Scunthorpe and Runcorn<\/p>\n
In April 2025, British Steel<\/a>\u2019s plant in Scunthorpe teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. The Chinese owners had declared themselves content to close the blast furnaces and thus end virgin steelmaking in Britain.\u00a0<\/p>\n Starmer, just as the Brexiteers had done before him, had promised to reindustrialise hundreds of towns just like this one. <\/p>\n Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, refused to sit back and accept what Beijing\u2019s moneymen said was inevitable. The forbidden word of New Labour \u2014 nationalisation \u2014 re-entered the lexicon of government. \u201cWe are doing this,\u201d he told civil servants, insisting the government would have MPs return from their holidays for a weekend sitting of the Commons if necessary. \u201cI have 400 friends that I will get to London on a Saturday to back me up if we need to.\u201d <\/p>\n He had pored over the Civil Contingencies Act, the law \u2014 never used by any government \u2014 that gave ministers extraordinary powers to requisition property in the event of a national emergency. Its high thresholds, chief among them an imminent risk to life, had not been met. He would have to legislate to take British Steel into government control himself. At 9am that Friday, Reynolds went to No 10. Around the cabinet table, surrounded by officials and advisers, sat Starmer, Reeves, and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary. Cooper supported the plan. Reeves had found the money. But what did the prime minister think? Without his licence, no action could be taken. And so a circular discussion began. Starmer said there were no grounds to trigger the Civil Contingencies Act, and recalled it had not been used even during the Covid pandemic. Reynolds knew as much already. On and on it went.<\/p>\n \u201cKeir really wanted to know what the right answer was,\u201d recalls one person present. To everyone else it was clear that there was no right answer: only a question of political judgment. Starmer needed to agree to the ends, then will the means. But there they were, again, confronting the obvious as their leader sought refuge in a winding maze of process. Eventually, Reynolds snapped. He needed to know what Starmer believed \u2014 what he felt to be right. \u201cWe have to decide whether we\u2019re going to let British Steel go down or not,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n That afternoon, Starmer went on television and with conviction. Announcing an emergency Saturday sitting of parliament, he said: \u201cAs prime minister, I will always act in the national interest to protect British jobs and British workers.\u201d He went on: \u201cI\u2019ve been to Scunthorpe. I met the steelworkers. I know how important steel is \u2014 not just to the region, but to the whole country. It\u2019s part of our national story: part of the pride and heritage of this nation. And I\u2019ll tell you this: it is essential for our future.\u201d Only a handful of his ministers knew that, hours earlier, he had appeared to have no opinion at all. <\/p>\n The political outlook grew uglier with the rise of Nigel Farage and Reform UK. Runcorn, the grey industrial town on the banks of the Mersey, surrendered first. Mike Amesbury, the Labour MP, had been captured by CCTV punching a man to the ground, prompting his resignation and a criminal conviction. In the by-election that followed on May 1, a Labour majority of more than 14,000 evaporated. Reform took one of Starmer\u2019s safest seats by six votes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Many Labour MPs, now fearing for their own seats, knew who and what to blame. It was all because of the cut to winter fuel, they said loudly. Sotto voce, among themselves, they pointed accusatory fingers at McSweeney. Only he would dare to force a progressive party to disavow its values \u2014 its concern for the old and needy \u2014 so spectacularly. This, of course, was not entirely fair. It had not been his idea: at first he had not known about it. Once he knew, however, he had spoken as though it had been his creation. As late as that year\u2019s conference, he told one newspaper editor the trouble with Labour MPs was that too many had the mindset of charity workers and civil servants. For him, winter fuel had been a virility test, a reminder that governing required as many difficult decisions as opposition.<\/p>\n But in the days after the result, Starmer met with Reeves. They concluded they had little option but to cast off the albatross around the government\u2019s neck. Within a month, the chancellor had all but reversed the policy she had wasted ten months defending as non-negotiable.<\/p>\n Welfare revolt<\/p>\n Worse was to come. In March, under pressure from Downing Street, Liz Kendall had brought forward proposals to reform welfare. The work and pensions secretary wanted more than anything to make a Labour case for the dignity of work. The politician \u2014 whose kamikaze 2015 leadership campaign, run by McSweeney, told the party exactly what it did not want to hear on migration and the economy \u2014 had evolved in the intervening decade. She did not want to slash and burn the benefits system, but harboured ambitions to lift the two-child cap at the same time as toughening eligibility for certain payments. Starmer and Reeves presented the public with the opposite. Without her knowledge, her programme of welfare reform was leaked and framed as a \u00a35 billion cut, with recipients of disability benefits paying most of the bill. There would be no lifting of the cap. Labour MPs saw this as evidence that the party had abandoned its soul.