There’s never a quiet week in British politics, but this one’s shaping up to be particularly bruising for Keir Starmer.
The Prime Minister is preparing to stand beside King Charles III in Parliament for the King’s Speech, the set-piece moment where a new government lays out its legislative ambitions for the year ahead. It should be a triumphant occasion. Instead, Starmer arrives at the Palace of Westminster carrying more baggage than a Heathrow carousel in August.
Labour’s honeymoon period, never exactly a long one, has curdled faster than most expected. Internal tensions over welfare cuts, rows about the winter fuel allowance, and a string of unflattering polling numbers have left backbenchers restless and commentators sharpening their pencils.
“He came in with a massive majority and somehow managed to make it feel like a liability,” one Labour MP said privately last week, declining to be named. “The speech needs to remind people why we’re actually here.”
The King’s Speech itself is expected to include legislation on planning reform, a long-delayed rail nationalisation bill, and further measures tied to the government’s clean energy commitments. Whether any of that cuts through a news cycle dominated by leadership speculation is another matter entirely.
Starmer’s allies insist the criticism is overblown. They point to the complexity of the inheritance: a broken public finances picture, a creaking NHS, and an economy still finding its footing. Governing, they argue, is harder than opposing. Fair enough, but voters tend not to award points for difficulty.
King Charles, for his part, will read out whatever his ministers hand him, as constitutional convention demands. He’s done it before, and he’ll do it again, with characteristic composure and that slightly weary regal patience he seems to have perfected.
The real question isn’t what’s written in the speech. It’s whether Starmer can use the moment to reassert control of his own narrative, or whether his critics inside Labour will simply use the occasion to turn up the volume a little louder.
A government with 400-plus seats in the Commons shouldn’t feel this precarious. Whether it still does by Christmas is the story worth watching.
