“It’s nice isn’t it. The quiet.”

Herald on Sunday, Sunday National, 14th September 2025.

It’s now moderately notorious tweet. During the first couple of weeks of the new Labour administration, as new-minted Labour ministers were opening their red boxes and contemplating all the promise of their new responsibilities, one commentator sighed “it’s nice isn’t it. The quiet.”

To say this sentiment aged has badly is a contender for understatement of the year. After the last fortnight, invoking the “grotesque chaos of the Labour government” is only a tad melodramatic. As adjectives go, “stable” is amongst the last adjectives currently leaping to mind for the Starmer government. And this is a significant moment – as stability was one of the few concrete promises the former Director of Public Prosecutions was prepared to offer in exchange for making him First Lord of the Treasury in the first place.

When Sir Keir Starmer launched the Labour party manifesto in Manchester in June 2024, he claimed “a vote for Labour is a vote to stop the chaos.” Establishing political and economic stability was one of the few defining commitments of the Labour opposition before the last general election. You can understand why. It looked like a reasonable pitch at the time. Confronted by the dying days of the Conservative administration, resignations and sackings left right and centre, leadership challenges bubbling, and defections of the ungruntled – lots of folk looked on and wondered if this is the best way to run a country.

In a campaign which was hardly overburdened by substantive manifesto commitments, where a change of government loomed larger than any policy offer to the electorate, the promise of stability was something Labour could reasonably and readily make a virtue out of. It was Starmer’s main vibe, with his lumpen state bureaucrat mien and real legal pedigree.

May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak – these successive Tory regimes tottered, one after another – deadlock, scandal, disgrace.

Sir Keir, by contrast, looked like an uninteresting candidate promising uninteresting times. Establishing a brave new tedium was a specific aspiration. Starmer consistently presented himself as an unideological bloke who imagined the task of political leadership is to establish “a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives.”

This was always humbug. There were plenty of folk Starmer was guaranteed to make a virtue of stomping all over, as noisily as possible, in case other members of the public and the media didn’t notice the exciting crackdowns the government was unleashing on out-groups, minorities and the inexpensively bashed.

Wherever this rhetoric comes from, it reliably gets my back up. Any politician, of any political party, who tells you they want you to give you more opportunities to switch off your critical faculties and ignore politics wants the watching.

There is nothing visionary about elected politicians, pretending to disdain political ideas. There is nothing ordinary about politicians who claim they’ve never worked up a critical understanding of the social and economic forces they shape and which shape them. A lack of self-awareness isn’t a moderate political position – it is just a dumbly unselfconscious one.

Politicians who convince themselves that being ideological is an irregular verb – that it’s something that you do but they’re untainted by – are normally smugglers, with no idea at all of how profoundly they’re intellectually bought and sold by the consensus, by common sense, or whatever other rationalisation they give you for having so few good arguments for what they’re proposing to do. Starmer is of this mould.

In his first speech on the steps of Downing Street, Starmer claimed “stability and moderation” would be two of the key watchwords of his new government. He has achieved neither. He also appropriated the language of “service” and “duty” – normally reserved to describe boring tasks the working members of the House of Windsor undertake to justify their royal crust – as unfashionable but central virtues of the newly restored Labour government. They seem to be tarnishing just as quickly.

“Labour will stop the chaos and support business through a stable policy environment,” the Labour manifesto read. The failure to achieve significant economic growth was also consistently attributed by senior Labour figures to political turbulence at the top, with friendly voices in the lobby suggesting unironically that Britain might emerge as a “haven of calm” in comparison to France and the United States “led by the stolidly sensible Starmer and buried in the technical detail of planning reform” as one fawning Guardian profile of Rachel Reeves from last summer put it.

This kind of preening self-deception is in evidence in some of Starmer’s earlier speeches, where he speculated in peculiar, sentimental style about how the political atmosphere in the country might change after Labour took the reigns of power from Rishi Sunak after a successful general election campaign. “It will feel different, frankly. The character of politics will change, and with it the national mood. A collective breathing out. A burden lifted. And then, the space for a more hopeful look forward.”

The promise of stability is a theme they returned to again and again, with stability being presented as a panacea for a range of public ills. While some of this reasonably adverted to Liz Truss’s brief and costly stint in power, the claim went far wider than that, with Conservative commotion and confusion in government being credited with sending “a signal of instability across the world that damaged our standing, making Britain a less attractive place for business to invest.”

This was memorably dubbed the “moron premium” by some economists, suggesting that securing a reasonably uninterrupted period of government might, of itself, help encourage inward investment in Britain and fill in some of the many blank spaces in Labour’s explanations about how precisely they imagine growth is to be achieved. 

Within thirty days, the new quiet gave way to riots and resignations. The subsequent eighteen months have been anything but quiet. Chaos seems to be catching, even for state bureaucrats like Starmer.  A measure of chaos isn’t always a choice in public life. Every government faces challenges – and yes, a little chaos.

Every political party has its internal tensions. You have to appoint ministers you don’t rate for party unity. When you eventually dump them, their friends take the huff with you. For diverse reasons, individuals do stupid and occasionally unlawful things and have to resign. And just occasionally, it turns out the twice-sacked person you went out of your way to appoint as ambassador to the United States happened to have an intimate, fawning, and only implausibly deniable relationship with the world’s most famous paedophile, accompanied by significant paperwork, photographs and evidence of their intimacy. Could have happened to anyone, I guess.

Is it any wonder the new decency is attracting sceptical glances? “I will restore standards in public life with a total crackdown on cronyism,” Starmer said. Aspects of this total crackdown included appointing Peter Mandelson as Britain’s Washington ambassador, and spending the early months of his leadership, explaining why he and his senior leadership team had accepted several thousand pounds worth of freebies, perks and gratuities from party donors, angrily dismissing the idea that accepting waggon loads of free gear from millionaires might look inconsistent with the fearless squelching of everyday cultures of corruption in politics which innocent listeners might have imagined Starmer was promising to when he spoke about a “total crackdown on cronyism.”

Governments winning landslide majorities don’t normally collapse like this. The standing of the Starmer administration with the public is decidedly abnormal. The collapse in his personal ratings is almost unprecedented. And so, the challenges continue to crowd in. Starmer’s administration stands indicted by its own clichés, and by any objective reckoning, failing to achieve anything like the stolid regime centrist dads everywhere seem to think “putting the adults back in charge” ought to have achieved.