This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
Sir Keir Starmer wasted no time in chairing the first meeting of his new Cabinet on Saturday after winning a whopping majority in the General Election. Of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, Labour will now occupy 412 of them while the Tories are reduced to 121, the worst result in the party’s history. Taking up the same Cabinet Room seat occupied by Rishi Sunak as well as Liz Truss and Boris Johnson before him, Starmer told his colleagues that the “work of change begins immediately” as he pledged to usher in an era marked by “stability and moderation”. The joke doing the rounds on social media was ‘How dare he use the room reserved for parties to conduct official government business’ in a thinly-veiled reference to the previous administration’s penchant for frivolousness.
Further signs of change were there for all to see with the appointments of non-political ministers into the ranks, demonstrating that the new prime minister intends to lead in a non-ideological way. Starmer appointed former chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance as science minister, rehabilitation campaigner and businessman James Timpson as prisons minister and Richard Hermer, an expert on international law, as his attorney general. Allies of the new PM say the appointments to a “government of all the talents”, or “goats”, demonstrate that the days of ministers being installed solely for political point-scoring purposes are over. Similarly, tensions between the civil service and the government appear to have been quickly quashed, with Sir Keir telling them “from the get-go” that they should know they have “my confidence, my support and, importantly, my respect.”
Talk of Starmer’s “supermajority” was used in the run-up to the election to cloak the fact that the Conservatives have enjoyed a comfortable majority for nearly five years and achieved next to nothing, and thankfully, there are no signs that such political paralysis will be allowed to creep into Westminster again. Within 72 hours of being appointed the Labour Party entered talks with junior doctors, ditched the onshore wind ban and started improving the “botched” Brexit deal with the EU. The disastrous Rwanda scheme was also scrapped and rightly reclassified as a “gimmick” rather than an actual policy. As the new home secretary, Yvette Cooper pointed out, The Conservatives ran the scheme for two and a half years and sent four volunteers to East Africa at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds to the taxpayer. The full extent of the cost will now be audited and released by her office.
But by far the most impressive attribute of Starmer’s nascent administration has been the recognition that in politics, dialogue is everything. The prime minister used strong Labour showings in Wales and Scotland to seek an “immediate reset of the relationship” with the devolved nations, setting out on a UK-wide tour to mend old wounds. His administration is already working with Europe on security and trade, has initiated talks with Israel and Palestine on the conflict in the Middle East and is set to do the same with Volodymyr Zelensky and US President Joe Biden on the war in Ukraine. It all goes to show that after years of playground politics, it looks like we finally have the grown-ups back in charge. And with any luck, it could be just the tonic the country needs.
Sign up to Elevenses for free here: www.thelondoneconomic.com/newsletter