Keir Starmer, the operator, the fixer, not the visionary

Insiders’ jobs

Good morning. A really important thing to understand about Keir Starmer is that he really, really cares about institutions and really values institutional memory and knowhow.

It’s part of why he brought in Patrick Vallance, James Timpson and Peter Hendy as Lords ministers in his government. And it explains many of his ministerial appointments: from Hamish Falconer at the Foreign Office, to Ed Miliband at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, to his brand new transport secretary Heidi Alexander. It’s also why he likes to give ministerial and shadow ministerial jobs to select committee chairs: that’s part of why Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, Darren Jones, Stephen Timms and Lilian Greenwood have the roles they do.

In opposition, it is why he brought in so many veterans of the New Labour era, and indeed, it’s part of why he has sought to sharpen his Downing Street team by bringing in Liz Lloyd, a Blair-era official.

That he has picked Chris Wormald, the longest-serving permanent secretary, to be head of the civil service, is a typically Starmerite move. (Over on his Substack, William Cullerne Bown argues, I think correctly, that Starmerism is best understood as a theory of management and recruitment rather than an ideological creed.)

It’s also a Starmery appointment for other reasons, as Jill Rutter notes in a good, balanced thread over on Bluesky: he’s state educated, “blokey”, an operator and a fixer, not a visionary. He is a former protégé of Jeremy Heywood and a Heywood-style appointment in some ways.

There’s a really important caveat here, which is while all of these things are reasons why some people are cheering this appointment, others (and indeed Jill points this out in her thread) worry that he is not someone who is going to be able to reform the machinery of the civil service or bring in external perspectives.

One reason why Starmer’s government has not yet been very cohesive is that while his appointments tend to have “institutional memory” in common, they pull in different directions — it includes committed public sector reformers of various types, proud defenders of the status quo, and a pretty wide range of Labour party traditions. It remains to be seen whether that breadth ends up being more of a strength or a weakness.

Now try this

I saw Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion this weekend at the Barbican: they were terrific. You can listen to their new record Rectangles and Circumstance here.

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