Labour’s first 100 days: Could do (MUCH) better

It would be so easy to rip into our new Labour government. I could knock out a polemic before breakfast without breaking into a sweat. It has been beset by low level scandals and political nervousness. I am not laying into it because I believe Starmer and his cabinet will soon start behaving like serious politicians, and this government will begin to register real achievements.

The Spectator asked me to explain why, and here is what I said.

Needless to add, if I am wrong (and that is always a possibility, I fear) I will report back in six months and hold myself to account.

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Keir Starmer’s fortunes are about to change

Those of us who voted Labour with pleasure on 4 July could never have imagined the new government’s first 100 days. We thought that the grown-ups would take charge after the chaos of the Tory years. Labour would be the adults in the room, as the cliché goes: sensible, professional people like Sir Keir Starmer, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, and Rachel Reeves, a former analyst at the Bank of England.

Angela Rayner once described Keir Starmer as ‘the least political person in politics I know,’ and many found his apolitical nature endearing – mature, even. We could not have been more wrong.

The first 100 days of his government have proved that what is grown-up in the rest of the world is childish in politics. Here’s where that delusion has led us.