So that was Christmas. And as “the lights come on at four, at the end of another year”, and the festive season sours into its familiar hangover of grey days and bloated bodies, we find ourselves looking to the future, if not with hope, then at least with a willingness for it to arrive.
With his own popularity standing at an eye-catching -34 points and dissatisfaction with the government cruising at 70 per cent, Keir Starmer will not be expecting an easy-does-it 2025. Problems that can already be anticipated include the Treasury spending review in the spring, which will reinvigorate the chorus of middle-tabloid screams about “savage cuts” or “brutal tax raids” on pensioners and businesses; the May local elections, which promise a breakthrough for Reform and disaster for Labour and the Conservatives; and Donald Trump’s ongoing attempts to catch the eye of the Nobel judges.
But, like the rest of us, the prime minister slogs on. As Michael Gove has said, citing Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin: “He’s made mistakes—but he has shown the capacity to learn from them… It doesn’t look elegant, it’s not a cavalry charge. That’s because he’s walking across a minefield… A bit of shrapnel hits him, but he survives.”
Before and since coming to power, Labour has chiselled a whole stone mason’s yard of aspiration—comprising no less than seven pillars, six milestones and three foundations—by which it may be judged. For the government’s edification, and in effort to add even greater clarity to this enterprise (and without forgetting, of course, the five missions), I add to the pile eight New Year’s resolutions for the prime minister.
1. Be boring
The new MP for Swansea West and former Resolution Foundation chief executive Torsten Bell reports one hack complaining to him that they missed the “excitement” of having Liz Truss and Boris Johnson run the country. And if there is one public service the Conservatives really do believe in, it’s the free-to-air public entertainment they staged as partial recompense for the misery of being governed by them. Back in the 1990s—the days of David Mellor’s Chelsea kit and cash for questions—we would call this stuff “sleaze”, as it largely concerned the exposure of individual weakness and peccadilloes, but the Tory party has since authored a whole universe of interlocking venality and endless feuding. Through the raw, blue-on-blue chaos of the Brexit wars, the leadership contests endless in both volume and duration, partygate, lobbying scandals, harassment scandals and a tableaux of scenery-chewing resignations from the likes of Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, the only constant has been the spectacle of mighty egos tottering upon the frail supports offered by their talents. Having flirted with scandal via a trip to the Arsenal here and a Taylor Swift gig there, plus the curious case of Louise Haigh’s phone, Labour should bind its own MPs fast to a strengthened ministerial code and leave scandal to the Tories.
2. Split the right
With its hackneyed talk of civil service “rewiring” and “efficiency cuts”, however unrealisable that may prove, Labour has parked its rhetorical tanks on Kemi Badenoch’s weird lawn, and there it should stay. This ensures she has nowhere to go except an unwinnable argument with Reform about who’s hardest on immigration. A full, scented-hankies-at-dawn row between the opposition leader and Nigel Farage and the odd high-profile defection or two from the Conservatives to Reform would do very well for Labour, decreasing the chances of a populist-right alliance.
3. Lovebomb Elon Musk
Attempts to ignore or rebut trolling of the British government by X’s whelp-in-chief amount to meeting him on his own terms. Treating him the way Labour plans to treat the rest of Donald Trump’s incoming administration—with unctuous goodwill, flattery and invitations to as many VIP conferences and dinners with undisgraced members of the royal family as it can muster—would leave him punching at a paper wall. And if there’s no time to legislate against Musk’s threatened mega-donation to Reform, Labour should trust that any attempt to game another nation as though it were a meme coin will speed the decline of X and make him and those he sponsors about as popular in Britain as his new boss in the White House.
4. Completely ignore the breakdown of the two-party consensus
The political map of the UK has never been so atomised, and the introduction of proportional representation to the Senedd elections this year could end Labour’s long rule in Wales. With anti-incumbency a global trend, any of the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the SNP and Reform could find themselves in a coalition government in the near future. Much better then not to recognise this new reality or dream of making the Westminster electoral system fairer or more representative, but to wait instead until the “broad coalitions” of old have collapsed for good, and the smaller parties can dictate terms at their moment of greatest power.
5. Get Liz Truss another publishing deal
The height of the Tory “psychodrama” (or psycho drama) was the hyper-tragedy of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. The latter has had the sense to retreat almost entirely from public life, while the former pursues it in the manner of a wronged spouse. Labour never loses an opportunity to mention them, but it should also ensure there is a ready store of material on the supply side—something of which the lady herself would no doubt approve. It should set up, via a series of offshore entities, a Tufton Street vanity publisher and have it offer her a lucrative multi-book deal—at a rate of at least one a year, with lavish nationwide tours to promote them; it should lobby GB News via proxies to give Truss a show; it should erect a statue of her in Westminster for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and men in Peaky Blinders costumes to defend on public holidays. It should never let anyone forget.
6. Prepare for Boris Johnson
The inexorable slow roll-back into public life by the tapioca-shouldered, pudding-headed political bowling ball that is Boris Johnson has already begun. Getting chucked off Channel 4’s US election coverage for plugging his book too brazenly is the kind of ripping lark we will see more of, all to make anxious Conservatives remember the good times when Boris was “in charge”. Remember the Corbyn-clobbering, the get-Brexit-done-ing, how he rocked a high-vis jacket, a hardhat and site-appropriate footwear, or drove a forklift truck through some cardboard boxes, or did a double thumbs-up at something or other? Should Badenoch’s eldritch libertarian agenda and somewhat brittle public persona fail to resonate with the common man and woman, the cry will go out that a safe Tory seat must be found for the prodigal; that only Boris can skewer Starmer and match Farage pint for carefully posed pint. Labour shouldn’t bet against facing him before the next election.
7. Steal from Boris Johnson
Instead of proffering clumsy half-tautologies such as “measurable milestones” or trying to repurpose “take back control”, Labour would do better to “take back ‘levelling up’”. For all that it was ultimately tacked to an empty agenda, levelling up resonated enough that it has entered the wider language as a synonym for “improve”: people now talk of “levelling up” their careers or takeaway orders. Why? Because levelling up is a brilliant description for tackling regional inequality: it identifies a problem and proposes a solution, framing it in a hopeful way, all in two words. It works because ultimately, unlike all this gobbledegook about foundations and missions, it sounds like it might have been formulated by someone who understands the reality of thwarted lives.
8. Be unpopular
There are many ways to dislike someone—casual contempt, overt or sublimated jealousy, instinctive distrust, seething animus—but human beings often reserve their greatest resentments for the people on whom they most depend: parents, partners, employers. Starmer can claim no such emotional intimacy with us, so should have as his model the man on your street WhatsApp group who holds forth on all of life’s most tedious but inescapable subjects—local planning law, what goes in what bin, the resource pressures caused by the new flats by the station, how to get your drains unblocked for free, how often you should test your RCD switch... His posts are a daily bore, but you don’t block him because his utility exceeds his tedium. Would you want to be cornered by him at your neighbour’s barbecue? No. Are you going to attend his talk at the local historical society? You are not. But is he the sort of man you would you want to rewire your house, mend your plumbing, or fix your foundations, rather than the slightly shifty fellow who did the job before? Absolutely. As this man is, so Starmer’s government should be: as relentless as the rain, lightly resented but sometimes forgotten, dousing the country in a mizzle of incremental, technocratic “delivery”.
