The Starmer Reboot

The government discovers its purpose at last - aided and assisted by Donald Trump

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There is a sense of a hint of a possibility - I put it no more strongly or certainly than this - that Sir Keir Starmer is entering a new phase of his premiership. That is to say, the Sir Keir Starmer of recent weeks looks more like the prime minister British voters thought they were electing last July. It is early for a reboot but not too late for one either.

The thing we forget about politicians is that they are almost always forced to learn on the job. This is especially the case when their party has, like Labour, been out of office for 14 years. Tony Blair is hardly the only prime minister to wish he’d known at the start of his term what he knew by its end. Hence this irony: politicians are least equipped to use their political capital at precisely the moment…