Will Keer Stmper allow to celebrate his first anniversary as Prime Minister later this week? Or he will look a long, difficult in the mirror and ask himself what went wrong?
This is what is in my mind because he congratulates me for a long planned conversation about his first 12 months in this week’s office in the terracotta room on the first floor of 10 Downing Street.
He looks surprisingly relaxed, given that his Chancellor, Rachel Reaves, was in the tears sitting behind him in the Commons a few hours ago. This caused speculation of fever how long she would go into the job, push the markets to sell the pounds and increase the cost of borrowing.
Perhaps this is the feeling he wants to tell me because he shares a story about his photo opportunity, which has the world’s most famous door with Formula One cars parked outside his front door.
Starmer is determined that recent weeks of problems – and a long list of boys – will not look forward to achievements that she believes that she is equally noted.
“We have done some great things,” he says to me, “actually took down the waiting list in NHS, in fact the load of improvement in schools and goods that we can do for children – whether it is rolling school uniform projects, whether it is school food, breakfast club, you name it – even more [brought in] Investment in huge amounts in the country. And of course we are busy getting three business deals. ,
It is clear that, given the opportunity, its list will run. And yet, I tell, there is another long list – of things that he has recently recruited to be wrong.
In the previous year, he said that the Sue Gray -Starmer’s former Chief of Staff, who left the Downing Street in October – was wrong. They have also held their hands about ending winter fuel payments, dismissing a national grooming gang investigation and cutting benefits for people with disabilities. This is not even a complete list, yet it is a lot of things that he is accepting to be a mistake.
The Prime Minister feels that I have severely summarized my personal reflections on what he has done. He challenges the idea, which is prevalent in the Westminster, that changing your brain represents weakness, or “derogatory u-turn”.
This is the fourth time when we are sitting for an extended and personal conversation for our political thinking podcast.
“You know me by knowing,” they say. “I am not one of these ideological thinkers, where ideology explains what I do. I am a practical. You can do these things as a U -turn – this is general knowledge for me.
“If someone says to me, ‘There is some more information here and I think it is really right to do’, I am the kind of person who says, ‘By the way, in the situation in which, let’s do it’.”
However, there is no doubt that so much part of their welfare reforms was a U -turn – an expensive and derogatory. The stammer and their Chancellor have not only lost rights and face, they have lost £ 5BN in planned savings, something that will have to pay through high taxes in any way, less cost or, most likely, most likely.
“I take responsibility,” he says, “We did not find this process right”. But somehow he means that it may be someone other than the leader of the responsibility of the Labor Party, who persuades Labor MPs to return his plans.
He does not explain what it means by obtaining the process correctly and, perhaps even more important that he dodges my efforts to clearly tell him which story he is trying to tell about the benefit.
Should labor be in favor of people with disabilities and people like their own mother, who had a crippled disease, which ultimately meant that he had to dissect one leg? Or should they adopt his reluctance, which he had told the last time he told me? When her doctors said that she would not run again, she refused to listen.
Injured by the incidents of the last one week, the stormer also refused to address that option. But of course, I suggest him, the nation does not want just a problem-constant or the Chief Executive Officer of the UK PLC? Voters definitely want a leader who has a story to tell?
Starmer clearly knew this question – or a variation of it was coming. I have pushed him every time when we talk in length, I have pushed him.
“It’s about a passion, if it is the right word,” they say. “But certainly the determination to change the lives of millions of working people and, in particular, to deal with this question of fairness.”
“This is almost like a social contract,” he says, “that people are coming back to what they are putting, that there is a proper environment for them that supports them and respects them.”
It is a little longer to sew on an election banner, chant on the streets, or to write in a post on X, but it is a subject. He is a self-declared practical person who does not want something that can be labeled as “surprise”, but at least we can now say that his guide theory is fair.
“Every challenge that is put in front of me, I raise it, complete it, and we are going to continue in the same vein,” they say.
I remind my conversation what they say about failing football managers, who have “lost the dressing room”. Has he lost the labor party dressing room? His answer is vigorous.
“Not at all,” he says. “Labor dressing room, PLP, what we have done is proud of hell, and their frustration – my frustration – that sometimes other accessories, welfare will be an example, can obscure us that can be able to get us out of there.”
Almost one as he adds: “I am a hard-suited bastard to find out who it was who said, so that I can discuss with him.” After knowing the Starmer, I suspect that he is more likely to give a crunching tack on the pitch than a cool word.
But the Prime Minister’s message is clear for me: don’t count me, although it feels bad now. Apart from that, it seems bad for everyone. worst.
