This year’s Labour conference should, all things considered, be one gigantic celebration.
For the first time since 2009, the party is gathering in Liverpool this weekend with its leader in 10 Downing Street.
But less than three months after securing a landslide general election victory, Keir Starmer is already a man under pressure due to a series of missteps which have even led some to question whether he is really up to the job.
The controversial decision to cut winter fuel payments from 10 million pensioners was taken shortly after Labour took office and continues to dog the prime minister.
A simmering briefing war against Starmer’s chief of staff, Sue Gray, burst into the open this week when it was revealed she earns more than the PM – angering government aides who accuse her of blocking their calls for a pay rise.
Meanwhile, Starmer’s liking for freebies – more than £100,000-worth of hospitality, concert tickets, clothes and glasses in the last five years – has seen him dubbed “Free Gear Keir” by his gleeful opponents.
Even his wife, Victoria, was dragged into the row when it emerged Labour donor Lord Alli had also paid for £5,000-worth of clothes for her.
“Because he only became an MP in 2015, he lacks political experience,” one Labour veteran told HuffPost UK. “And there’s no one around about him giving him the right advice.”
Another senior party figure said: “The extent to which he takes freebies is disgraceful really. It smacks of arrogance.”
A former frontbencher added: “They are so shit it is really hard to believe.”
Even party loyalists like Baroness Harman have been critical of the PM, in particular his decision to accept corporate hospitality so he can continue watching his team, Arsenal.
Starmer, who has had a season ticket at the Emirates for many years, says the cost to the taxpayer of providing him with security at matches would be too high, so he is saving the public purse by choosing to sit in the posh seats.
But speaking on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Harman said: “It’s not a hanging offence, but I think doubling down and trying to justify it is making things worse.
“You can just say it was probably a misstep, if I had my time again I wouldn’t do it and therefore I’m going to auction [it] for charity or something. I think at the moment he’s just got to get rid of every distraction he possibly can.”
Any hope Labour have that the public will see “frockgate” as a Westminster bubble issue are forlorn, according to Luke Tryl of the More in Common think-tank.
“In the focus groups which we regularly hold with a variety of voters from all over the country, we hear consistent anger about these kinds of issues,” he said.
“With the Tories, we kept hearing it was ‘one rule for them and one rule for everyone else’ but the overarching feeling is that all politicians are in it for themselves. That’s the real point here. These stories may well be dismissed as Westminster tittle-tattle, but they eat away at the most fundamental quality required for democracies to work effectively and that is trust.”
A senior government figure admitted that things are “a bit shaky” at the moment, but insisted the party conference is the perfect opportunity for Starmer and Labour to rebound.
“We have to use the conference to get beyond all of this,” he said. “We need to talk about the inheritance we were left by the Tories. The winter fuel decision and having to release people from prison are a hangover from what we were left.
“It’s not like people are being let out of jail because we want to let them out.
“And it’s a bit rich of the Tories to attack us when they just fought an election promising £12 million in welfare cuts.
“There’s no doubt it’s tough at the moment, but the important thing about conference is to stand up there, talk about why we won and what we’ll do to improve the country. We need to get back on the front foot.”
One cabinet minister took aim at the anonymous special advisers (SpAds) who went to the BBC to voice their unhappiness about Sue Gray’s wage packet.
“There’s obviously some leaks coming from No.10 and people saying things that shouldn’t be in the public domain,” they said. “It’s ill-discipline. Some of them probably are unhappy about their pay offers, but there’s a way to negotiate that and they shouldn’t be using journalists as therapists.
“Sue was brought in to do a job. She’s the chief of staff, so she can go to any meeting she wants. The criticism of her is unfair.”
Charles McQuillan via Getty Images
The Labour conference slogan is “Change Begins”, which aims to move beyond the gloomy messages which have been emanating from Downing Street since the election.
Standing in the No.10 garden last month, the prime minister told the country that “things will get worse before we get better” and that the Budget on October 30 will be “painful”.
He will strike a more upbeat tone in his keynote speech on Tuesday afternoon, which he will deliver before jetting off to a meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York.
A close ally of the PM said: “He’ll talk about the good things we’ve already done, while reminding people again about what we were left by the Tories.
“But this is the first conference in 15 years in which we are the party of government – we shouldn’t forget what a change that is.
“It’s really important to remember that we won big, we’ve got a right to govern and we shouldn’t be blown off course by people who think that Labour have no right to be ever be in power.”
Starmer’s first 77 days in power have not always gone as he would have hoped when he stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street on July 5 promising to change the country.
He will hope, to coin a famous phrase, that things can only get better from now on.
