Reflections on politics of the week

Trump seeks a new UN ambassador; Starmer's chief spin doctor walks away; but the PM and the Chancellor are likely stuck with each other, for better or worse

For obvious professional reasons—to quote the great Sir Billy Connolly, “This is what I do, I’m not on a YOP scheme”—as well as by inclination, I pay unnaturally close attention to political news and I don’t think it’s outrageous egotism to say I’m reasonably well informed. Recently, however, I’ve noticed occasions when what I would classify as significant news stories, or at least items I think I should have been aware of, have passed me by completely. It is, I suspect, a function of the new Trump 2.0 dynamic, the tactic learned from Steve Bannon of “flooding the zone with shit”.

(If you will permit me an historical analogy, it puts me in mind of “Window”, Britain’s initial Second World War radar countermeasure, developed by the young Welsh physicist Joan Curran at the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Worth Matravers in Dorset. She posited, correctly as it turned out, that if RAF aircraft dropped packets of small paper strips backed with aluminium foil, these would create a cloud of false echoes for radar detectors and effectively blind them. This “chaff”, as it was known, was given the code-name “Window” by A.P. Rowe, Chief Superintendent of the TRE, and was first used to brilliant effect during Operation Gomorrah, Bomber Command’s week-long campaign against Hamburg in July and August 1943.)

If the zone is to be flooded with shit, then these occasional updates will certainly be helpful for me in their compilation. In the event that they prove informative or at least interesting for you as readers as well, then I will consider that a win all round.

I’m gonna make a brand new start of it, in old New York

Yesterday President Trump withdrew the very first cabinet nomination he made after his election victory last November, that of Elise Stefanik to be the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations. Stefanik was elected to the House of Representatives for New York’s 21st District in 2014, but Trump has now decided that, because of the slender size of the Republican Party’s majority in the House—it is currently 218-213, with four seats vacant—he cannot risk her district falling to a Democrat if she vacates it. She had been Chair of the House Republican Conference, the fourth most senior member of the party’s leadership in the chamber after the Speaker, the Majority Leader and the Majority Whip, but gave up that role in preparation for becoming Permanent Representative to the UN; the President has said she will resume the position.

The Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson, was effusive in his praise for Stefanik.

There is no doubt she would have served with distinction as our ambassador to the United Nations, but we are grateful for her willingness to sacrifice that position and remain in Congress to help us save the country.

It is a distinctively Trumpian, MAGA touch to present a completely pragmatic political calculation, to which no dishonour or opprobrium attaches, into a high-minded act of sacrifice and principle.

Elise Stefanik is an interesting character. She is 40 years old, from Albany, the state capital of New York, a Harvard graduate who worked for the Domestic Policy Council in the White House under President George W. Bush and then in the office of Joshua Bolten, Bush’s Chief of Staff from 2006 to 2009. When she left the administration, she started a blog for conservative and Republican women called “American Maggie” (in honour of Baroness Thatcher), worked for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative, and helped Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2012, prepare for his television debates.

In 2013 Stefanik declared her candidacy for the 21st District, a rural area on the border with Canada which includes most of the Adirondack Mountains and the Thousand Islands region, as well as the cities of Glens Falls, Rome and Plattsburgh. The following year she comfortably saw off Democrat Aaron Woolf and Matt Funiciello of the Green Party to become, at 30, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Stefanik was initially regarded as a moderate Republican, supportive of equal rights, taking a mainstream position on climate change and opposing Trump’s January 2017 executive order which banned travel and immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries.

Once Donald Trump was in office, Stefanik began to tack towards his positions on a number of issues. She opposed federal Covid-19 vaccine mandates and was openly hostile towards MAGA hate figure Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; opposed impeachment proceedings against Trump in 2019 and 2021; endorsed the narrative of serious election fraud in November 2020; and blamed former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for the Capitol riots of 6 January 2021. In the 115th Congress of 2017-19, she was ranked as the 19th most bipartisan member of the House; by the 117th Congress, she had fallen to 100th. She described Trump as the “strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution” and by 2022 was considered a Trump loyalist.

