Numerous civil servants remember their first encounter with Labour ministers last year, says Ed West on Substack. Britain’s new rulers walked into their departments, traded pleasantries with officials, then asked for “ideas about how to run the country”. The mandarins were confused: “That’s your job, minister.” Eighteen months on, Keir Starmer is the least popular prime minister in history, leading a party polling in the teens. Bookies strongly favour his resignation by the end of next year. As a conservative, I feared Labour would do lasting damage while bribing and flattering enough of the electorate to succeed politically. “Luckily, I was too pessimistic, and things are even worse than I expected.”

People complain about career politicians. Starmer has the opposite problem. He is notably bad at managing his MPs – he hasn’t even met some of them and apparently can’t remember their names. (Tony Blair was brilliant at this. His trick was to repeat someone’s name several times early in a conversation; it always stuck.) Admittedly, Starmer has a talent problem aggravated by the Corbyn era, which left hordes of MPs from trade unions and charities. These folk spent so long saying fashionable, popular things that they now have no stomach for doing necessary, unfashionable ones – hence their rejection of last summer’s welfare cuts. Why was this a surprise? Media scrutiny of Labour was so poor before the election that one hedge fund commissioned its own report – who would the MPs be, what were their policies, etc. Its conclusion was, essentially: “There is no plan, there is no vision, and they’re not going to succeed because they don’t have the talent.” The fund took a short position on UK gilts, essentially betting that Britain’s borrowing costs would rise. “They made a lot of money.”

🤝🖋️ Starmer is, belatedly, trying to get his MPs onside, says Patrick Maguire in The Times. In September he appointed a new political director, Amy Richards, who has been getting the PM to send backbenchers handwritten notes, invite them to No 10 and hold lunches in the members’ dining room. They say it’s almost becoming a challenge to avoid him.

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👾 How to stop your phone being snatched
🚢 What it feels like to be torpedoed
🧔🏻‍♂️ Why men are fine, actually
🏏 Geoffrey Boycott’s naked batting practice
🦖 Can you spot CGI?
⛴️ London’s golden age of river travel
🏛️ What kids today could get from a classical education
🖼️ Quiz: which painting is more expensive?
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