Keir Starmer has no response to the Morgan McSweeney phone shambles, no timeline for publishing the defence investment plan, and no strategy to shield businesses from rising energy costs. However, the Prime Minister has received one piece of good news today.
After the elections, the Commons will not be sitting until the King reopens parliament on May 13, making it that much harder for would-be plotters to depose him. Once again, there is a will, but not a way.
Annabel Denham, Senior Political Commentator. Daily Telegraph 27/03/26
As Britain contemplates a 1970s-style energy crisis, our Prime Minister is in Helsinki attending a summit of the Joint Expeditionary Force. Never-here will be eager to present himself as a statesman of consequence, a bridge, a broker of alliances, particularly after his very public falling out with the Man in the Baseball Cap, which may have very marginally increased his cred with the Left.
Yet it is hard for Keir Starmer to sustain an image of Churchillian authority overseas when the domestic picture is so bleak. At home, the Government’s gormless response to the energy crunch has been to hesitate and hope it’ll blow over. Only today have we seen some signs of contingency planning, with a £100m commitment to reopen a Teesside carbon dioxide plant mothballed last year.
Elsewhere, governments are acting with greater urgency. The US has loosened ethanol fuel rules to ease soaring oil prices. In Brussels, Dan Jørgensen is urging member states to refill gas reserves earlier than planned. Slovenia has become the first EU country to introduce fuel rationing, though a similar scheme would provoke uproar here.
Rachel Reeves is still preparing a modest package of “targeted” support for selected households this summer, while preparing, we are told, a more substantial (and inevitably more expensive) intervention in the winter. However, businesses, which fall outside the protection of the energy price cap, are wondering how they fit into the Chancellor’s calculations. Their concerns have not been assuaged by the Government’s incessant claims of “price-gouging”. Yet a new investigation has unsurprisingly found accusations that petrol retailers are profiteering from the Iran conflict to be baseless.
This is desperate diversionary stuff. The nation’s favourite retailer, Marks & Spencer, has this morning directly challenged the Government’s framing, with its chief executive posting on LinkedIn to tell us that levies imposed by the state now account for more than half of the company’s energy costs. Reeves and Starmer will have to find some new panto villains.
As our fiscal picture deteriorates further, the long-awaited defence investment plan has yet to materialise. Today, figures suggest that spending had reached just 2.31 per cent of GDP by 2025. How, exactly, are we to reach 2.5 per cent next year, let alone the 3 per cent Labour is promising? Equipment orders are not being placed and soldiers are not being recruited. Perhaps they’ll increase military pensions, which count as defence spending for some purposes. Or order some new uniforms for our supernumerary admirals. That’ll scare the pants off Putin.
However, there is a glimmer of hope for the PM as he anticipates the May elections bloodbath: Parliament will not be sitting in the immediate wake of those polls. A new forecast suggests Labour is on track to lose almost 2,000 councillors, representing three-fifths of those up for re-election.
Yet MPs will be dispersed in their constituencies until the State Opening on May 13. Planning a coup from afar is far trickier than in the corridors of Westminster, even in these days of instant electronic communications: plotters need to see the whites of each other’s eyes. Would-be challengers might also need to weigh the “optics” of moving against a leader at the very moment he receives the formal endorsement of the monarch for a new legislative programme. Few MPs believe Two-Tier can survive, but again, the route to deposing him remains elusive.
As MPs depart for the Easter recess, the political landscape looks broadly similar to what it was at the start of term. Polling puts Reform leading on 27 per cent, Labour trailing on 21, the Conservatives on 17, the Greens on 15, and the Lib Dems on 12. Compared with January, Reform has dipped slightly, prompting speculation that its surge may have peaked. That seems premature. Should it perform strongly in May, as many expect, Reform will regain momentum and reinforce its boast to be the “only party on the Right”, reducing the Tories to dusty museum exhibits.
What still baffles is the stagnation of the Lib Dems, which remains stubbornly fixed at 12 per cent despite Ed Davey’s Trump-bashing clown act. The party has been overtaken – including by the Greens, whose brand of politics looks less like beards and sandals environmentalism than performative student radicalism tinged with what looks worryingly like anti-Semitism. The ever-fickle British electorate is still intent on something new, and the establishment parties are struggling to adapt to this new reality.
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