On Wednesday the great and the good of Labour gathered at the Hilton on Park Lane to commemorate the life of Margaret McDonagh, Tony Blair’s general secretary who paved the way for two of the party’s election victories.
Nobody could resist acknowledging they were on the precipice of another. For once, the discipline of the last month dissolved into pre-polling day giddiness.
Speaking at the soiree, Blair said he expected a “great Labour victory”, while Angela Rayner indulged in a rendition of the party’s 1997 anthem: Things Can Only Get Better by D:ream.
The question facing Sir Keir Starmer is whether that is the case, or if in fact, given the state of the economy and public services, things could get worse.
That is why Labour is determined to get the first 100 days right, and why Sue Gray and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff and head of elections, believe the party must hit the ground running within days of being elected.
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Week one
Swearing in
Starmer will head to Buckingham Palace on Friday where King Charles will ask him to form a government. He sat next to Charles’s private secretary, Clive Alderton, at a palace banquet last week and has been extensively briefed on the rituals between an incoming prime minister and the monarch.
He will then deliver a speech outside 10 Downing Street that, according to an insider, will “show that politics can be a force for good rather than the utopian view of progressive liberalism”, and will echo Theresa May’s 2016 pledge made in the same spot to govern for the many and not the “privileged few”.
Welcomed on the world stage
On July 9, Starmer will travel to Washington DC for a summit marking the 75th anniversary of Nato with the anticipated foreign secretary David Lammy and defence secretary John Healey. It will be dominated by the Russia-Ukraine war, and Starmer is likely to have a bilateral meeting with Ukraine’s President Zelensky before a proposed trip to Kyiv.
A bilateral meeting with the US president Joe Biden is yet to be confirmed.
A week later Starmer will host a summit of the European Political Community of 47 countries at the birthplace and ancestral home of Winston Churchill, Blenheim Palace. This will offer an “instant” chance to “look prime ministerial” on the world stage.
Back to the green benches
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Starmer’s cabinet will be told to get to work immediately, with the King’s Speech due on July 17. MPs will return to the Commons on July 9 and sit until July 31 before breaking for a shortened summer recess. MPs will return on September 2. Starmer had hoped to truncate the customary six weeks by more than a fortnight but relented after grumbling from exhausted Labour MPs and officials.
Labour’s top team in government will largely mirror its existing shadow cabinet, although sources say Starmer’s aides are looking for bigger jobs for Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow paymaster general, Ellie Reeves, the deputy national campaign co-ordinator, and Alison McGovern, the shadow employment minister. Those in post can expect to hold on to them for five years; one of the big mistakes Blair made, according to allies of Starmer, was conducting too many reshuffles.
Budget prep
In No 11, Reeves’s team will begin preparations for a budget in mid-September. Wes Streeting, the incoming health secretary, is likely to make his first call to the junior doctors’ leaders to begin talks on how to end their long-running pay dispute.
He will also meet the British Dental Association on Monday, July 8, to discuss reforming the NHS dentistry contract, which is blamed for a widespread loss of services. Rayner, the new levelling-up secretary, will also make the first steps to turbocharge housebuilding by addressing planning reform and boosting social housing stock.
Surveying the damage
In the first week, Starmer and his top team will finally be able to lift the bonnet and examine the true state of public finances and services. The shadow cabinet has already started working on the “blame game”, preparing announcements that the public purse looks worse than they feared and using every opportunity to point the finger at Liz Truss.
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Aides are already working up a narrative that echoes David Cameron and George Osborne’s 2010 claim that the previous Labour government had spent all the money, by framing Starmer’s mission and spending restraint around the idea that the Tories “crashed” the economy.
The civil service and Gray have each drawn up a list of urgent issues in need of attention, known as “black swans”, with one of the most pressing being Britain’s overstretched court system and prisons.
With the projected inflow of prisoners expected to far exceed projected capacity, Labour intends to hold a sentencing review. The Prison Governors’ Association is calling for inmates to be released after serving 40 per cent of their sentence. Planning reforms will also speed up the delayed construction of new prisons. But insiders admit “there are no obvious and immediate solutions”.
The Treasury has also been sitting on new pay recommendations for millions of public sector workers. The recommendations are understood to significantly exceed the several billion pounds of funds allocated, putting Labour in an immediate bind.
