Starmer must move fast without losing his head

When Keir Starmer’s Labour party gathered on Monday to celebrate their election victory, the difficulty was finding a big enough venue. There were so many MPs that aides had to abandon Labour’s usual meeting room on parliament’s committee corridor, and instead head for Church House, where Tony Blair met his party after the 1997 landslide. Cabinet ministers joked that their biggest problem in government would be learning their colleagues’ names. Later in Strangers’ Bar, the queue for a drink went six rows back. ‘It’s freshers’ week,’ said one newbie.

Yet some in the party still felt a sense of unease. ‘This majority is a mile wide and an inch deep,’ said one new MP. ‘Lots of these wins are very slight.’ Already Labour strategists are worried about the next election. ‘If we don’t deliver, we will be out.’ The fear is that the same wave of anti-government sentiment which led Starmer to Downing Street could quickly turn against Labour. As one frontbencher in a northern seat put it: ‘The threat from the Reform party could become our problem.’

Throughout the campaign, when Labour had a 20-point lead in the opinion polls, Starmer often talked about a ‘decade of national renewal’. In the end, Labour’s lead was ten points and the vote share was just 34 per cent: the lowest of any governing party since 1923.

Despite the scale of Labour’s majority, Starmer knows he does not yet command the public’s trust. His plan is to respond with action. With no real room to borrow or spend more, the only way to do that is with reform. When he became the Labour party leader, a few members of his shadow cabinet – Wes Streeting, Bridget Phillipson, Pat McFadden and Steve Reed – would often meet to talk about the need for public sector reform, knowing there would be little money if they came to power.