It wasn’t meant to happen that way. Nick Clegg had swept into government two years earlier on a wave of optimism and change, his party finally ending its decades in the political wilderness. Yet there he stood, that day in September 2012, a forlorn figure, begging his conference – and the nation – for forgiveness.
‘We made a pledge, we did not stick to it, and for that I am sorry,’ he admitted tersely. His election promise not to raise university tuition fees – endorsed in blood by every Liberal Democrat candidate – ‘was a pledge made with the best of intentions, but we should not have made a promise we were not absolutely sure we could deliver. I shouldn’t have committed to a policy that was so expensive when there was no money around.’
Nick Clegg delivers his tuition fees apology to the Liberal Democrats in 2012
We are unlikely to see a similar mea culpa from Sir Keir Starmer at his party’s conference in Liverpool this week. Perhaps wisely. Clegg’s desperate act of contrition was turned into a pop song that surged up the charts and helped cement his place in national infamy.
But Sir Keir should be under no illusion. As he prepares for what should have been a triumphant and validatory address to his own party, the political warning lights are no longer flashing amber but red.
This was supposed to be the good bit – the moment for Starmer to kick back, breathe out and enjoy a brief political honeymoon. Yet he could hardly have put a bigger dampener on his nuptials if he’d booked a cruise to Krakatoa on the Titanic in the teeth of Hurricane Katrina.
His fledgling administration is already riven by infighting. He is being assailed over a series of optically disastrous policy decisions that have seen him framed as prioritising the release from jail of wife-beaters and condemning pensioners to freeze in the winter. His first major foreign policy announcement led to a violent public rebuke from one of Britain’s most important strategic allies. And having pledged to bring an end to sleaze and cronyism, he has become embroiled in his very own cash-for-couture scandal.
Until the past week, this simply looked like the teething problems of a new and relatively inexperienced administration. His allies were reassured by private polling showing grudging public admiration for his tough approach to decision-making. The row over Downing Street access for a major donor was dismissed as Westminster froth. The infighting described to me as ‘a silly turf war’. But over the past seven days something has shifted. As one minister told me: ‘We can’t go on like this. No 10 have got till the end of October to get on top of it or we’ll be in real trouble.’
That may seem a hyperbolic assertion from a member of a government that has been in office for less than 100 days, and luxuriates in a Commons majority of 170. But it reflects a general perception among Labour MPs that Starmer is already losing his grip on the centre.
The war between his chief of staff Sue Gray and just about every other minister, aide and official in government has now been allowed to spiral completely out of control, with some insiders even discussing the possibility of strike action if she is not removed.
As has Wardrobegate. Over the weekend it emerged Starmer’s team had failed to correctly register donations of dresses his wife had received from donor Lord Alli. This error was then inexplicably compounded by allowing her to appear at London Fashion week sporting a £615 blouse and £715 trousers.
At the same time, the first early-release prisoners began to be returned to jail after reoffending, it was revealed a number had been freed without tags, and confusion continued to reign over whether ministers had bothered to conduct an impact assessment over the winter fuel allowance cut.
Within No 10, there is frustration at how a string of increasingly bad headlines are overshadowing what they see as a series of initial successes. ‘I could be here until next week listing all our early achievements,’ one Starmer ally fumed.
Irritation which has a degree of legitimacy.
The PM’s robust response to the riots, his decision to finally pick up and hurl the prisons hand-grenade left to him by Rishi Sunak, and his willingness to break bread with Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, that bete noire of the Left, in a bid to tackle the small-boats crisis, shows there is some substance beneath the lend-leased two-piece suits.
Those unfavourably contrasting Starmer’s tumultuous and tortured transition to government with the supposedly slick and seamless manner Tony Blair eased into power also have short memories. It was roughly at this stage of his premiership that Blair became ensnared in the Bernie Ecclestone crisis – personally intervening to secure an exemption for Formula One from a tobacco advertising ban just hours after meeting the Labour donor.
Within No 10, there is frustration at how a string of increasingly bad headlines are overshadowing what they see as a series of initial successes, writes Dan Hodges. Pictured: Sir Keir Starmer
But while comparisons with Blair are misplaced, the parallels with Clegg, and his political toxification, are becoming eerily – and from the Prime Minister’s perspective – dangerously apparent.
The way hope and change were so quickly replaced by cynicism and disillusionment. The failure to appreciate the scale and speed of a growing estrangement from the electorate. And the ultimately terminal disconnect between the promises that were made in Opposition and what was delivered in government.
One Tory MP last week described the winter fuel policy as ‘Keir Starmer’s poll tax’. It isn’t. But tuition fees didn’t turn out to be Nick Clegg’s poll tax either.
Predictions that that row would lead to the premature fracture of the coalition government proved misplaced. As did those that foresaw Clegg being ousted by his party.
Yet the damage was done. The poison injected in those first fateful months in office by deputy prime minister Clegg’s tuition fees perfidy was slow acting, but fatal.
And that is why this is becoming such a perilous moment for Starmer. The British people didn’t really get to know him while he was Leader of the Opposition. Which was just how he liked it. His whole strategy rested on slipping into No 10 as unobtrusively as possible. But the people are getting to know him now. And they dont’t like what they’re seeing.
Cronyism. Lies. A seeming disregard for the impact of his decisions on the most vulnerable. All the things, in other words, they thought they’d cast aside when they threw out the Tories.
Yes, he is only three months into office. But these are the months that can define a Prime Minister.
If images of champagne-swigging lags, freezing pensioners and Premier League hospitality boxes become burned into the consciousness of the electorate, the Labour Party and their leader will find themselves entering a shallow but remorseless death spiral.
By which point it will be too late. Because, as Nick Clegg found to his cost, when the British people recognise you’ve betrayed them, ‘sorry’ really does become the hardest word.