Tom Harris Starmer just proved he has no political strategy whatsoever

The sheer number of policy reversals reveal an extraordinarily weak Prime Minister Daily Telegraph 23/12/25 It would be churlish for anyone to demand repeatedly that the Government reverse its spiteful policy of levying inheritance tax on farmers and small businesses and then to castigate the same Government for doing so.

Not that Keir Starmer has done exactly that, but today’s decision to more than double the threshold from the original £1 million to £2.5 million will be a relief for many families who had fretted about the impossibility of handing farms or firms on to the next generation as going concerns. So we should be thankful that the prime minister has shown some flexibility on this topic. One cheer for Starmer. Or perhaps one and a half. It is Christmas after all. There is a wider political problem in this, of course, and it is one that is vexing the brains of many Labour MPs as they cast a reluctant glance at what political events will develop in 2026. For performing U-turns – or, to be more precise, insisting on maintaining an unsustainable position, only to perform a reluctant but inevitable U-turn – has become a defining characteristic for Sir Keir. We’ve come a long way since Margaret Thatcher delivered her infamous lines to the Conservative conference in 1980: “You turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning!” That was at a time when she was personally deeply unpopular and her party looked like it was heading to defeat at the next election, even though it had been in office for just over a year. Sound familiar? And yet despite her personal unpopularity, the then prime minister attracted a degree of respect from her opponents for her determined attitude to deliver on her own terms. Could the same be said of Starmer? The scale and number of high-profile reversals now threaten to define Starmer’s premiership every bit as much as Thatcher’s was defined by her obstinacy. The public tend to appreciate a politician who admits he was wrong and makes amends – perhaps because such an event is so rare. But when those reversals happen so frequently and are not accompanied by anything like a genuine mea culpa, then voters’ patience can run out extremely quickly. And Starmer’s various U-turns have not been confined to arcane and technocratic details of policy. Arguably his biggest reversal was in agreeing – eventually, giving the impression that his capitulation was done as he kicked and screamed against it – to hold a national inquiry into the rape gangs that had victimised thousands of young girls across the country. This wasn’t about the balance of payments or budget deficits or tax thresholds: this was about whether the horrific experiences of young white girls at the hands of largely Pakistani men had the right to experience justice for how they had been treated. It was the most significant and the most damaging of U-turns because the Government’s previous stance – that the extensive seven-year inquiry into historical child abuse overseen by baroness Jay had been enough – was widely seen as based on fears that if another inquiry looked specifically at the ethnicity of the perpetrators, support for Labour among the Pakistani Muslim population would fall even further. This equated in people’s minds with the notion that Labour was prepared to sacrifice the safety and lives of working class girls in order to shore up its electoral base. Perhaps related to Labour’s continuing worries about losing Muslim votes, the Government chose to perform a U-turn on one of its own manifesto commitments by officially recognising Palestine in September, something the party had promised would only be done in the context of a peace process which, at the time, did not exist. And then we come to the more economic U-turns, the ones that cost actual money and people’s jobs. Raising employers’ national insurance contribution was a reversal of the party’s previous promise not to raise tax on working people. And then there was the debacle of the two-child benefit limit, and the suspension from the Labour whip of some MPs who voted in favour of abolishing it, only for the Government itself to abolish it anyway. And the winter fuel payment cuts, which raised far less money for the Exchequer than the political pain was worth but which Starmer decided MPs should defend in their constituencies against angry voters – only for him to make tax changes that effectively reversed the cut. The benefit reforms proposed by the former work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall were a modest but vital start to what should have been a major process of benefit reform. But another rebellion by back bench Labour MPs was enough for Starmer to turn tail and run. Never has a colossal majority of 170 been so vulnerable to the predilections of a minority of ill-disciplined back benchers, and rarely has any cabinet minister suffered so public a humiliation at the hands of her boss. This “tactic” of marching his MPs to the top of the hill and then marching them back down again with absolutely nothing to show for it has become the closest thing that Number 10 has to a political “strategy”. But its most important result has been to make Starmer the most unconvincing – and the most vulnerable – political leader in the country.