Stefanik, whose father’s family comes from Frysztak, a shtetl in western Galicia, is fiercely pro-Israel, believing the country has a “biblical right” to the West Bank, has supported Israel’s response to the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023 and accuses the United Nations of “extreme antisemitism and moral depravity”. She gained enormous public attention for her stinging criticisms of Professor Liz Magill, President of the University of Pennsylvania, President of Harvard University Professor Claudine Gay and Professor Sally Kornbluth, President of MIT, when they appeared in front of the House Committee on Education and Workforce. In particular she lambasted the three university leaders for temporising when asked if “calling for the genocide of Jews” would represent a violation of their institutions’ policies on bullying and harassment. Magill and Gay resigned not long afterwards, as later did the President of Columbia University, Baroness Shafik, who appeared before the committee a few months later.

Unquestionably Stefanik was extremely aggressive in her approach to the hearings, and has a background of very staunch support for Israel. I also have no reason to believe that she did not realise the public platform she had and the potential it gave her to appeal particularly to American conservatives but also to the public more generally. Moreover, at the end of 2023, when the first hearing took place, Donald Trump was almost certain to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee the following year, but there was no consensus on whom he would choose as his running mate (bearing in mind that he cannot serve a third term after 2028 under the provisions of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. Stefanik’s name was mentioned with many others as a potential vice-presidential candidate, and she was still under active consideration by June 2024. Given that she is exactly one month older than J.D. Vance, Trump’s eventual choice, and had served for much longer in Congress, she was by no means an impossible or implausible candidate.

I will be honest, I find Stefanik in relative terms considerably more sympathetic than many of the men and women Trump has appointed to high office (Hegseth, Bondi, Kennedy, McMahon, Noem, Gabbard, Patel, Vought…). While she certainly gave no quarter in committee hearings, the performance of the heads of the various universities was frankly woeful: mealy-mouthed, evasive, non-committal and defensive. Stefanik may be ruthless and driven by ambition in the way she has trimmed her ideological sails to curry favour with Trump, but she is hardly the only Republican politician to do that, and it has a cold, transactional logic to it. She has also been brutally critical of the United Nations, to which she was supposed to be her country’s envoy, but, again, I have argued that it is a dysfunctional organisation and that UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, is a self-perpetuating and malign bureaucracy which should be wound up.

It is no surprise that the administration has prioritised maintaining its advantage in the House of Representatives over its representation at the UN. In their position, I would do the same. I’m also not sure how productive for anyone Stefanik’s abrasive and confrontational approach and her deep-seated support for Israel would have proved in the role of US Permanent Representative; John Bolton, another arch-critic of the UN who represented the United States there from 2005 to 2006, although disarmingly courteous in person, had little impact.

There has been no official indication of who will be nominated in Stefanik’s place. (Ironically, given some of the battles for confirmation, especially that of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, Stefanik’s nomination was considered a certainty: she had been approved by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations by 19 votes to three in January, and was likely to be comfortably endorsed by the Senate as a whole.) Politico is currently tipping David Friedman, former Ambassador to Israel, and Ellie Cohanim, ex-Deputy Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, as front-runners, but also mentions Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee. Special Envoy for Special Missions Richard Grenell has ruled himself out and Morgan Ortagus, Deputy Special Envoy to the Middle East, is rumoured not to be interested.

For all of Donald Trump’s antipathy towards the UN, his chronic inability to focus or maintain a coherent stance suggests to me that he will find more rewarding outlets for his energy than reform of the United Nations. He has already pulled out of the World Health Organization, withdrawn the US from the UNHCR, suspended American funding to the UNRWA and ordered a review of its membership of UNESCO, regarding them of little to no value but often acting contrary to US interests. He may feel that the foundations of a renewed relationship have now been laid and leave the task to a relatively anonymous figure, especially as whoever he chooses will still face confirmation by the Senate.