Busy summer
Build, build, build
In week three Labour will launch its housebuilding programme in a King’s Speech focused on “build build build”. By the end of July it will announce a council-led review of green belt land that will be reclassified for development. Local authorities will have to release green belt land if brownfield sites are insufficient.
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A recruitment drive for 300 more planning officers, to speed up the rate at which permissions are granted for developments, will also be unveiled. At the end of July, Labour will publish a draft of the national planning policy framework. It will restore top-down targets to ensure councils are meeting housing needs in their areas.
Matt Pennycook, the shadow housing minister, is working with officials to determine if primary legislation is needed to grant certain public bodies powers to scrap “hope value” on schemes where a public interest is identified. This would stop landbanking, and pave the way for housing and infrastructure projects. In August, the party will start rolling out “first dibs”, a voluntary housing scheme piloted in London, which gives local people priority for new homes before overseas investors.
Legislative bonanza
The King’s Speech will include a new fiscal responsibility bill, putting Reeves’s fiscal rules into law and making it a legal requirement for the Office for Budget Responsibility to provide forecasts to accompany budgets.
There will be two health bills: one will resurrect Sunak’s smoking ban legislation for under-15s, while the second will reform the UK’s current mental health legislation to tackle the growing number of people being sectioned, and to improve care for people with learning disabilities and autism who are often inappropriately detained in hospitals.
The Home Office will deliver a new crime and policing bill to crack down on antisocial behaviour and create a new offence of criminal exploitation of a child to tackle county lines drug-dealing. A border security bill will be established to “smash” the small boats gangs. Martyn’s Law, named after the Manchester Arena bombing victim Martyn Hett, will require venues and local authorities to have training requirements and preventative plans against terror attacks.
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A railways bill will overwrite the 1993 Railways Act to allow Labour to take the network back into public ownership when the current franchises expire. A GB Energy bill, establishing the publicly owned clean energy company, has been mooted.
Other legislation will deal with renters’ reform and leasehold, while an elections and democracies bill will introduce automatic voter registration and may include votes for 16-year-olds.
An early test of the mood of Labour MPs will be an amendment to legislation reversing the two-child benefit cap, which has brought a backlash across the political spectrum.
Israel-Palestine will be high on the agenda for Lammy at the Foreign Office. Labour will not immediately recognise a Palestinian state — it hopes to do so later, in lockstep with the US and other allies — but Lammy will seek new legal advice on whether Israel is in breach of international law.
Handing out jobs
Labour will begin appointing dozens of new peers in the House of Lords to reduce the Tory majority. The new appointees are likely to include “sparkling” business figures who will hold ministerial office. One name being talked up by Labour grandees as a potential “growth minister” is the former Blair policy aide and head of Ofcom Dame Sharon White, who is stepping down as chair of John Lewis next February.
Inside No 10, Gray will assemble the new Downing Street team. Mission boards will outline Starmer’s top priorities and cabinet members whose departments are leading on delivering them will be allowed four special advisers each. Gray will oversee personnel changes at the top of the civil service. The cabinet secretary, Simon Case, with whom Gray has a complicated relationship, intends to go in January 2025.
A brief break then back to work
Business and pleasure
Starmer will allow himself a family holiday in August. He has told friends that he will attend the Euros final in Berlin if England make it that far.
Over the first 100 days, Healey’s Ministry of Defence will run a series of “Nato tests” to determine whether the UK is able to fulfil its obligations. A wider year-long defence review will commence to identify shortfalls in the armed forces.
For months Labour has been talking to Brussels about a new UK-EU security pact to deepen co-operation between allies that could be signed within 100 days.
Finding the money
When MPs return, difficult choices will have to be made with strained public finances. Departmental budgets will reach a “cliff edge” by December, with the next spending review likely to be delivered by the end of autumn.
The challenge for Starmer and Reeves will be to avoid the billions of pounds in spending cuts that were baked in by the Tories. “Some would say it’s the worst inheritance we could possibly get,” said one Starmer aide.
The autumn statement will be Reeves’s first big test. Her team has already begun working on it and the expectation is it could come either in September or October. It will confirm that VAT on private school fees will be implemented in 2025, in time for the next academic year. She may be forced to raise taxes in other areas. Aligning capital gains rates with income tax seems the most palatable option.
Reeves will also host an international investment summit in London to show that Britain is back open for business under Labour.
The programme for “growth” and delivering the missions is ready. The big question neither Starmer nor Reeves can answer at this time is what happens if it does not work.
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