At final issues are wanting up for Starmer after his spectacular flip Right. But he cannot cease there – time to inform Little Ed and Big Ange their Lefty sport is up: ANDREW NEIL

Only Nixon could go to China has become one of the most enduring political proverbs of the past half century.

It refers to Richard Nixon’s historic trip to Beijing in 1972 to mark the start of detente with Chairman Mao Zedong’s communist regime which, by solidifying the Sino-Soviet split, reshaped the geopolitics of the Cold War in the West’s favour.

Only a US president with Nixon’s indisputable credentials as a Cold War hawk and anti-communist hardliner, it was agreed, could get away with making peace overtures to a brutal Marxist dictator.

Ever since, it has been applied to politicians who are able to strike out in controversial, hitherto unthinkable directions because their previous political track record gives them cover.

The best modern example is none other than our very own Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who has rapidly morphed into a sort of Nixon-in-reverse – a Lefty who is able to tack to the Right in all manner of surprising ways because he has the trust of the Left.

Indeed, it is becoming the defining leitmotif of his Government. The transformation is quite breathtaking in its speed and scale. Not only has Starmer grasped the need for a rapid increase in defence spending in these treacherous times, he’s funding the initial rise by cutting the international aid budget to the bone.

Labour MPs and activists don’t like it; but they’re going along with it. The Tories, under whose dubious watch our armed forces were allowed to atrophy for 14 long years, are left to look on in awe, admitting they never even contemplated raiding the foreign aid budget for defence – largely because they would have been excoriated if they had, above all by Labour. Which is hardly fair, but that’s politics.

Starmer is clearly relishing his reinvention as the new Nixon. This week he stayed in character by scrapping NHS England, deemed to be the ‘world’s biggest quango’. The Tories invented it in 2012 to give the NHS operational independence, free of political control – and have regretted it ever since. But they couldn’t bring themselves to abolish it.

Starmer has – with his ministers echoing Nixon that ‘only Labour can reform the NHS’. Once again the Tories are left looking on dumbstruck from the sidelines.

About half of NHS England’s 15,000-strong workforce will be made redundant, the rest merged with the Department of Health, where there will also be job losses.

Starmer says the hundreds of millions saved from ending the quango and the department duplicating each other’s work will be reallocated to the beleaguered frontline of the NHS and in new technology for it. He hopes it will reverse the 20 per cent decline in NHS productivity since before the pandemic. Of course, we await to see if real savings and improved efficiency emerge. 

The Whitehall Blob has a remarkable ability to withstand efforts to cut it down to size. But Starmer seems minded to wield the axe across government, raging this week against the ‘checkers and blockers’ getting in the way of his plans for economic growth.

About time too. When the Tories came to power in 2010 there were 492,000 civil servants. During the years of so-called austerity that was whittled down to 384,000 by 2016.

Then the Tories totally lost the plot. By this time last year there were 513,000, more than they inherited from Gordon Brown, who bowed to no one in his belief that big government was good government.

Starmer came to power with no plans to cut government down to size. Now he rails against the dead weight of Britain’s ‘watchdog state’, whose agencies he wants to sweep away or put in their box. This week he turned on ‘jumping spiders’ whose mere presence somehow managed to stop the development of a new town when a nature quango moved to protect them.

The last Tory government promised a ‘bonfire of the quangos’. In the event they abolished only 40 out of 901 and even that involved consolidation into bigger agencies rather than outright closure. So more a flickering candle than a bonfire.

But in the eight months he’s been in power Starmer has created 27 new quangos. So he has a long way to go before we can take his new Thatcherite enthusiasm for slimmer government seriously.

Yet he is not shying away from trying to crack the toughest nut of all: welfare reform.

It has long been a truism of British politics that only Labour can really reform welfare (that Nixonian echo again) but that Labour is also least inclined to do it.

That may be about to change. Chancellor Rachel Reeves realises that without savings from the massive welfare budget, her fiscal sums won’t add up and she’ll breach her fiscal rules.

The case for reform has never been stronger. Over three million people of working age are now on sickness benefit, up one million from pre-pandemic 2019. No other advanced economy has seen such a rise.

We now spend 4.3 per cent of GDP on welfare benefits for people of working age – about twice what we’ve been spending on defence. This year, Britain will spend £70 billion on sickness and disability benefits alone, a massive increase on pre-pandemic times. The total is projected to climb relentlessly towards £100 billion in the years ahead.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research was recently asked by my friend and colleague Fraser Nelson what would be the fiscal consequences if the extra one million who have signed on for sickness benefits since 2019 were to find work.

The answer was astounding: a £30 billion increase in tax revenues by the end of the decade and an £11 billion saving on welfare payments.

So a £41 billion improvement in the nation’s finances is enough to move closer to spending an essential 3 per cent of GDP on defence and help keep the Chancellor within her fiscal rules.

It makes the £6 billion welfare savings the Government is reportedly looking for pretty modest. But even that is being subjected to some pushback from Labour MPs and activists.

It is worth remembering that the first six months of Starmer’s rule, dominated as they were by such matters as a disastrous tax-raising Budget, attacks on farmers, a war on private schools and the Chagos Islands fiasco, had all the hallmarks of a failing premiership. His stock has only started to rise as he’s donned the mantle of a war leader and turned robustly Rightwards.

It is ironic that Starmer’s rehabilitation is being facilitated by the adoption of essentially Right-wing policies – increased defence spending, getting government out of the way of investment and development, welfare reform, less reverence for the ability of foreign aid to change very much.

Of course, all these policies were available to the Conservative government that preceded him. But the Tories were either too timid, too stupid or too gutless to adopt them – perhaps a combination of all of the above. So they can hardly complain when Starmer steals their clothes.

So what next in the remaking of Starmer? Billions more for defence and fiscal consolidation could be released if the PM ended Ed Miliband’s zealous and absurdly expensive pursuit of net zero. That is where Starmer should look next. There’s plenty of money when the state budget is over £1 trillion. It just has to stop spending so much of it on stupid stuff.

Then there’s Angela Rayner’s job-destroying labour market reforms. Welfare reform has more chance of succeeding if you make it cheaper and less risky for firms to hire people who’ve been idle on sickness benefits for too long. Rayner’s reforms do the opposite, making it more cumbersome and expensive to hire lower paid workers, which will make welfare reform all the harder.

Starmer is about to find out you can’t be half pregnant. That you can’t face Left and Right at the same time. That government has to be joined up to succeed.

Failure beckoned when he tried facing Left. Things have started to look up since he turned Right. It would be folly for him to give up his new winning streak and reverse course again.

Time to tell Little Ed and Big Ange the game is up.