I don’t think Stefanik lacks ability or intelligence, in striking contrast to some of her colleagues in the administration, and, while I hold the United Nations in fairly low esteem, it feels like Stefanik should be higher up in the GOP’s food chain than number four in the House leadership. That said, the Republican Party’s caucus has seen a great deal of turbulence in recent years, with the unseating of Rep. Kevin McCarthy as Speaker in late 2023 and ongoing opposition in some quarters to Johnson’s tenure. Will she become a significant player in the Republican Party beyond Capitol Hill, or does she face years of hard slog in the legislative trenches? She is worth watching.

Not leaving us so soon, are you?

On Friday it emerged that the Director of Communications in 10 Downing Street, Matthew Doyle, is leaving his post after barely nine months. The Guardian reports that, having stabilised the situation around the Prime Minister somewhat after a highly charged and beleaguered beginning, it is now “mission accomplished”. His valedictory email to colleagues said:

When I started working for Keir four years ago, not many people thought we could win a general election and certainly not in the emphatic way we did. That was down to the hard work and determination of so many people and of course Keir’s leadership. I am incredibly proud of the part I have played in returning our party to government and the change we are already bringing to the country. Now it’s time to pass the baton on. To my political colleagues, we’ve been on quite a journey, and I look forward to cheering you, Keir and the whole government on from the sidelines. I can’t wait to see what you all do next.

Doyle is hardly geriatric—he will turn 50 in June—but he is a veteran spin doctor. He was Head of Press and Broadcasting for the Labour Party from 1998 to 2005, in a very different media landscape, spent six months as a special adviser to David Blunkett at the Department for Work and Pensions and was then called up to be Deputy Director of Communications in Downing Street under Sir Tony Blair. He left Number 10 with Blair and then spent five years as Political Director of the former Prime Minister’s private office.

After setting up his own consultancy, MLD Advisory, he was European Director of Communications for the International Rescue Committee and ran the media operation for Liz Kendall’s strikingly unsuccessful bid for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015. However, after the party’s disastrous performance in the Hartlepool by-election in May 2021, when its candidate was soundly beaten by the winning Conservative and Sir Keir Starmer briefly but seriously considered resigning, Doyle was recalled to the colours as Labour’s interim Director of Communications as part of a wide-ranging reshuffle. He was shortly afterwards confirmed in the role permanently.

That shake-up of Starmer’s team in the summer of 2021 seems to have marked a turning point. While Doyle controlled communications, Morgan McSweeney moved from being Chief of Staff to Director of Campaigns, taking firm control of candidate selection and imposing rigour and discipline on the Leader of the Opposition’s Office. Having refreshed his Shadow Cabinet in May, Starmer made further changes in November: Rachel Reeves had replaced the lacklustre Anneliese Dodds as Shadow Chancellor at the first round of changes, and at the second Yvette Cooper returned to the front bench as Shadow Home Secretary while David Lammy was promoted to Shadow Foreign Secretary. In The New Statesman, Stephen Bush called Starmer’s actions “rewarding his biggest hitters”.

Despite the dominant House of Commons majority the Labour Party achieved at last July’s general election, and the scale of the Conservative Party’s shattering defeat—its worst electoral performance in its nearly 200-year history—the first weeks and months of Starmer’s premiership were and are challenging. The government has struggled on several fronts and its popularity has plunged, but one persistent accusation is that it has lacked a “narrative” and failed to communicate a sense of purpose. One cannot completely overlook the responsibility of the Director of Communications in this.

It is fair to observe that Doyle has had uninspiring material with which to work. Against a backdrop of poor economic performance, a fraught international situation and a stubborn absence of growth, he has been working with a top team of politicians who are unusually unremarkable. The Prime Minister himself is a wooden performer in front of the cameras, whose attempts to convey passion and commitment often seem like sudden and uncontrolled spasms of long-restrained anger.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is dry and guarded, and her vaunted reputation for economic qualifications and ability has been shattered by foolish and avoidable untruths; Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, is hugely experienced but cold, damningly described as someone you like less the better you get to know her; Pat McFadden, in charge of the Cabinet Office and ubiquitous in Whitehall decision-making, is wily and hard-working but often high-handed and projects a rather dour, joyless persona. Foreign Secretary David Lammy can be suffused with passion but is deeply unpredictable and careless in his words, while Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, has an authentic ability to connect with voters but has not yet shown that she has fully adapted to the heaviness of office after so long in opposition.

