Keir Starmer’s legacy will be ‘managing to p*** off everyone’
P.Ministers of the time always ultimately care about their legacy. They often strive to make a good, lasting impression with big, bombshell announcements or career-defining legislation in the final months, weeks or even days of a premiership. There is a full term for this mode of operation: ‘legacy mode’.
Former deputy cabinet secretary and In The Room co-host Helen MacNamara can think of plenty of things Keir Starmer would like to be remembered by. The most recent and obvious of these is the announcement of a social media ban on people under the age of 16, which has been both celebrated and criticized.
There are other things, too: the Tenants’ Bill of Rights and the removal of the two-child allowance limit. Starmer would do much better to make more of a fuss about the dramatic fall in immigration, which he also oversees. She would love more people to remember the VAT increase for private schools and the introduction of free breakfast clubs in schools (“we couldn’t have heard more about that,” grins Helen).
Cleo Watson, Theresa May’s former No 10 special adviser and In The Room co-host, chimes in: “Unfortunately you don’t get to choose what your legacy is. There are a few things that will follow it forever.”
Cleo says there are things like lack of action on welfare reform. And this failure had other knock-on failures: increased UK spending on welfare meant inadequate funding for defence, leading to the shock resignation of defense secretary John Healey.
In the final episode, Cleo argues, “He managed to piss off the farmers with the inheritance tax. He managed to piss off the judges by canceling some jury trials. He managed to piss off the veterans by dragging them to court.”
And then there’s the complicated business of winter fuel allowance. Cleo explains: “The situation hasn’t really changed, but people remember that the government came for the people who needed it most. It was a completely pointless debate and it did huge, huge damage to it. It’s still on the doorstep and in focus groups now.”
Former politicians also point out that the assisted dying bill has led to even more division and debate, and that while it is not something Starmer was personally involved in, it happened on his watch. “This is his brand of passive management. He allowed this to happen,” says Helen.
“Keir Starmer promised to ‘rewire the state’. As far as I can see there has been no rewiring. It all comes down to someone around whom there is so much hope, so much promise, so much ‘things will be different’.
“People probably put a lot of that hope in the abstract and it wasn’t actually something he said; it was what everyone thought it could be. But some of it was things he said and he didn’t live up to those expectations. The truth is Keir Starmer hasn’t actually helped build or rebuild trust in politics.”
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