Sir Keir Starmer’s retreat from his own welfare reforms on Tuesday evening has been one of the biggest political blunders of recent years.
It has triggered doubts inside and outside Westminster about the political judgment of the UK prime minister and some of his closest allies.
Starmer himself has urged colleagues not to form a circular firing squad, telling the cabinet on Tuesday: “We will learn from our mistakes, but we will not turn on each other.”
However, urgent questions are being asked about how the “shitshow on stilts” — as one Labour MP put it — was allowed to happen.
Sir Keir Starmer
It is perhaps unsurprising that Starmer does not want a blame game: the buck ultimately stops with the prime minister himself.
The initial decision by the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions to slash disability benefits was made with Starmer’s blessing. One senior Treasury figure said Number 10 had every opportunity to block or change it if Starmer and his advisers had believed the move was misguided.
The prime minister was warned months ago by his own whips that the scale of dissent over his welfare reforms was dangerously out of control. Some of his Downing Street advisers also sensed that MPs would not vote for the welfare bill in enough numbers.
He ploughed on, dismissing the uprising as “noises off” even after 126 rebels broke ranks.
Only four days ago Starmer insisted the benefits system was broken and fixing it was a “moral imperative”.
Starmer has faced questions over the extent of his international travel, having made 26 trips in the past year. In the past fortnight alone he has attended a Nato summit in The Hague and a G7 meeting in Canada.
He admitted he had not been paying full attention to the progress of the welfare reforms. “I was heavily focused on what was happening with Nato and the Middle East all weekend . . . My full attention really bore down on this [last] Thursday.” He said that then “we were able to move relatively quickly” to begin making concessions.
Rachel Reeves
The chancellor was one of the most adamant supporters of the welfare bill in its original form because of the £4.8bn of savings it would have generated for the exchequer.
Reeves, in one-on-one conversations with MPs last week, was uncompromising in her determination to push the bill through.
She told some that Tuesday’s vote would be a de facto vote of confidence in the government itself — a warning which raised the political stakes even further.
Some Labour MPs are now privately suggesting that her time in the Treasury could soon be up, but others argue that for Starmer to throw Reeves overboard now — after working closely together for years — would not solve his political problems.
Starmer has previously stated that Reeves would remain chancellor until the end of the parliament. However, during Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday he swerved the question when asked by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch if that was still the case. Only subsequently did his spokesperson say the chancellor was going nowhere.
Liz Kendall
The work and pensions secretary is no stranger to humiliation, having won 4.5 per cent of the vote in the 2015 Labour leadership race. But Kendall struggled to hide her disappointment on Tuesday night as her welfare bill was cut to ribbons after months of hard work.
Kendall is one of the most Blairite figures in Starmer’s cabinet and believed fervently in the potential for the reforms to encourage more disabled people back into work. At the same time, however, the scope and scale of the cuts were imposed upon her by Downing Street and the Treasury.
The usually effervescent Commons performer was described as a “tortured” figure on the front bench during the second reading of the bill, with Starmer and Reeves not there to back her up.
Morgan McSweeney
The FT reported last Wednesday that Starmer’s chief of staff was becoming a “lightning rod” for the anger of Labour MPs unwilling to vote for a bill that would take large amounts of money from some of Britain’s most disadvantaged people.
He has long been Starmer’s most trusted aide, having persuaded him to shift to the right on immigration, the economy, defence and welfare in order to neutralise the rise of the populist Reform UK party.
During Tuesday’s cabinet meeting Starmer urged colleagues not to brief against McSweeney. “We will not turn on our staff, including our chief of staff, without whom none of us would be sitting around this cabinet table.”
One Downing Street figure said McSweeney had harboured reservations over the welfare bill in the first place.
“Everyone with any understanding of either the welfare system or PLP was arguing against it,” they said. “Morgan saw that it could be painted as balancing the books on the back of the poor.”
Speculation continues that McSweeney could decide to return to Labour HQ before the next general election to focus on election strategy rather than helping to run the government.
Liz Lloyd
Lloyd, director of policy delivery in Downing Street, has largely stayed out of the limelight since she was brought in to bolster the operation at the start of this year.
Lloyd worked as a fixer to Tony Blair in Number 10 until 2007 and subsequently worked in banking. She has already been blamed by some Labour left-wingers for this week’s debacle.
“Liz Lloyd cooked it up on the fly,” said one person involved in the negotiations. “She took leadership of the policy process in the run-up to the spring statement. She was against concessions as late as Thursday last week, when Keir had already changed the tone to conciliatory.”
Claire Reynolds
Reynolds, a former aide to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, is in charge of liaising with Labour’s 403 MPs. She failed to convince enough of them to go along with the original welfare reform package and therefore is taking a share of the blame for the government’s embarrassing climbdown.
Reynolds, wife of business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, led presentations a month ago designed to convince Labour MPs to get behind the reforms. “She did her best but it fell on stony ground,” said one MP.
Angela Rayner
The deputy prime minister is one of the few political figures who emerges politically strengthened after this week’s chaos.
Rayner was deployed to try to bring the rebels into line, despite having no direct responsibility for welfare policy. And although the efforts failed, MPs were struck by her use of charm rather than strong-arm tactics.
She has also become a totem for colleagues who want to increase taxes instead of cutting benefits. Earlier this year a private memo sent by Rayner to Reeves emerged setting out various proposals for taxes that Labour could raise.
On Wednesday morning Rayner insisted she was not interested in succeeding Starmer as prime minister, adding that it was a “very challenging job” and she already had her hands full with delivering social housing and changes to employment rights.
Reflecting on the Labour government’s first year in government she said: “There’s a lot that we’ve done, there’s a lot that we’ve got right, and there’s a lot that we should reflect on”.