Starmer, and therefore by extension Doyle, have also been hampered by churn at the centre of government, among both officials and political advisers. Sue Gray, the Downing Street Chief of Staff on whom so many hopes were pinned, proved disastrous and resigned after three months, to be replaced by Morgan McSweeney. The Secretary to the Cabinet, Simon Case, was already heading for the exit on grounds of ill health but took the process of his departure at a more leisurely pace than the Prime Minister would have liked, and his replacement, former Department of Health Permanent Secretary Sir Chris Wormald, was not installed until December last year.

After an unexplained interregnum, Ninjeri Pandit, whose background was primarily in healthcare policy, replaced Elizabeth Perelman as the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary and head of his Private Office; but it transpired that she was only on secondment and just over a month later Downing Street began advertising for a permanent occupant of a key role. In the meantime much of the burden has fallen on the Deputy Principal Private Secretary, Kunal Patel. Before her own fall, Sue Gray was reportedly pressing the candidacy of Daniel Gieve, CEO of the Office for Investment, but others were resistant because of his previous close working relationship in the Cabinet Office with Lord Maude of Horsham. Such is the close-guarded nature of the Prime Minister’s key staffers that it not current clear whether a replacement for Pandit has yet been found.

If all of this suggests a degree of chaos in Whitehall and especially Downing Street, that seems an accurate assessment. Nor will it necessarily get better: the current staff structure was only put in place after Gray’s resignation in October 2024, will now change again. The response to Doyle’s departure is a somewhat counterintuitive one, under which the role of Director of Communications will be divided. James Lyons, a former journalist and spinner for NHS England and TikTok working with Doyle in Downing Street, will become Director of Communications (Strategy) while Steph Driver, a Labour Party veteran who had been Doyle’s deputy, is named Director of Communications (Delivery).

The border between “strategy” and “delivery” seems to me impossible to define, and, if that could be done, impossible to police. The dangers of either duplication or failure by admission must be substantial, and Lyons and Driver would need an extraordinarily close, instinctive, almost telepathic connection to make it simple. Even with the fairest of winds behind it, the arrangement is characteristically Starmerian, too bold to represent continuity but too conservative to make a substantial difference, and suggests that the decision-makers in Downing Street have not yet decided whether their problems so far have been personal or institutional.

Whatever diagnosis you choose to make, the government is doing something wrong. Even taking into account a general public dissatisfaction with, distrust of and contempt for politicians across the spectrum, the government’s approval ratings after only nine months in office are dire. Only a fifth of people think the country is going in the right direction, less than a third have a favourable view of the Prime Minister (and only 17 per cent think well of Rachel Reeves), nearly two-thirds think the government is doing a bad job of tackling the cost of living and more than half think it is performing poorly on managing the economy and dealing with asylum and immigration. At the general election last July, 33.7 per cent of people voted Labour, hardly a ringing endorsement but enough; if there were an election today, according to one poll, only 24 per cent would do so.

Whether it’s a small or large factor contributing to the government’s indisputable woes, Labour is not explaining itself, not showing the kind of country it wants to make nor its firm grasp of how it will get there. In what should still be a honeymoon period, election victory still palpable, Sir Keir Starmer’s party is in an ignominious three-way scrap with the Conservatives and Reform UK to top the opinion polls, and only then with the support of around a quarter of the electorate. The next general election could still be more than four years ago, but the new communications dyarchy of James Lyons and Steph Driver have to start plotting a route towards a second victory. It is incredible to imagine it, and the odds are still heavily in the opposite direction, but Labour could end up as a one-term government.

