In normal circumstances, Keir Starmer’s appointment of Gordon Brown as his special envoy on global finance and Harriet Harman as his adviser on women and girls would be seen by Labour MPs as sensible.
Tapping the wisdom of the party’s elders to solve important problems would be viewed as competent if dull technocratic government.
However, these are not normal circumstances for the Prime Minister. His MPs see him as responsible for yesterday’s electoral catastrophe. He indeed has insisted he does take full responsibility.
And that is why the appointments are in fact incendiary.
Because they are seen as – at best – irrelevant to the crisis faced by the government, and for many MPs and ministers they are provocative, an insult, a manifestation – in the words of one minister – “that he simply doesn’t get it.”
This is what one senior and influential member of the government told me:
“The Harriet and Gordon thing and his Guardian article [in which he said the government should neither move left or right] has annoyed Labour MPs even more. It’s tone deaf. I think people give him until Monday to actually show he gets it or he’s done.”
To be clear, this minister would often try to defend the PM. Not any more.
And that’s not altogether surprising, given that few Reform voters are likely to say “I was thinking of voting for Nigel Farage but I’ve changed my mind now that Keir has tapped Gordon to create an international off-balance-sheet finance facility for defence spending.”
Another minister told me that the preference of MPs and Labour’s members would be for Starmer to stay and turn around the performance of the government, but they were increasingly doubtful he was capable of doing this.
This minister’s mood, and that of his colleagues, he said, “was increasingly of despair”.
Perhaps the biggest problem was that Starmer “is seemingly unable to give a clear coherent sense of direction for the country.”
“Voters will forgive you many of your mistakes if you can tell them where you want to take them. But he has been incapable of doing that, and none of us know whether he ever can.”
Even those members of the Cabinet who are genuine loyalists talk about him on the basis of hypothesis and guesswork.
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None of them seem to actually know what makes him tick or what he wants (one told me he was planning to set out his own policies more publicly in the hope that perhaps the PM would adopt them).
In that sense, Starmer seems more isolated than any prime minister I’ve ever known.
A very big test for him comes on Monday, when he is expected to give a speech that will be billed as his agenda for the rest of the parliament, but is in practice a plea to his MPs to give him a last chance.
I asked a minister what MPs would need to hear to be clear that he does understand their concerns, that he “gets it”.
This was the reply. “I mean god knows because I dont think he does. It’s not anything anyone else can tell him it has to come from him.”
And that, in a nutshell, is why Starmer is in so much trouble.
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