LATIKA M BOURKE: Keir Starmer attempts to reset his Government as he replaces controversial chief of staff

The decision to shelve his controversial chief of staff, not even 100 days into the job, is an important reset moment for Keir Starmer but one that will test whether the shocking start he’s made as UK Prime Minister is the result of his staff or is because he personally lacks political judgment and is fundamentally unsuited to the job.

Sir Keir’s Government has been battered daily, if not hourly in the press after it was revealed that a Labour Party donor and member of the House of Lords Waheed Alli had been given a pass to Number 10.

This unprecedented access was immediately linked to the enormous sums Lord Alli has donated to Labour, including the unorthodox decision to clothe the Prime Minister with suits and spectacles at an eyewatering sum of £16,000 ($A30,000) — nearly half the median annual wage of a British worker.

The situation was made worse by Sir Keir’s personal record as the UK Parliament’s chief grifter, accepting nearly £100,000 worth of freebies, including tickets to see Taylor Swift in concert, a private box at Emirates Stadium to watch Arsenal football club play and attending the horseraces.

Last week, he began paying back some of those freebies, an admission that it was not going down well with voters.

YouGov’s weekly tracker measuring approval of the government’s performance slumped to just 18 per cent, for instance.

The Sir Sponger look was sharply incongruous with the self-described “son of a toolmaker” schtick and attempt to cast himself as a man of the working people but more importantly the early decision of his government to cut the winter fuel allowance payment to pensioners ahead of winter.

It was set against the backdrop of a bitter power struggle between Sue Gray, the civil servant Starmer appointed to be his chief of staff before the election, and his political strategist Morgan McSweeney, who ran the successful election campaign.

Ms Gray had always been a controversial appointment with a giant target on her back, having headed the inquiry into the Downing Street parties held during Covid that ended former Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s premiership.

Internally, she had built a reputation as not being a team player.

But her critics were not just confined to the now Tory opposition.

Some parts of the Labour Party felt she was too prone to pandering to the left of the party on Palestine and other issues.

It was quickly noted in the press that it was she who had signed off on granting the Number 10 pass to Lord Alli.

There were constant mutterings of nepotism given her son Liam Conlon was elected as a Labour MP and then it emerged she had asked for a salary higher than the Prime Minister’s.

Ultimately, she was a civil servant in a job that needed a political operative, with Labour’s early missteps risking defining the government as worse than the Conservatives who voters couldn’t wait to boot from office, although without any enthusiasm for Labour.

While the Starmer government was elected with a whopping majority of 174 seats, it was on the back of its lowest-ever vote share, meaning it had little political insulation from so many early and unforced errors.

Luke Tryl, UK Director of More in Common, which conducts regular polling and focus groups said the 38-point decline in Mr Starmer’s personal approval rating in just three months was extraordinary and reflective of the volatile electorate.

“You’d expect a new Government not to allow it to be defined in this way,” he said.

He said while voters had mixed views about the freebies — some cared and others didn’t — the issue, combined with the cut to the energy bill relief and the disunity coming out of Number 10 was eroding public confidence in Mr Starmer.

“The public don’t pay attention to who’s in and who’s out but it’s this sense of disunity that they’re fighting,” he said.

“And it means that there was no choice but to change something.”

That something was Sue Gray. In a reset of his staffing team, Sir Keir announced her resignation on Sunday and named McSweeny as her replacement.

Across the party there was relief.

Luke Akehurst, a newly-elected MP and a leading player in the pro-leadership wing of the party was one of those who publicly backed the changes to key staff in Number 10 as very welcome.

“The Parliamentary Labour Party and wider party have huge confidence in Morgan McSweeny’s abilities given the superb way he ran the general election campaign and orchestrated profound changes in the Labour Party that made us electable again,” he told The Nightly.

“It’s important to note that the fundamental strategy of a Labour government isn’t changing which is that we need to stabilise the government’s finances and the economy and get growth going again.”

This is Starmer’s reset moment and one he desperately needs to get right.

He has, after all, time — five years to be precise — on his side and a public that is disappointed but still overwhelmingly wants him to succeed and fix the services and infrastructure that crumbled under the Tories.

“The flipside of a volatile electorate is that this could all be easily forgotten,” Mr Tryl said.

“Having been at the recent Conservative conference their optimism is a bit misguided.

“But it is a warning that how Labour won means it could all be swept away quite easily.”

Ultimately the lingering concern for Labour MPs will be that while Starmer might smarten up his office, it might ultimately expose that the real problem is the man at the top, as opposed to his team and no amount of advice can compensate for a political leader who has demonstrated a repeated and concerning lack of political judgment.