You ain’t goin’ nowhere

It will not have escaped your attention that one of the biggest news stories of the week, though perhaps facing stiffer competition for headlines than might have been expected, was the presentation to Parliament by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on Wednesday of the Spring Statement.

A quick word might be helpful to explain what the Spring Statement is, why it happens and why it’s not the same as the Budget. The parliamentary components of the Budget are the Financial Statement which the Chancellor delivers in the House of Commons, a series of Ways and Means Resolutions which contain the taxation specified in the Financial Statement to be collected and upon which there are usually four days of debate immediately afterwards, then eventually a Finance Bill which puts the new taxation measures into law. Until 2017, the Budget generally happened in the spring, just before the end of the financial year, but Philip Hammond as Chancellor of the Exchequer moved the event to the autumn, delivering successive Budgets in March and November 2017. While the Budget was still a spring event, there would still be a second announcement concerning taxation and spending; from 1997 to 2010, this was known as the Pre-Budget Report, before being rechristened the Autumn Statement. This became a Spring Statement when the Budget moved to the autumn.

Twice a year, the Office for Budget Responsibility, which was established in 2010, publishes a forecast of the performance of the UK economy and the state of the public finances. One of these will usually be published at the same time as the Budget in the autumn, with the other in the spring. The Spring Statement is the Chancellor’s opportunity to comment on the OBR’s forecast and explain how government policy will address it. The same thing happens at the Budget, though it includes far more changes in tax and financial policy.

The Chancellor’s personal approval ratings have declined (further) in the aftermath of the Spring Statement. A survey this week showed that 51 per cent of respondents think Rachel Reeves is doing a bad job, and only 19 per cent had a favourable view of her. The highest level of dissatisfaction with either Rishi Sunak or Jeremy Hunt during their tenures of the Treasury was 44 per cent; Reeves’s new job approval is a dire -32, which is on par with the -37 which faced her predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng in the wake of the publication of The Growth Plan, often wrong called a “mini-budget” , in September 2022. After that, Kwarteng was only Chancellor for another three weeks: he entered the record books as the second shortest serving Chancellor in history, behind Iain Macleod who died a month after taking office.

Inevitably, given this dreadful performance, there have been a number of suggestions that Starmer will or should sack Reeves as Chancellor. There is a clear prima facie logic to this: she is deeply unpopular, she has endured a few embarrassing and damaging political storms over the recruitment of civil servants with links to the Labour Party, inaccuracies in her CV and her acceptance of hospitality, and, most significantly, the economic policies she is implementing are not generating growth in the ways expected. But, as I’ve said before in a few different places, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

There are, by my quick estimation, four main reasons for a Prime Minister to sack a Chancellor of the Exchequer, or any senior cabinet minister, though the boundaries between these reasons is not always absolutely clear or obvious. The first is of these broad categories is in the wake of some kind of fundamental operational disaster or mistake: for example, Hugh Dalton having to leave HM Treasury in 1947 for accidentally disclosing commercially sensitive measures in the Budget before—just before—announcing them in the House of Commons; another possible instance, though there was a time delay, might be the dismissal of Norman Lamont by John Major in May 1993, several months after but certainly related to the sterling crisis of 16 September 1992 which was immortalised as Black Wednesday.

The second reason to replace the Chancellor can be to signal and implement a substantial change in policy, allowing the government to turn a page and choose a different direction. Harold Wilson’s decision to devalue sterling in November 1967 from $2.80 to $2.40 was a necessary and inevitable response to different market forces and circumstances, but the change of policy required a change of Chancellor, so Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, by then in his ambitious pomp, took over from Jim Callaghan at HM Treasury while Callaghan went in the other direction to the Home Office.

The third motivation is the discovery or development of a basic ideological difference between the Prime Minister, who can be expected to prevail, and the Chancellor, who will usually have to go. Under this umbrella might come A.J. Balfour’s sacking of C.T. Ritchie in October 1903 because the Chancellor, committed to “fair trade” earlier in his career, was a staunch opponent of the scheme of preferential imperial tariffs promoted by the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. We might also look at the resignation of the whole ministerial team at the Treasury in 1958, Peter Thorneycroft stepping down as Chancellor and taking the Financial Secretary, Enoch Powell, and the Economic Secretary, Nigel Birch with him. All three felt they had to leave the government in protest at higher public expenditure, which was anathema to their proto-monetarism.

