Starmer knows he’s in trouble – which is why it’s time to reset his government

Keir Starmer’s government has reached another unwanted if inevitable milestone – its first cabinet resignation.

Louise Haigh’s swift departure at least limited the damage for Starmer, who was true to his pre-election promise not to tolerate any rule-breaking. He told his biographer Tom Baldwin: “People will only believe we’re changing politics when I fire someone on the spot... It doesn’t matter who it is, they’ll be sacked.”

For many Labour figures, the treatment of the popular Haigh seems harsh, but there was only going to be one answer when the prime minister faced his first question on this subject.

An awful lot has happened in a government that is just five months old: a baptism of fire with the summer riots; controversy over a decision to means-test the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance; turmoil inside Downing Street, ending in the sacking of Sue Gray, the prime minister’s chief of staff; and damaging headlines over freebies.

Ministers hoped last month’s Budget would provide a reset. But it provoked a backlash from business and farmers that is not over yet.

Now, the PM is about to attempt another relaunch. He won’t call it that; politicians hate the word, since it concedes that they are stuck in the mud. Next week, he is due to make an important speech unveiling a “plan for change”, setting out new targets for his government. They will be more tangible than his five rather vague missions, such as achieving the highest sustained growth in the G7, which have hardly set the nation’s pulse racing.

The new targets will come with a public dashboard allowing voters to see whether the government is on track. They will reflect Starmer’s new priorities – the standard of living people feel they have in their daily lives; immigration; and NHS waiting times. The first two were the dominant issues in the US election, and Labour strategists are determined to learn lessons from the Democrats’ crushing defeat.

There will also be targets on housing, children’s development, safer streets and clean energy. The missions will survive, as Starmer was reluctant to junk them, but in name only; insiders tell me they will be “symbolic” and supplanted by the new targets.

This approach is not without risk. Some goals will be hard to achieve – such as building 1.5 million homes in five years, and raising real disposable incomes (which are set to increase by just 0.5 per cent a year). The media will magnify the failures and not devote much space to the successes.

But Morgan McSweeney, the new No 10 chief of staff, hopes the government will at least get some credit for making progress towards the tricky targets. He views delivery as the best way to combat the threat from populists like Nigel Farage.

The relaunch comes unusually early in the government’s life, and is a tacit admission of its bumpy start. It is all proving much harder than many shadow ministers imagined in the heady days of opposition, when they didn’t have to turn easy promises into difficult, detailed policies. In another sign of this, Rachel Reeves has postponed her government-wide spending review, which had been expected next April, to June. This is sensible, as there was a risk that the spending plans would not fully reflect the new targets, which would have been back-to-front government and left the Treasury calling all the shots.

The chancellor is banking on achieving big savings in the welfare budget by getting many of the 9.2 million “economically inactive” working-age people – that is, those who are not in work or looking for it – into jobs. A study in Barnsley headed by Alan Milburn, the former health secretary now advising Wes Streeting, suggested that 4.5 million of them could be found work with the right tailored support.

In a white paper on Tuesday, the government rightly went down this route, but put off the difficult decisions until next spring. I detect that some ministers and plenty of Labour backbenchers lack Reeves’s appetite for the tough decisions that are needed to curb benefits for the sick and disabled.

The targets mark a return to the centralised, Downing Street-driven approach of the Tony Blair era – no coincidence after Starmer recruited key former Blair advisers, including the self-confessed “deliverologist” Michael Barber, Liz Lloyd, and Jonathan Powell.

Initially, Starmer’s instinct, influenced by the former senior civil servant Gray, was to let ministers “get on with it” in their departments. But this did not deliver the joined-up, cross-departmental working the missions were supposed to ensure, and it made it harder to have a disciplined message. The new targets are also designed to sharpen the government’s communications – not before time, given Starmer’s and Labour’s plummeting opinion poll ratings.

Starmer now realises that he and his government must constantly tell a “story” to have any hope of taking voters with them. There is a lot riding on the reset. If it doesn’t work, the danger for Starmer is that he will head a one-term government and not get the chance to complete the “decade of renewal” he wants.