UK Labour Party admits it’s not ready for government — yet

After nearly 14 years in opposition, Britain’s Labour Party insists it’s ready to govern. Just not quite yet.

The opposition party is preparing for formal talks with government officials about its immediate plans if — as polls predict — it wins the next election, currently expected in either spring or fall 2024.

But Labour officials privately admit that, before they begin discussions with the civil service, their policy program still needs work.

“We’re not nearly ready,” grimaced one Labour official, granted anonymity to speak candidly (like others in this article.) “We’d be fucked if there was an election tomorrow.”

Unlike the U.S. presidential system, a changeover in No. 10 Downing Street involves no transition period. The new prime minister starts work still red-eyed from election night.

To ease the new government’s arrival, pre-poll “access talks” — where neutral civil servants help prepare potential incoming parties for the challenge of power — have taken place before each U.K. election for the past 60 years.

Given an election is all-but-certain in 2024, the process might have been anticipated to start soon for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. The last time Labour came to power, under Tony Blair in 1997, the party began conversations with the civil service 16 months before the election.

Yet the Times reported Saturday that this time round, access talks are unlikely to start before the new year — a fact confirmed to POLITICO by four senior Labour Party figures, including the one quoted above.

“There hasn’t been enough time to get everything done yet,” a second of these officials said. They pointed to Starmer — who has to request talks in a letter to the PM — warning that he wants to “bombproof” each of his policies. “We need more time,” they added.

A third Labour official said: “We won’t rush into access talks because we need them to be more than just surface level. There is a delivery question. We really want to be ready and not caught out.”

Better late than never

Access talks are at least rising up the agenda inside Labour’s new HQ.

Earlier this year, a unit of up to half a dozen staff started meeting in the party’s trendy bare-brick offices near the River Thames to work on its plans for government, four different party officials told POLITICO.

The unit is working its way round shadow Cabinet teams — who will each have access talks with their respective government departments — to figure out how their priorities will translate into legislation.

Starmer’s highly regarded chief of staff Sue Gray, who quit the civil service to take up her new role in September, is also holding meetings with shadow ministerial teams to talk through manifesto policies and find any gaps, according to one of the group of officials cited at the top of the story.

All major policies are due to be signed off by January or February, said the third senior official quoted above.

One shadow Cabinet minister said Labour expects it will have to match Conservative spending plans for its first year in power, if an October or November election is called. They suggested the party may also have to cull some of its existing frontbenchers, as the number permitted is already set out in statute.

‘Measuring the curtains’

For Labour — now on a run of four straight election defeats — access talks have borne little fruit over recent years.

The talks were most intensive in 2017, when Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap election without warning. Labour’s poll ratings then surged dramatically in the final days of the campaign, heightening speculation the party might seize power.

Then-leader Jeremy Corbyn’s team held three hastily-arranged meetings with the senior civil service as expectations grew.

At the first, Corbyn made tea for then-Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood in his House of Commons office. The one-to-one was set up after Corbyn’s private secretary Laura Parker — having received an informal nod from the civil service — made contact with Alex Thomas, principal private secretary in the Cabinet Office. “I talked about what my Jeremy was like, he talked about what his Jeremy was like,” she recalls.

The second meeting, in 18th-century Admiralty House on Whitehall, felt more rigorous. At least three senior Labour officials attended — Policy Director Andrew Fisher, de facto chief of staff Karie Murphy, and Director of Communications Seumas Milne. They were joined by at least three civil servants — Heywood, Thomas and No. 10 Principal Private Secretary Peter Hill.

That meeting felt like “measuring the curtains,” recalls Fisher. “They went through the logistics; what No. 10 looks like, which jobs are civil servants, which jobs are political … how we would structure certain things, where people would want to be based and sit.”

Officials trawled through Labour’s policy plans, right down to which new laws would be delivered as formal bills and which would not require primary legislation. They discussed the timing of an emergency budget, and a proposed shakeup of government departments including a new Ministry of Labour. 

The third meeting came on polling day itself, when Murphy was phoned by a civil servant who asked to meet at 9 a.m. She and Fisher returned for an hour to Admiralty House, where a small group again discussed an incoming Labour government’s first 100 days in power, including plans to end a freeze on welfare benefits.

At 10.20 p.m. that evening, after the first exit poll predicted a hung parliament, Thomas emailed Fisher from the Cabinet Office to open a “channel of communication in case we need to talk later in the night,” recalls Fisher. “I remember phoning Karie quite excitedly.”

In the event, Conservative PM Theresa May ultimately clung to power, with the help of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland.

Inside the room

Access talks can take civil servants to unglamorous places. In 2019, then-Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill squeezed into Corbyn’s tiny constituency office in Islington, north London, two people with knowledge of the meeting told POLITICO.

Government officials also traveled 200 miles to then-Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner’s constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne, near Manchester, as she was reluctant to leave the campaign trail.

But the civil servants do give “useful feedback and guidance,” noted Fisher. Parker added: “It’s a massive opportunity for the opposition to stress-test some of its thinking, on people whose job it is to think.”

One civil servant involved in the 2017 talks describes them as “cobbled-together” in the heat of the campaign. But they added: “I vividly remember Jeremy Heywood saying it was imperative for the civil service to take these access talks seriously, whatever the polls were saying. Not just because Labour might form the next government, but because it would shape the Labour Party’s view of the civil service for a long time.”

What’s the point?

Former Tory Minister Nick Boles, who headed the Conservative Party’s efforts to prepare for government in the run-up to the 2010 election, believes building personal relationships are the ultimate point of the talks. The sessions are a chance to “get a feel for” civil servants, he tells a new edition of POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast.

For this reason, added Boles, Gray’s appointment — as a former Whitehall insider — will be “incredibly important” for Labour. She knows the civil service’s “flaws, failings, how slow it can be,” he suggested, and will have a healthy “impatience with the system.”

Gray has already “warned everyone [in the Labour Party] not to expect much” from the access talks by way of usable information, according to a second shadow Cabinet minister. Former Lib Dem minister David Laws, who helped prepare for the 2010 Coalition, agrees: “The information is immediately more useful to the civil service than it is to the opposition.”

For former Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell, who served PMs Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, it’s time to overhaul the entire system. Also speaking to the Westminster Insider podcast, he suggested Britain should introduce a transition period for incoming governments of “a couple of weeks,” like a mini version of the U.S. system.

“Unfortunately things don’t work,” he said. “That’s not good for the country. It’s not good for the civil service and it’s not good for the governing party.”

He suggested incoming ministers should also receive a crash course in governance before taking office. “If Sainsbury’s [supermarket] were overtaken by another firm and they put someone in who’d have no retail or food selling experience, you’d think — that’s completely mad.”

Emilio Casalicchio provided additional reporting.