The problem with death spirals is you never know when you’ve hit the bottom. Now, with a week before that Rooseveltian milestone is reached, Sue Gray — Starmer’s Chief of Staff — has resigned.

This was supposedly unthinkable as recently as a fortnight ago, when Angela Rayner told the BBC’s Laura Kuennsberg that Gray would “absolutely” be in her job by Christmas. But while Rayner made those public assurances, at Labour’s party conference it was being whispered that Gray was on borrowed time. The problem, as I was repeatedly told, was that the political instincts of Gray and Morgan McSweeney — who now replaces her as Starmer’s chief of staff — not only diverged but were in polar opposition.

For McSweeney the point of politics is to be elected, and once elected to campaign for re-election. For Gray, by contrast, it is the boring bit bolted on to government. Starmer hoped he could benefit from both figures. But instead their competing beliefs and vision — with McSweeney allegedly behind the briefings against Gray — created a black hole at the heart of Number 10. While McSweeney supposedly viewed himself as being more in touch with those voters Labour needs to win, Gray was part of the blob, too distracted by identity politics and the latest liberal fad.

McSweeney’s accomplishments are objectively impressive: forming Labour Together, undermining the Corbyn leadership, taking Starmer first to the top of his party and then into government. Still, it’s unclear how all of that makes him qualified to lead the office of a prime minister pledging “national renewal”.

Following McSweeney’s ascendancy, policy will now come second to communications, with the demands of the latter shaping the former. As with Tony Blair, “good policy” will quickly become whatever lands well with the press rather than what solves long-term problems. That is why, alongside Gray’s resignation, Starmer’s team now includes a new head of strategic communications, James Lyons. His previous job was with Tik Tok, where he worked to finesse the company’s fragile image in Europe while Washington touted a ban. The position certainly makes sense: since 4 July the government has had no broader vision regarding how to convey its message. Whether one person can change that remains to be seen.

One could argue that Starmer wielding the knife against Gray is a testament to his ruthlessness. To an extent that is true. But it is a different kind of ruthlessness to either Margaret Thatcher or Blair, both of whom had a strong idea of who “their” people were, and who were possessed by a sense of mission embedded within a broader movement to which they were loyal. There is, after all, no Thatcher without Keith Joseph or Blair without Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould.

Starmer, by contrast, is powered by personal career progression and status. In the absence of a vision for Britain, a broader ideology, or a wider movement behind him, such “ruthlessness” will make an already disliked prime minister reviled. Ruthlessness at the service of self-interest is, after all, nothing more than avarice.

Today’s changes could be the start of a successful reboot, as happened after the debacle of Hartlepool and the near-miss of Batley and Spen in 2021. More likely, though, is that the government continues to struggle while it has no core policy agenda and no cadre of activists and thought-leaders.

The main problem for Starmer was — and remains — a lack of solutions capable of answering those problems facing the UK. He is a good autopilot politician, but the time for those is over. Britain might not be reliving the torpor of the Thirties, but it could certainly do with an FDR.

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Aaron Bastani is the co-founder of Novara Media, and the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism. 

AaronBastani

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