Starmer needs to work on placating his revolting MPs

With parliament now in recess, the prime minister can spend his summer figuring out a new direction

- Andrew Grice

“Keir cannot afford another fiasco like welfare,” one Starmer loyalist told me, recalling the government’s humiliating climbdown on proposed cuts to disability benefits after a revolt by Labour MPs.

The prime minister knows the episode showed that his way of governing is unsustainable. He is consulting people widely this summer about how to turn things round. There’s a fierce internal debate taking place. In Keir Starmer’s right ear, Morgan McSweeney, his influential chief of staff, tells him to focus on wooing back voters in the red wall from Nigel Farage. In his left ear, soft-left cabinet ministers urge a more progressive approach to woo centre-left voters who have deserted Labour for the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. They argue that these lost voters outnumber defectors to Reform by a margin of three to one.

The soft left’s allies in Downing Street want Starmer to emulate Bill Clinton, who fought back against a right-wing populist - Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives - after a rocky start to his first term in 1993. One minister admitted: “There is a battle over the direction of the government. There is only one person who can resolve it. Keir has got to decide for himself - based on his values, who he is, who he wants to be.”