\u00a0<\/p>\n By May 8, eighty of them had signed a letter to Starmer\u2019s chief whip, in which they declared the cuts unconscionable. Less than a week later, the number of refuseniks had passed a hundred. Defeat became inevitable and the whips told McSweeney so. As ever, Starmer was the last to realise the enormity of what he had done. <\/p>\n On the eve of the vote, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting bumped into one another in a Commons corridor. They were both on the way to tell the prime minister that his MPs were willing to inflict the biggest defeat of his premiership. Starmer\u2019s emissaries, led by Rayner, went cap in hand to the rebels. Starmer was not present for the talks. Reeves had no option but to agree to a peace deal that, almost comically, ended up increasing spending on welfare. <\/p>\n On July 2, the week of the first anniversary of the election victory, the chancellor arrived in the Commons for prime minister\u2019s questions in a state of heightened emotion. It had been a difficult morning at home. The weight of circumstance, political and personal, bore down on her. On her way into the chamber, she passed the Speaker\u2019s chair. <\/p>\n Sir Lindsay Hoyle remonstrated with her over a perceived slight to his authority some days previously. She told him: \u201cI\u2019m under a lot of pressure.\u201d The Speaker exploded. \u201cYou think you\u2019re under pressure?\u201d he shouted. Reeves took her seat beside Starmer with puffy, bloodshot eyes. Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition, asked whether the prime minister had confidence in his chancellor. He laughed it off without answering. The benches opposite responded with derision. The chancellor began to weep. It was all too much, yet Starmer was oblivious. The nation was not.<\/p>\n A search for answers<\/p>\n The summer recess in late July came as blessed relief to Starmer. Insurrection by his MPs had badly damaged his standing. He was bitter, dejected, frustrated. To one friend he wondered aloud whether he remained the right person for the job he had coveted so much. Nothing seemed to work. The man who prided himself on his ability to reform the most outdated of institutions \u2014 first the Bar, and then the Crown Prosecution Service \u2014 struggled to make sense of the impasse before him. One of his closest advisers says he saw government as a horologist would see an antique clock. Tuned correctly, each cog and gear could fit together and keep perfect time. So long as he found the right parts, the machine would whir back into life, however broken it may have appeared. Yet the British government did not conform to that approach.<\/p>\n Aides found themselves summoned to Chequers with little notice. Starmer wanted answers. At last he appeared alive to the existential peril he had spent a year sleepwalking into. Yet solutions were in short supply.<\/p>\n In early September Rayner resigned from government over a tax scandal. In the reshuffle that followed, No 10 sacked Lucy Powell, the leader of the Commons, who was baselessly blamed for every leak or briefing from within cabinet. She had her revenge a month later when Labour members elected her to Rayner\u2019s old job as deputy leader, making her a tribune for Starmerism\u2019s many losers \u2014 all those MPs and members whose sense of self and autonomy the prime minister and his advisers had undermined. Said one leading Downing Street aide, ruefully recalling the comparison to a driverless London train with which one of McSweeney\u2019s intimates had once condemned Starmer<\/a>: \u201cMorgan has been replaced by Lucy Powell as the driver of the Docklands Light Railway train. It\u2019s Lucy Powell\u2019s world now.\u201d<\/p>\n A man of little compassion<\/p>\n By the autumn of 2025, MPs began to wonder aloud how long he would last. The prime minister was running out of other people to blame.<\/p>\n Cabinet ministers and No 10 advisers strained for loyalty. But it proved too difficult for some. \u201cHe is,\u201d said one influential aide upon their departure from Downing Street, \u201cthe least intellectually curious person I have ever met.\u201d Said another politician upon whom Starmer relied heavily: \u201cHe can only prepare by reading briefing books for hours on end. He doesn\u2019t brainstorm. He has no fixed views on anything. There\u2019s no clarity because there\u2019s no belief. There\u2019s no belief because there\u2019s no understanding. There\u2019s no understanding because there\u2019s no curiosity.\u201d Said a senior civil servant who observed him closely: \u201cHe is not a compassionate man. He\u2019s careless about people around him. It\u2019s just not warm. He just doesn\u2019t think very hard about other people.\u201d A once-close adviser, witheringly: \u201cI don\u2019t think he has a theory of power. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s ever sat down and read any history, or has any idea of how power works. I just don\u2019t think he would be attracted to the kind of historical figures who got stuff done.\u201d<\/p>\n McSweeney was depressed. As the wreckage of the welfare rebellion smouldered around him, he had told an old friend over dinner: \u201cI\u2019m drowning out here, I need help.\u201d The riptide of the prime minister\u2019s urge for self-preservation began to pull him away from the Irishman. In McSweeney\u2019s weakest moments, he confessed to those closest to him that Starmer remained unknowable. In the hours before Lord Mandelson\u2019s sacking as the British ambassador to Washington in September, McSweeney told one intimate that his guess was as good as anybody\u2019s as to where Keir would \u201cend up\u201d on a given issue. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s definitely not a relationship where the chief of staff is the voice and the eyes and the ears of their principal,\u201d a colleague of both men ruefully concluded. \u201cThe room where decisions are taken doesn\u2019t exist. You would think that it was a deliberate thing, that Keir thrives in chaos. But it\u2019s not, and he doesn\u2019t. It\u2019s very, very strange.