A year into office, Keir Starmer is ready for a new approach

Yet even when he was facing a parliamentary revolt against his government’s benefit reforms, he refused to draw on his experiences to make the case for change. “I don’t think he would ever want to deploy his family in that way,” said one Downing Street source. “It’s personal.”

Instead, Starmer allowed the proposals to be seen as a bloodless, Treasury-driven attempt to save money. There was too little humanity.

As the rebellion grew, No 10 went into what one senior Labour figure describes as a “fetishisation of toughness, with people saying it’s better we lose than we back down”. Two aides reduced backbenchers to tears and told female MPs to “grow a pair” as they tried to bully rather than cajole the rebels into line.

According to an insider: “The boys in Downing Street saw it as a test of manhood. It took Keir himself to say: ‘We’re shifting tactics.’ He didn’t want the confrontation.”

By Friday, the government had been forced to make significant concessions to avoid what would have been a devastating defeat on a key reform. For many in the Labour party, however, the inability to communicate the underlying moral purpose of the policy and the failure to understand the strength of feeling in the House of Commons were symptomatic of a prime minister who seems oddly disconnected from his party and the country.

As the Starmer government marks a year in office this week, many in Whitehall and the Labour party insist the anniversary must be an inflection point. One former cabinet minister said: “What’s happened with the welfare reform vote shows that the way the government is operating is palpably unsustainable, so something has to give. What this has done is expose the weakness of the No 10 operation – strategically, politically and operationally. They’ve got to learn the lessons.”

Former prime minister Tony Blair believes the government must have a greater sense of urgency about public service reform to see off the populist threat. Speaking to The Observer, he said: “People need to think things are really moving, that decline is not merely being managed but arrested and then reversed, and that requires changes which are radical in nature.

“But the progressive political challenge has always been that the radical people aren’t sensible and the sensible aren’t radical. The technology revolution gives you the instrument to resolve that challenge to make big reforms in the way government and public services work.”

Blair insists that chasing after Nigel Farage and Reform UK by talking tough on immigration and welfare is never going to work. “One of the myths about New Labour is, we lost working-class voters – we had the same majority in the ‘red wall’ in 2005 as we had in 1997. You are not going to get those people back by going down a Blue Labour route – you just end up validating Reform.”

The former Labour home secretary David Blunkett said: “The undoubted success of the PM’s interventions on the international scene, on defence, security and trade, now need to be reflected in an equal, laser-like focus on domestic policy.

“That means a review of how major policy issues are handled across government and ensuring that the very large number of frustrated backbenchers are given a role. That’s going to be critical – not just to keep them on board but to stop them feeling completely alienated.”

Just 12 months after Starmer secured a landslide general election victory, there is a sullen mood on the Labour benches. The sense of frustration is reflected in the country.

An Opinium poll for The Observer found that more than half of voters think the government has been doing a bad job since the election, compared with less than a fifth who believe it is doing a good job. Almost two-thirds of those who voted Labour last July think the party has done a worse job in power than they expected.

“Too many people don’t know what this government is about,” said a Labour peer. “There’s a sense that we have been throwing out policy but there’s no overarching narrative. In the end, it has to come from Keir.”

Anthony Seldon, the British historian who has written biographies of several prime ministers, thinks Starmer has not yet fully understood the nature of the role.

“His defence is that he is not a person for vision or strategy, and that he solves problems. But that’s not what the prime minister does,” he said. “The prime minister should be like the captain of the ship, who stays on the bridge, and having set the direction makes certain the ship goes in that direction.”

There are calls from some for Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff, to be replaced. One Labour source thinks Starmer’s right-hand man could now return to political strategy and election planning sooner than he might otherwise have done. “He never wanted to be chief of staff; he said right from the start that he wasn’t cut out for the role and suggested other people who would be better.”

But the government’s problems cannot be blamed on a single adviser, however powerful.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, thinks the briefing against the chief of staff is a distraction. “I’m not sure the Labour party would exist as a political force, let alone be in government, without Morgan McSweeney,” he said. “We owe that man a greater debt than can possibly be repaid.”

Streeting insists the focus should be on transforming the public services, including the NHS. “The way in which the state functions needs radical change. It still resembles too much the 20th century, and we’re not going to be able to seize the amazing opportunities of the 21st century unless we change with the times.”

In the past, Labour has been divided between left and right, Blairites and Brownites, pro-Europeans and Eurosceptics. Now, the defining split in government is between incrementalism and radicalism.

One Labour veteran identifies “deliverology” as the problem: “It’s the belief that in order to win electorally, you have to focus on a handful of things that are visible and prove that the government is delivering the goods,” he said.

“That doesn’t work. People expect the government to deliver things. You’ve got to answer the bigger question, which is: what’s your view about where the country should be in future?”

A cabinet minister says that after a year in the job Starmer is now becoming “more assertive” with those around him.

In his interview with Tom Baldwin, published in The Observer today, the prime minister makes clear that he regrets the “island of strangers” speech he made on immigration. He says he was distracted by the firebombing of his Kentish Town home in north London, which came a few months after the death of his brother.

“Labour has to be a progressive political party,” Starmer says. “We have to be the progressives fighting against the populists of Reform.”

There is a sense that the human rights lawyer feels that he has been defined too much by others at Westminster, and wants to reclaim his own identity. Slowly but surely, he is building up a new team of trusted policy experts in No 10 to shadow Whitehall departments and encourage innovation.

Axel Heitmueller, a health specialist with an interest in technology, has joined Oli de Botton, who is focusing on education. The prime minister is seeking to recruit an economics adviser to make sure he has the intellectual firepower to stand up to the Treasury

There is talk of a new strategy unit in Downing Street that can rise above the day-to-day crises to focus on the long-term challenges facing the country. Starmer is also turning to external thinktanks in a search of good ideas.

The Tony Blair Institute has been asked to draw up proposals on defence spending, the future of the state and the role of technology in public services.

Labour grandees say substance must now take priority over spin. Starmer’s advisers insist that the words “plan for change” appear in every press release. The rule is so rigidly followed that even a meeting with the crown prince of Bahrain was welcomed by Downing Street as “delivering on the plan for change”, baffling many Bahrainis. The motto is meaningless without definition.

“Keir was elected on a one-word slogan: change,” said a former cabinet minister.

“But change is a means to an end – it’s not an end in itself. The important question is: change to what? Everything follows from that.”

Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/AFP/Getty