better than the Conservatives. He loves to talk about “mission-led government”, “pillars” and other phrases beloved of people working in “delivery” but, as prime minister, he is the one with the power to write the letter, not the postman who delivers it – important as that is.
There are areas where Starmer’s government is trying to be genuinely reforming, particularly on planning and health policy. The former has moved quicker than the latter, with Angela Rayner unveiling big changes to speed up planning permission and get more homes and infrastructure built where the government thinks they are needed.
Wes Streeting is taking much longer to produce his detailed plan for the NHS, which has left many in the health and political worlds worried that, beyond setting a broad direction for reform, the government still doesn’t really know how to achieve it with a health service that is in permacrisis.
However, both Rayner and Streeting show the prime minister up: they know how to be good cops. These two ministers are the current frontrunners to take over as leader and for good reason. They both have an authenticity that Starmer, for all his talk of his background, still struggles to muster. They also have something far more potent than a back story, which is fire in their bellies. They appear hungry for success, while Starmer is much lower energy.
Trying to be more like his colleagues probably won’t work for Starmer either – remember Gordon Brown trying to smile in a YouTube video – but the prime minister does know how to get animated and seem passionate: it’s just that he needs to switch the focus of that motivation from talking about Tory failure and Arsenal to some other topics that interest the electorate and make people feel that the prime minister is leading them towards a better future, even if it isn’t quite here yet. After all, one of the things we all like about a new year is that it brings a sense of hope that life could get a bit better soon.
• Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of the Spectator and a presenter of Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster
