Beware a desperate Prime Minister in search of a legacy

From Theresa May to Rishi Sunak and now Keir Starmer’s, Prime Ministers have long sought to ban things just before leaving Downing Street, says Tom Harwood

Is it too soon to write the Prime Minister’s obituary? As Keir Starmer returns from his latest bout of wining and dining with world leaders in Évian-les-Bains by Lake Geneva, he must be thinking to himself that lasting more than two years is pretty good going for a Prime Minister these days.

Unusually, this week Never Here Keir decided to bring along Lady Victoria Starmer with him on this latest international trip to the G7. The Prime Ministerial spouse has accompanied Sir Keir on just one other international trip since moving to Downing Street, his first. Is this decision an omen? A bookend?

This Prime Minister is certainly behaving as if he is a man in a hurry. The rushed announcement of a social media ban for under-16s, the baffling idea of an internet curfew for 16 and 17 year olds (who under this government are trusted to drive and vote, but not scroll).

It is easy to forget that at the time Australia announced its own ban, our Prime Minister seemed opposed. “I think it’s more about how you control the content children can see”, he told journalists – with a government spokesman adding: “It’s important we protect children while letting them benefit safely from the digital world, without cutting off essential services or isolating the most vulnerable.” 

U-turns

What changed? Sir Keir knows his days are numbered and is in desperate search of a legacy.

Perhaps this is why, too, this week we learned the Assisted Dying Bill is being brought back in an identical form to the one which failed to pass the Lords in the last parliament. While it is returning again in the form of a Private Members Bill without official government support, those in the know detect the fingerprints of the Prime Minister’s whips all over it.

Desperate leaders look to legacy. It’s why Theresa May bound the country into a carbon net zero commitment after just three hours of Commons debate in June 2019, just a month before she resigned. It’s why Rishi Sunak announced a generational smoking ban for anyone born after the 1st January 2009, in the dying days of his own premiership. Sir Keir is following exactly the same pattern.

As the Prime Minister rushes to leave a mark so that history will remember his peculiar time at the top, the sharks are circling. Wes Streeting claims he has the numbers necessary to launch a contest already, and the country looks to Makerfield which today decides whether or not to send Andy Burnham back to the Commons. Former defence minister Al Carns is on manoeuvres too, with his resignation speech to the Commons straying into his wider politics, which he claims come “chiselled out of the mines of the North East”.

Things now feel poised to kick off in a big way, and we must be braced for a bitter contest. Just as the Conservative Party in 2022 saw Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss out-competing each other to conjure up comforting conservative policies each more climactically pandering than the last, a mirror image contest from Labour in government could see candidates out competing each other to offer token tax rises for the party selectorate.

We learned this Parliamentary Labour Party sits further to the left than Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves had bargained for when the mildest form of welfare reform was rejected out of hand. The party membership sits further to the left still. As Andy Burnham flirts with nationalisations and Wes Streeting promotes a “wealth tax that works”, we should all brace ourselves for things to get even worse.

Tom Harwood is deputy political editor of GBNews