Sir Keir can refresh his Number 10 crew but they still need the captain to steer the ship

Absence does not always make the heart grow fonder. Sir Keir Starmer has returned from his disrupted summer break to be greeted by Labour's lowest rating of his premiership. At 20 points, the party is just three ahead of the wretched Tories and trails 15 behind Reform, which has dominated the news cycle during the summer recess and led every opinion poll since May. Sir Keir's personal favourability rating is just a little better than the score held by Rishi Sunak just before he led the Conservatives to a crushing defeat without precedent in that party's history.

- Andrew Rawnsley

The government doesn't have to ask the public to return its verdict at the ballot box until summer 2029, but time feels a lot more pressing for Sir Keir. Angela Rayner tells colleagues that the next 12 months will be make or break for Labour. Friends of the prime minister acknowledge that his second year at Number 10 needs to see a significant improvement on the domestic front.

The majority of Labour MPs have not yet abandoned all hope, but they will return to parliament this week yearning for their leader to start providing them with more reasons to feel cheerful. One regular complaint is that the government is somehow less than the sum of its parts. Ministers are doing quite a lot of stuff that ought to be admired by people on the progressive side of the aisle and generate some appreciation among median voters. Yet the achievements they can fairly claim aren't cutting through. That is a failure of presentation. Or the successes are eclipsed by the blunders that the government has made. That is a failure of politics.

Sir Keir's response is to rejig the personnel at Number 10. That will be followed by a ministerial reshuffle, which is expected to be concentrated on the more junior ranks. Geeky and technocratic as this may sound, a reset in Downing Street is widely held to be essential. Successful prime ministers depend on building a tightly knit team bound together by trust, discipline and shared goals. There's general agreement among both ministers and officials that Number 10 is not performing as effectively as it could in setting the government's aims, driving its ambitions and articulating what Labour is for.