You might expect any minister who served in government under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss to think twice about denouncing “unserious politicians”. But that is how Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leadership candidate, has commenced an article in the Daily Mail about the Sue Gray affair. She says:
It’s time to get serious. We are being governed by unserious politicians and Sue Gray’s departure yesterday is part of the pattern.
In the article Badenoch says Gray, who was a civil servant when she was equalities minister, tried to stop her using a never-before-used power in the Scotland Act to block the Scottish government’s gender recognition reform bill. She says:
When I worked with Sue Gray (who, by the way, I quite like), she tried to pressure me into dropping my opposition to the SNP‘s crazy Gender Recognition Bill. This was the very bill that, if not blocked by Westminster, would have allowed 16-year-olds to ‘self-identify’ as the opposite sex – no medical diagnosis required.
Many ministers might have bowed to such pressure from a senior mandarin. But I stood firm. For me, this was a matter of principle, not politics.
There is a strong chance that Badenoch’s bid for the Tory leadership will come to an end this week, when Tory MPs vote on Wednesday and Thursday to eliminate two candidates, leaving just two on the ballot paper for members, and Badenoch’s article is mainly about herself, and her leadership credentials, not Gray.
She claims that her comment at the Tory conference last week about up to 10% of civil servants being “should be in prison bad” was just a “light-hearted gag”, and that the fact it was not taken this way shows she scares the left.
At Tory conference, I made a light-hearted gag that some civil servants are so bad at their jobs they should be jailed, but of course, some humourless headlines couldn’t see the joke.
But these kinds of misrepresentations will happen to anyone who has convictions that scare the left. That’s why we need a straight-talking leader who is cool under pressure and has a clear vision and direction for our party and our country.
In an interview with the Today programme, John Healey, the defence secretary, rejected the claim by Alastair Campbell and John McTernan that it was a mistake to delay the budget. (See 9.21am.) When this was put to him, he replied:
We saw with Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng what happens when you try and rush a budget. So this needs to be done properly.
Good morning. Opposition parties are fond of accusing a prime minister in difficulties of attempting a relaunch, and sometimes you hear the claim every time there is a big speech after a single bad week. But what we are seeing from Keir Starmer this week is a genuine relaunch, triggered by a recognition that things were going wrong. It is a big moment for the government – although how much difference it will make will not be clear for a while.
Here is our overnight story.
And here is Pippa Crerar’s analysis.
John Healey, the defence secretary, was the cabinet minister doing the morning interview round and he tried to play down the significance of Sue Gray outlasting Liz Truss in her time as the most powerful woman in No 10, but not by a huge amount. Asked on LBC if the government was at crisis point, Healey replied: “I’d characterise this as a new government getting on with the job.”
Thankfully, other veterans from the New Labour era have been much more frank, honest and interesting when asked for their take in interviews this morning. They have been arguing that, while this crisis is not terminal, Starmer needs to get much better at communicating what his government stands for and is doing.
(One of the appointments yesterday was James Lyons, an ex-Daily Mirror journalist, as head of strategic communications, and this may make a difference. As a lobby journalist, he excelled at hard-hitting knocking copy. If he had been in No 10 over the summer, it is difficult to imagine the freebies story running as long as it did without firmer rebuttal.)
But two of Tony Blair’s key advisers have also said that one of Starmer’s big mistake was to wait so long until having a budget. Alastair Campbell, who was Blair’s communications chief in No 10 and who now co-hosts the Rest is Politics podcast, told the Today programme:
The most important thing is to understand that in the modern age, when it comes to strategy and strategic communications, you have to develop, execute and narrate strategy all at once.
And I think the point about the budget is really important.
When Margaret Thatcher won in 1979, Geoffrey Howe delivered the budget five weeks after the election. Gordon Brown in 1997 he delivered the budget eight weeks after the election. David Cameron and [George] Osborne in 2010 – six weeks.
We’re having to wait almost 16 weeks since the election. And I think that is what creates this sense of people not quite sure what the government’s about.
The key strategic pillars when a new government comes in, you have the king’s speech, you have the party conference … and you also have the budget. And the budget is probably the most important of those.
Campbell said there had definitely been “missteps” that had led to what happened yesterday. But, in response to a question from the presenter Mishal Husain he said: “You say it comes to this as though the whole thing is a complete irrecoverable shambles, which I don’t think it is.” Better communication was essential, he said:
Government is harder than opposition. And government is not just about the technocratic delivery of policy and change. It’s about the relentless, endless, never-ending conversation that you’re having with the country about what you are trying to do for the country. And I think it’s fair to say that that bit has been largely missing.
In a separate interview on Times Radio, John McTernan, who was Blair’s political secretary in No 10, said delaying the budget so long was “a terrible miscalculation”. He said as a result the government had been defined, in the public mind, by the decision to cut winter fuel payments. The government was not controlling the narrative, he said:
The government has completely lost grip, a grip on their operations, a grip on the media grid, and they don’t dominate communications.
And that has been because they have lacked a political narrative and the political drive and the momentum that drove them through the election to a great victory. That seemed to run out after the sitting weeks ended in July and we got into the recess of August.
It just went from the country demanding change to a government delivering drift.
Stewart Wood, another New Labour veteran, who worked as an adviser for Gordon Brown in No 10, told the Today programme that he hoped the government would now get back on track. He said:
Parliament’s only been sitting for, I think, less than 20 days so far in the first 100 days of the government. So the space for the new policy agenda has been limited.
But [the No 10 reshuffle] hopefully is going to enable a focus to be on the policy agenda, on GB Energy, on GB Railways, on planning reform, all the things the government wanted to set out, a workers’ rights package.
I think this has got to be a drawing a line moment for the internal stories that have come to take the place of the policy-focused stories.
There will be more comment on this as the day goes on. Here is the agenda.
11am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, and the party’s four other MPs hold a press conference on “two tier policing in Britain, with a special announcement and focus on the policing incident at Manchester Airport on 23 July 2024”.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
After 3.30pm: Keir Starmer is expected to make a Commons statement on his visit to the UN general assembly. After that there may also be a statement from David Lammy, the foreign secretary, on the handover of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
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Source: theguardian.com
