The ‘big asks’ may eclipse the sunlight of hope

Joe Murphy, The Independent

The good news, Keir Starmer told us with a perfectly straight face, is that the rose garden at 10 Downing Street is now “back in your service”. The bad news, to borrow the PM’s latest social media jargon, is that he’s going to make a lot of “big asks” in the weeks ahead.

Wise voters will guess that the second sentence in the above summary will be rather more consequential on their bank balances than the first. Anyone left hoping for a free floribunda from the No 10 shrubbery will, I’m afraid, be disappointed.

A clue that Starmer was not giving a sunny address to the nation from his lawn was given in his distinctly non-barbecue attire: grey suit, grey tie, grey glasses, grey hair, grim expression.

His speech, billed as the starter for a new political season, was a confusing mish-mash: an attempt to look back in anger at the worst scandals of the Tory years while simultaneously admitting that things won’t feel better for a long while to come. First, a reminder of the Conservatives’ most shameful moment, when the rose garden was the scene of Partygate gatherings and Dominic Cummings’s infamous press conference where he attempted to deny breaking pandemic rules. “Remember the photos of the cheese just over there,” cried Starmer, his arm sweeping over the patio in a rare moment of animation. “Well, this garden and this building are now back in your service.”

Nodding appreciatively was a hand-picked audience described by No 10 as 50 people Starmer met on the election trail, including charity volunteers bussed in for the occasion. Clearly, this event had been on the spin doctors’ grid for many weeks, which makes it all the more amusing that it coincided with a mini-scandal following the revelation that Lord Alli, a mega-rich Labour fundraiser and donor, was given an access-all-areas security pass after the election and was among donors entertained recently on the very lawn that is supposedly “back in your service”.

A couple of hours before the speech, Cabinet Office minister Ellie Reeves sat squirming on the Sky sofa as she struggled, and failed, to explain why Lord Alli needed such access to the centre of power. In between a lot of ums and aahs, she assured us that “no rules were broken”, which sounded like someone had accidentally handed her one of Boris Johnson’s old briefing packs. Back on the lawn, Starmer was recalling some “big asks” he made to the police when they needed to tackle the tattooed thugs who tried to burn down asylum hotels. You just knew that there were more big asks coming our way.

And here they were: “There is a Budget coming in October and it is going to be painful.” Painful is not a word that prime ministers usually use to describe their Budgets (for good reason). “I’ll have to turn to the country and make big asks of you.”  Just a few short weeks ago, Starmer was happily burbling about “turning the page” and “ending the chaos”, not to mention all that guff about the sunlight of hope spreading in the dawn of his election landslide.

But now, standing in an actual rose garden, he was singing the old country song, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.”  What changed? Well, according to Starmer, he was completely astonished to discover that the Tories had been making an absolute s****-up of running the public finances. “I can’t tell you how shocked I was when I found out,” he said. Funnily enough, we all knew. Starmer claimed to be totally blindsided by the shortage of prison spaces. He must have been too busy to read Yvette Cooper’s stream of pre-election press releases on the subject.

“Just last Wednesday, we found out that, thanks to the last government’s recklessness, we’ve borrowed almost £5bn more than the OBR expected in the last three months alone,” the PM said, although the fact that June’s figure was already £3bn too high might just have tipped him off.