Who could forget Keir Starmer’s attack on civil servants languishing in “the tepid bath of managed decline”? Only a few months into government, that remark – still quoted ironically by officials – summed up Labour’s shock that getting the apparatus of the state to deliver was far harder than they had ever anticipated from the outside. In opposition, Labour criticised Conservatives who attacked the civil service. In government, they were prepared to do it themselves.
The tone has changed, but the sentiment has prevailed privately ever since. Only in December, Starmer lamented at a select committee: “every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be”.
Many in No 10 have shared his frustrations. One of them, Paul Ovenden, who left Downing Street in September having served as one of Starmer’s closest advisers since opposition, put those on the record in a recent Times article, decrying what he described as “the stakeholder state.”
He argued that lobbying by a “political perma-class” had distracted the government from voters’ priorities, despairing at the “sheer weirdness of how Whitehall spends its time”.
The Labour Party – and the entirety of Westminster – noted Ovenden’s intervention, with mixed reviews. “That was Paul freelancing,” a Starmer ally says. “It wasn’t very helpful, and we weren’t happy with it.” They were worried it looked like “making excuses” after 19 months in government.
Ovenden, a former journalist who has left Downing Street, doesn’t speak for Starmer or the government. Yet his closeness to the premier and Morgan McSweeney means he is widely seen in Westminster as an “outrider” for the project. Another close ally of the Prime Minister, unaware of a difference of opinion on the matter, references Ovenden’s analysis approvingly.
Today, Wes Streeting weighed into the debate, arguing that attacking the civil service or blaming “stakeholder capture” is a dead end for Labour as an analysis or argument.
“This excuses culture does the centre-left no favours,” he said in a speech at the Institute for Government. “If we tell the public that we can’t make anything work, then why on earth would they vote to keep us in charge?”
While making his case for the modernisation of public services, Streeting said: “We are not simply at the mercy of forces outside of our control. Our fortunes are in our hands. And it is precisely because we on centre-left believe in the power of the state to transform people’s lives that we are best placed to change it.
“Where there aren’t levers, we build them. Where there are barriers, we bulldoze them. Where there is poor performance, we challenge it.”
It’s yet another development in the proxy war between Streeting and Starmer’s allies ever since the events of last November. Ovenden’s article – and Starmer’s past comments – left an open goal for the Health Secretary to implicitly criticise the Prime Minister while fleshing out a different argument around how Labour should be approaching, and talking about, reform of the state. Some of Starmer’s allies now wish Ovenden hadn’t weighed in at all.
[Further reading: Why Keir Starmer has gone to war with Elon Musk]
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