\u201d<\/p>\n On the night of the September 2025 reshuffle, the cabinet retired to Ed Miliband\u2019s north London home, streets away from the house to which Starmer had never invited them. The prime minister and his chief of staff were not present. Before long the ministers were talking about the leadership, and how long their prime minister might last.<\/p>\n Cooper v Reeves showdown<\/p>\n The 2025 budget offered the government a stay of execution. If the prime minister could not tell the country who or what his premiership was for, his chancellor could show them.<\/p>\n Reeves delayed it until the end of November \u2014 going long, in the hope that the UK\u2019s negligible rates of economic growth would rise and inflation might fall. But she faced what she described bitterly as \u201can impossible set of choices\u201d. Some were of her own making. In a fit of opportunism as shadow chancellor, she had lionised the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the budget watchdog whose pessimistic readings of the public finances sharply constrained her room for manoeuvre. Its economists refused to say that her embrace of planning reform to stimulate housebuilding and desperate wooing of the European Union would boost Britain\u2019s growth, and with it the national current account. Other concessions were forced upon her by mutinous Labour MPs who refused to support her on welfare, on the hated two-child benefit limit, or on anything else that made them feel uncomfortable as loud and proud progressives of the kind McSweeney<\/a> had once derided as insipid librarians. Cabinet colleagues provided little comfort.<\/p>\n In June, tense negotiations over the spending review that preceded the budget had ended in bitter recrimination. Yvette Cooper asked for more money to fund the new police officers promised in Labour\u2019s manifesto, and to fulfil pledges to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls. The home secretary came to the Treasury to set out her position to Reeves and Darren Jones, then chief secretary to the Treasury. The discussion was scratchy and fractious. <\/p>\n \u201cThe truth is, Yvette,\u201d Jones said, \u201cyou should have never promised to increase police numbers in the manifesto when we didn\u2019t know how things would look in government.\u201d <\/p>\n Cooper had not come for a dressing down. \u201cI\u2019m sure everyone made promises in the manifesto that look a bit more difficult to stick to in government,\u201d she replied, archly. \u201cBut we are where we are.\u201d<\/p>\n Reeves exploded. She gathered her papers. \u201cThis meeting is over,\u201d she said, storming out of her own boardroom. As she left, those present heard her complain that Cooper was \u201ctrying to lecture me on economic strategy\u201d. <\/p>\n Jones, rising to leave, declared: \u201cWell, that\u2019s it.\u201d Cooper<\/a> persisted, continuing to explain her position to a Treasury official frozen in their seat by second-hand embarrassment. Jones ordered the official to get up. He turned to the home secretary: \u201cThat\u2019s it, the chancellor has asked you to leave, you need to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n Budget day<\/p>\n By November 26, there were no surprises left. Almost all of the chancellor\u2019s speech had been briefed and leaked to the newspapers in advance. In a final act of unhelpfulness, the OBR accidentally uploaded its own costings of her decisions to its website some 45 minutes before Reeves rose to speak in the Commons. <\/p>\n Reeves had told Labour MPs that she would cut NHS waiting lists, the national debt and the cost of living, and she declared victory on all three. The grim projections of her impartial masters said the opposite: that debt would rise, growth would stagnate, and household disposable income would fall. The tax burden, already at its highest level since the Second World War, rose again. Millions of workers were dragged into higher rates of income tax when Reeves<\/a> reneged on her promise to increase the tax bands in line with inflation. <\/p>\n But still the MPs who were once the vanguard of Starmer and McSweeney\u2019s changed Labour Party were in raptures. Reeves told them they could have their way and abolished the two-child cap on welfare. Once, opposition to such generosity from the state was the purity test of the Starmer project. Barely a year earlier, seven Corbynites had been exiled for voting for the policy Reeves now heralded as the government\u2019s crowning achievement. This was change, but not as promised. All the right people were cheering the wrong thing.<\/p>\n It was as if Morgan McSweeney had never existed, and the long, brutal war for supremacy over the left had never happened. The Labour Party had not changed at all. In an instant, it all meant nothing: every promise, every speech, every slogan. The project had never belonged to Keir Starmer, but for years those around him had maintained the tenuous fiction that he was its leader. No longer.<\/p>\n Yet still he was smiling, rooted to the front bench, the ageing face curiously untroubled, as if he were back on the DLR \u2014 the passive prime minister, content to be driven to his destination by strangers who held him in contempt. The difference now was that even they did not know where the Labour Party was going.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/109a6303-a3f9-481a-8fce-40f429fefb94.jpg\")
SUNDAY TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JAMES GLOSSOP<\/p>\n![\"Video](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/54d04ecf-ad94-4231-b12b-60d7e1265421.jpg\")
Mike Amesbury was caught on camera<\/p>\n![\"Rachel](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/796bb2aa-e687-4256-a334-1a26c50336a2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Prime](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/abbcb5c1-3e97-4ae2-a7b7-dfa23f9a1e99.jpg\")
With Angela Rayner at a Commonwealth Day serviceSUNDAY TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE<\/p>\n