100 Days Hard Labour: How Keir Starmer created headaches for Anas Sarwar

Whatever Keir Starmer imagined the early days of his premiership would be like, it can’t have been this.

The first Labour prime minister for 14 years has had a honeymoon period so bad it would drive any couple to divorce. His initial 165-seat majority has been no protection against a swathe of public criticism and internal wrangles over policy, personnel and propriety.

In less than three months, Starmer’s chief-of-staff, Sue Gray – a star pre-election signing – has gone, demoted into a new and as-yet-undefined role of envoy for the nations and regions. Seven of his MPs have been suspended after rebelling over the continuation of the two-child cap, and another, Rosie Duffield, has quit altogether, accusing Starmer’s top team of “sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice” which was “off the scale”. 

And the move to end universal entitlement for the winter fuel payment to all pensioners, which is worth up to £300 per household, has been followed by revelations over donations of suits, concert tickets, football seats, city flats and even spectacles worth tens of thousands of pounds.

While all donations were made within the rules, the optics of freebies for ministers and cuts for the elderly have been eyewatering. And now Lord Alli, the peer behind so much largesse, is under investigation by the Lords’ standards watchdog over the registration of his interests.

All of which has left Scottish Labour in a somewhat unenviable position. Starmer may have five years to prepare for the next general election, but Anas Sarwar and his team must be ballot box ready by February 2026 – or earlier if the Scottish Government cannot pass its budget. 

This was the first time I had ever voted with the government against the Labour whip

While under Sarwar’s leadership Scottish Labour looks more electable than it has in many years – its vote share rose by 16.7 per cent in Scotland in July – UK Labour decision-making has caused notable disquiet in the ranks. Such is the unhappiness over the winter fuel payment move, and its disproportionate impact on Scottish households due to higher average energy costs than those in England, that last week two MSPs rebelled against the party in a vote on the matter. Alex Rowley and former leader Richard Leonard broke the whip to vote for a John Swinney motion which called for Chancellor Rachel Reeves to “reverse the introduction of means testing” for the benefit. Another five – Katy Clark, Rhoda Grant, Monica Lennon, Carol Mochan and Pauline McNeill – didn’t vote at all. “This was the first time I had ever voted with the government against the Labour whip,” Leonard said afterwards, “I did not do it lightly”.

Around 200,000 older Scots will lose their entitlement and, in a testy debate, Sarwar, who called on the Scottish Government to provide support to those affected, said the “root cause” of poverty-related issues was the “morally bankrupt and economically illiterate” Conservative government which left office in July. 

Former SNP equalities minister Emma Roddick called the party’s position “shameless” as time and time again MSPs referred to “freebies” and quoted Sarwar’s pre-election pledge of “read my lips: no austerity under Labour”. 

“Labour politicians might assume that this will all be forgotten by the time of the next election, but they are wrong,” Roddick said, adding that “every winter will be a reminder to people up and down this country”.

But the issues of political donations and social security cuts, for now so intertwined, have it seems already cost Labour in local by-elections. While the party had hoped for a double celebration in Dundee, where two council seats were up for grabs, both went to the SNP, which did not only save its majority on the administration but increased it. Scottish Labour sources said UK Labour rows were to blame. 

Keir Starmer took the Labour Party to power on a promise of “change” for the better. As his premiership hits 100 days, it is not only trying to rebalance the public finances, but also attempting to extricate itself from problems of its own making. Winning such a huge majority on such a low overall vote share – 34 per cent – means that’s particularly challenging, according to Professor Jennifer Lees-Marshment of the University of Dundee. 

It's come in without that sense of optimism and energy

“This is quite an unusual government. It’s come in without that sense of optimism and energy that most new governments have,” she told Holyrood. 

According to Lees-Marshment, an expert in political marketing and management, several errors have contributed to where the Starmer government is now, including a failure to define its goals and the creation of a “clash” between Starmer’s son-of-a-toolmaker story and the acceptance of a work wardrobe worth £16,000, minus the specs. After the rows over Boris Johnson’s gold wallpaper and Covid-defying ‘wine-time Fridays’, Labour’s positioning as not being a “party kind of government, but a serious, calm and collected government” could have worked in its favour, she says, “but the problem is that’s now been marred”.

Professor John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde agrees. “What we have seen is the limitations of the Starmer project writ large under the pressures of government”, he told an audience at the London School of Economics (LSE), adding that Starmer is “not very good at setting a narrative” and the absence of this has “enabled the opposition and indeed the journalists, to start to pick away at what Labour have been doing”.

Starmer has “weak political antenna”, Curtice said, relating this to pre-election rows like the acceptance of former Conservative MP Natalie Elphick into the parliamentary Labour Party and the long suspension of Diane Abbott. “We should not, perhaps, really be surprised that it has been a project that in the first 100 days has perhaps actually faced rather more than its fair share of electoral difficulty and difficult press because, in the end, this is a government that is there because of the mistakes of its opponents, rather than because it’s set a clear narrative of what it’s about and had taken the electorate with it into a supposed era of progressive politics,” Curtice said. 

