‘We’re sick of Downing Street’: Labour ministers raise the lid on the brutal civil warfare raging in No10 as one whispers ‘we’re about to commit electoral suicide’: DAN HODGES
The minister had seen enough. ‘To be honest, we’re all sick of Downing Street,’ he told me. ‘No 10 is constantly trying to blame everyone else for the Government’s failings. It’s time they started looking closer to home.’
Over the past couple of months, tensions have been simmering between Sir Keir Starmer and a Cabinet that has become increasingly disillusioned by what they see as rudderless and chaotic leadership. And now those tensions are set to boil over.
One tipping point has been a recent series of negative briefings against senior Cabinet figures from No 10 aides. According to government sources, the attacks were co-ordinated and sanctioned at senior level.
But they were also cackhanded. ‘The problem No 10 has is that they’re rubbish at it,’ one minister told me. ‘I know exactly who’s been briefing against me and to whom. Their fingerprints are all over it.’
The bad blood between Cabinet members and Downing Street has become so bad that some ministers are beginning to actively withhold information from Starmer’s aides.
‘We’ve decided we’re just going to have to cut them out,’ one revealed. ‘We can’t trust them. If we bring them in too early, they try to sabotage what we’re doing.’
Tensions have been simmering between Sir Keir Starmer and a Cabinet that has become increasingly disillusioned by what they see as rudderless and chaotic leadership
Another festering issue is the chaotic way the Downing Street operation is perceived to be being run.
‘It’s really, really hard to get a decision out of there,’ another minister complained. A colleague added: ‘I had someone from No 10 shouting at us that we hadn’t let them know about a policy announcement. And I had to say to them, ‘OK. But you do know we signed this off two weeks ago?’
A further point of contention is mounting concern over the management – or mismanagement – of the Government’s core economic messaging, and in particular the ‘pivot’ away from talking about new investment and protecting public services to what’s seen as a messianic obsession with talking up growth.
‘They understand they talked down the economy too much,’ a minister said. ‘But now they’re trying to just talk the economy back to growth. Well, that’s fine. But it wasn’t what we were told the strategy was.’
I understand that within No 10 there is also ‘terror’ at the political impact of the upcoming publication of the Office of Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) latest growth forecasts. To the extent that ministers have been ordered to provide Downing Street with stories and policy ideas to mask the independent body’s bad news.
‘We’ve been told to come up with things to pack the grid for March,’ one government official told me. ‘They want to try to bury the OBR figures. They’re that terrible.’
However, the straw that has broken the camel’s back is the ongoing series of negotiations over the Government Spending Review. Rachel Reeves’s fiscal headroom is now so narrow, her next hairstyle is in danger of being a flat-top. As a result, ministers are being asked to approve a round of spending cuts so brutal some have decided they are simply going to refuse.
‘I just haven’t got the scope in my budget,’ one told me. ‘What the Treasury and No 10 are asking for is impossible. The deficit I inherited from the Tories was already massive. I can’t implement the cuts they want without everything just collapsing.’
Another minister pointed the finger at Darren Jones, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who’s tasked with identifying where the axe will fall. ‘He’s a disaster,’ they told me. ‘He doesn’t really understand what he’s doing. He finds it hard to even grasp basic figures.’
A senior government official was even more scathing. ‘He’s a very strange man. There’s no empathy there. You try to talk him through the implications of what he’s proposing and he goes blank.’
While most Cabinet ministers are primarily concerned about the practical impact of the proposed cuts on their own department’s ability to provide vital frontline services, they are equally alarmed at the political implications of the spending review.
The ‘pivot’ to growth has pulled the rug out from under them. Starmer and Reeves have opted to make the success or failure of their policies dependent on being seen to stimulate the economy, writes DAN HODGES
‘We’re about to commit electoral suicide,’ one minister told me. ‘The reaction to the winter fuel cut was terrible. Well, this is going to set off carnage inside the party. People backed us because they thought we’d improve public services, not slash them further.’
Another warned: ‘The local elections will be a bloodbath. Farage is going to run riot.’
Friction inside government is nothing new, especially when ministers are being asked to tighten their departmental belts. But the scale of anger towards a Prime Minister and No 10 operation that has been in office for barely seven months is not normal.
Ministers had hoped the departure of Starmer’s chief of staff, Sue Gray, and her replacement with veteran strategist Morgan McSweeney, would stabilise Downing Street. But those hopes appear to have been dashed.
‘Everyone who thought Sue was the problem has been given a nasty shock,’ one minister said.
But a far bigger problem than personnel in the No 10 operation is what is happening with Labour’s economic strategy, and the attempt to sell it. At the time of the Budget, ministers believed they had a tough, but defensible stance. Public services had to be protected; the Tories had left the finances in a mess; tax rises were the only option.
However, the ‘pivot’ to growth has pulled the rug out from under them. Starmer and Reeves have opted to make the success or failure of their policies dependent on being seen to stimulate the economy. And they have done so just as the OBR is preparing to announce the economy is either flatlining or sliding towards recession.
Some Tories I spoke with last week believe the Government is managing expectations. ‘We don’t think the OBR figures will be quite as bad as people are expecting,’ one Conservative strategist told me, ‘and that will allow Reeves to say, ‘It’s hurting, but there are signs it’s working.’
But if that is the case, Starmer isn’t just managing expectations, he’s also manipulating his own Cabinet. Because they aren’t buying it.
‘No 10 aren’t that clever,’ one minister argued. ‘This isn’t expectation management. The OBR figures are going to be bad. And when we see them, the blame will lie in Downing Street.’
The patience of Cabinet ministers has finally snapped. Keir Starmer’s government is about to go to war with itself.