The last of my four proposed criteria is the most elemental but sometimes the most deadly: a straightforward political power struggle. When Lord Randolph Churchill offered his resignation to the Marquess of Salisbury, the Prime Minister, in late 1886, after only four-and-a-half months in office, he did so without any expectation that it would be accepted. Instead, his purpose was to show that he was indispensable, a fact disproved when Salisbury accepted his resignation calmly and replaced him with the Liberal Unionist financier George Goschen (Churchill reportedly said afterwards “I had forgotten Goschen”). A more recent example was Boris Johnson’s effective removal of Sajid Javid as Chancellor in February 2020, when he required him to dispense with his existing special advisers and submit to a shared economic unit run jointly by Number 10 and Number 11 Downing Street. Javid resigned, saying “I was unable to accept those conditions and I do not believe any self-respecting minister would accept those conditions”, which was the outcome Johnson and his Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings had sought. The supposedly more pliable and loyal Rishi Sunak, at that point Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was promoted to Chancellor.

None of these four categories would apply meaningfully to the situation in which Sir Keir Starmer finds himself in relation to Rachel Reeves. It was conceivable he could have required her resignation over the misleading claims she had made about her career before becoming an MP, and there is an argument that they were calculated falsehoods intended to inflate her reputation for economic competence in a way which, in many professions, would have been career-ending. He did not do so and the moment has passed, so there is no operational mistake or miscalculation to require her dismissal. To skip to the fourth category, there is no looming power struggle either: I suspect that Reeves’s hopes of becoming Labour leader were surprisingly slender anyway and the past nine months have slimmed them further, but in any case she is nearly 20 years younger than Starmer and could afford to wait him out if she really had credible ambitions towards the premiership.

This leaves ideological differences or a change of direction in policy. I cannot see any substantial gao between Starmer and Reeves in terms of ideology and approach; indeed, one of the hallmarks of his leadership has been to form a very close bond with his then-Shadow Chancellor, while Reeves in turn has taken care not to allow a chink of light to appear between them. They have both placed their confidence in a rather muddled blend of an active, dirigiste state and an almost corporatist partnership between government and private enterprise (with a naïve faith that business and industry will cheerfully fall in line). This is combined a weird prestidigitation by which they talk about cutting regulation, reducing burdens on businesses and taking on the “blockers” of progress, while simultaneously leaning towards Labour’s traditional public sector core support by introducing a raft of new regulatory burdens in the Employment Rights Bill currently before Parliament. It may be contradictory and doomed, but the delusion is one in which the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are wholly aligned.

As a result, it is ard to imagine Starmer deciding to embark on a new course which would require a change at the top of the Treasury. Bluntly, I don’t think he or Reeves has a Plan B. In short, there is nothing to be gained from replacing the Chancellor. There is hardly a lengthy queue of plausible substitutes, let alone improvements: Wes Streeting, the Health and Social Care Secretary, is able but ambitious and it would not serve Starmer to draw him closer to the centre of power; Pat McFadden and Yvette Cooper could both carry out the role at least as well as Reeves but have no greater warmth, charm nor charisma, nor any new ideas, and would more or less be the status quo; Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is sharp-witted but is already deeply enmeshed in economic policy in his current role.

Eyebrows were raised in January when, after initial hesitation by the Prime Minister, Downing Street said that Reeves would remain Chancellor for the rest of the Parliament. It seemed an unforced error, an unnecessary hostage to fortune which tied Starmer’s hands for no appreciable advantage. At this stage, however, I think it may simply have been acknowledgement of the truth: the government will live or die by its performance in economic terms, but the specific identity of the Chancellor is a secondary issue. The policy course, for better or worse, is set, and it will either work or it won’t. I have my doubts.