If lack of narrative is a central problem, the elevation of Morgan McSweeney into Gray’s former post of chief-of-staff could help resolve this. Lanark-based McSweeney, the partner of new Hamilton and Clyde Valley MP Imogen Walker, is a hero of the central party and credited with not only taking Labour to victory, but also ensuring Starmer took the leadership after a campaign against Corbynism. The appointment of a political thinker to the role, rather than ex-civil servant Gray, suggests a determination to shift gear and changes to internal teams are now expected. With Walker a parliamentary private secretary to Reeves, it also suggests a determination that there can be no deviation between No 10 and No 11. There has been a strategic hire too in the appointment of ex-political journalist James Lyons, formerly of the NHS and TikTok, to lead government communications.

Gray had not made herself popular during her tenure in Downing Street. Special advisers were furious in August when it emerged that she would earn £170,000 – more than Starmer himself – but their pay would be less than that received when in opposition, and under that enjoyed by their Conservative predecessors.

It's been a bit of a bloody shambles

Gray’s shift to envoy for nations and regions is a demotion, we are told. But the nature of the newly-created job remains to be seen and, when asked for specifics this week, the Cabinet Office told Holyrood that “any details” would be published on the government website “in due course”. By Thursday night it was uncertain when she would start in the role as it emerged she was taking a break and would miss the first council meeting. 

Certainly, the UK Government has said it is on a mission to “reset” relations with the Scottish Government, but it already has a minister for intergovernmental relations in Pat McFadden and a Scottish secretary in Ian Murray, alongside territorial secretaries for Wales and Northern Ireland. And, of course, there’s the new Council of the Nations and Regions, which was meeting for the first time on Friday and itself caused upset by reportedly admitting English mayors while omitting the heads of Scottish councils. 

“Hosting this meeting on a day trip to Scotland but choosing to snub our local leaders while inviting leaders in England is not just an insult, it is yet another gaffe from a prime minister who is stumbling from mistake to mistake and increasingly looks like he doesn’t know what he is doing,” said the Glasgow Maryhill and Springburn MSP Bob Doris, suggesting that Scottish Labour should “make clear to Keir Starmer that this situation is completely unacceptable and demand a U-turn” rather than “roll over for their bosses in London”.

This line of attack is nothing new from the SNP and follows anger from the Scottish Government that it was not consulted prior to the winter fuel payments decision. But Lees-Marshment says Labour should tread carefully when it comes to Scotland. “From the Scottish perspective, Scotland was the key to them winning power,” she says. “The UK Government really needs to pay very close attention to Scotland because of that. I have not seen anything to prove that they have.”

For Sarwar’s part, he has conceded to “teething problems” for Labour in its first 100 days. “It’s been a challenge,” he told journalists, arguing that the news that GB Energy will be headquartered in Aberdeen and the introduction of new legislation on workers’ rights proves his UK counterparts are “serious about doing the job” of governing for all. 

Though there are some within Scottish Labour who disagree. “I’ve never felt so depressed about the political outlook in my adult life,” one party figure told Holyrood. “We were told when Starmer took over that this was the adults in the room, everything that went before was just a mess, and now it would all be professional, and it’s been a bit of a bloody shambles.”

That basic political clumsiness doesn’t fill me with hope

For political scientist Professor Anand Menon of Kings College London, there is both light and shade. The 100-day mark is a “stupid moment” to assess a new government, he says, because “very little governing, particularly parliamentary time, has happened”. Labour has been short on political gimmicks, he says, and Starmer’s emphasis on the need for trade-offs in his conference speech was “sensible”. However, a “hole” has been left where a political narrative should be. 

“There’s a certain political naivety in the air,” Menon said at an LSE event. “The shenanigans in number 10 that we’ve seen over the last few weeks and months speaks to a certain naivety about how government works, what you need to govern.

“Ultimately, if you’re going to change the country, you need to be competent. And that basic political clumsiness doesn’t fill me with hope – [there’s] clumsiness too in the way they’ve announced some of their decisions. I am one of those people who happens to think that what the Labour Party did with the winter fuel allowance was absolutely right. I think the way they did it and when they did it defies belief, because surely the sensible way to take that decision is in a budget. It almost speaks as of a party that still thinks it’s in campaign mode.”

“Where I really start to worry,” he went on, “is the number of plans that were formulated in opposition that it now seems to me are proving to be unworthy. So, we have the argument about whether or not you can impose VAT on private school fees in January; you have the revelation that increasing the taxation on that, removing the non-dom status, will actually not raise you any money at all. It does seem to me that actually a lot of this stuff was sloganeering that wasn’t properly thought through.

“One of the things we’ve got to think about in this country these days is how we restore faith in mainstream politics, per se, and I think this doesn’t help in the quest to do that now.”