Changing prime minister has become an all too familiar ceremony. On July 20th Sir Keir Starmer bade farewell and zipped from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace, with helicopters hovering above. Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, followed in reverse, heading from Buckingham Palace to Downing Street, where friends, family, allies and apparatchiks listened to his hopes for Britain.
Then began the next stage: picking over every word. What did Mr Burnham mean when he called his government a “circuit-breaker”? Was
Changing prime minister has become an all too familiar ceremony. On July 20th Sir Keir Starmer bade farewell and zipped from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace, with helicopters hovering above. Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, followed in reverse, heading from Buckingham Palace to Downing Street, where friends, family, allies and apparatchiks listened to his hopes for Britain.
Then began the next stage: picking over every word. What did Mr Burnham mean when he called his government a “circuit-breaker”? Was his target to eliminate rough sleeping feasible? And most important: what will Mr Burnham do in his first 100 days?
At this point, the chuntering starts. Why judge a government that will run the country for years after only 100 days? Forget the first days, what about the next ten years? What better symbol of the adhd-addled media environment that makes governing impossible? But whereas most media conventions can be dismissed, the first-100-days meme cannot. It reflects a fundamental truth of British politics. The most consequential government actions happen almost immediately or not at all.
Take Sir Tony Blair. Practically all New Labour’s lasting achievements happened within days of taking power. Bank of England independence, which is now the backbone of British economic policy, came on day five. A plan to give Scotland and Wales their own parliaments, on day 14. By the end of the first month, the national minimum wage was in progress. After eight weeks, what became the Human Rights Act was outlined. To round off this busy first 100 days, plans for a London mayor were unveiled.
What about the next dozen years? Oh, they did this and that. Public services improved; waiting lists fell, eventually. Schools were rebuilt; the public realm was renewed. But this was temporary, as a trip down any high street or a visit to hospital today will show. New Labour’s achievements faded away and Sir Tony, the most successful prime minister of the past 30 years, spent two decades kicking himself for not doing more sooner.
And so it was for the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government led by David Cameron that took power in 2010. Austerity was put in train at once; the government announced it would crank vat to its current level of 20% after a little over a month. The triple lock, which guarantees that the state pension must rise by the rate of inflation, wage growth or 2.5%, came on the 42nd day of the Cameron era. A good 16 years on, it is still there, a symbol of the long-term unseriousness of British policy, since it will eventually lead to the heat-death of the fiscal universe unless someone tweaks it.
By 2014 the legislative cupboard was almost bare. Critics called it a zombie parliament. Whips desperately emailed MPs for ideas for debates. (Perhaps food security? What about foreign lorries?) When Mr (now Lord) Cameron won a majority in the 2015 election, he set Brexit in train almost immediately. He produced the referendum bill on the eu on day 21, sealing his government’s fate.
Likewise, Theresa May took her biggest decisions within weeks of winning power. At her first Conservative Party conference as leader, Mrs (now Lady) May set Britain on a path to a hard Brexit. Her place in history was secured by day 82. It took Boris Johnson a bit longer to rejig Britain’s relationship with Europe: he reached a deal with the eu on day 86, which was one half of his legacy. The other half was a boom in immigration. When did Mr Johnson ditch the Conservative Party’s long-held pledge to cut immigration to “tens of thousands”? Day one.
Most governments take up to 100 days or so to shape a country. Liz Truss managed it in half that. She pledged energy subsidies roughly equivalent to the annual British defence budget. When a ragbag of sweeping tax cuts were thrown in, markets moved, Tory mps followed and Ms Truss was gone. Unpicking that budget was Rishi Sunak’s job, which he did in the first few weeks. Grill veterans of the Sunak era about their achievements and at the top comes the Windsor Framework, which restored relations between the eu and Britain to normalcy, and dominated the start of Mr Sunak’s tenure. Little else matters from Mr Sunak’s stint.
What happens when a government fails to sprint at the start? Ask drinkers at The Grafton, a pub in north London, which on July 20th hosted relieved and humiliated members of Sir Keir’s team, who toasted their freedom from the burdens of government barely two years after a landslide victory.
Of all the sins of Sir Keir’s time in office, it was the start that proved mortal. In the first 100 days of Sir Keir’s tenure there was a great vacuum where a government should be. In the time that other governments had begun upending Britain’s constitution or ripping through the country’s fiscal position or taking Britain out of Europe, Sir Keir cut winter-fuel payments to pensioners, embroiled himself in a scandal about the number of freebies he accepted and sacked his chief of staff. After barely two months in power, prescient obituaries of “two-year Keir” were written, even if they felt absurd at the time.
I’m here for a good time, not a long time
First impressions are usually correct. Governments do not change much in office. Errors compound and events scar them, but their basic instincts and flaws remain the same. To the extent that prime ministers control their destiny at all, they control their first few months. And so the most significant period of Mr Burnham’s government has already begun. A strategy for the next decade is coming, says Mr Burnham, but in the autumn. Judging by his predecessors, it could well be too late. They had already been assigned their place in history by that point. If Mr Burnham has a plan, Britain needs to hear it soon, or it never will.
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