During recent riots in the United Kingdom, it was not lost on on the British public—or on the new Starmer government—that when riots last occurred in Britain in 2011, then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson didn’t come back from his vacation. True, Johnson wasn’t in charge of the country, only a city—albeit a capital of 8 million people at the time—but the man nonetheless seemingly had other things on his mind.
The Johnson era, during which Johnson clowned his way from mayor to foreign secretary to prime minister via the disaster that was Brexit, is one the new Labour government is working at hyper-speed to leave behind.
It is less than two months after British Prime Minister Keir Starmer won his decisive election victory on July 4, but the subsequent manner and style of governance in the United Kingdom could not be more different from previous administrations.
Starmer has demonstrated a professionalism that was absent during the years of mayhem that followed the 2016 Brexit referendum, as Britain lurched from the floundering Theresa May, via the buffoonery of Johnson, to the brief calamity that was Liz Truss, to the fin de siècle Rishi Sunak.
Starmer has been resolute on Ukraine (allowing most but not all U.K.-made heavy weaponry to be deployed for Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region of Russia). He has instructed his ministers to develop ambitious policy on priority areas (such as loosening planning restrictions and boosting renewable energy). He has taken on his own party’s left wing (banishing a group of Labour ministers of parliament for trying to increase child welfare payments). And he has been tough on the Tory legacy (attacking the former administration at every turn).
Most of all, he has wielded an iron grip on the machinery of government.
All that was before the copycat unrest in at least a dozen cities that followed the murder of three schoolgirls, an attack falsely attributed by far-right bloggers to a Muslim immigrant.
Starmer responded to the riots, which early on threatened to overwhelm the police, in Robocop fashion. Reinforcements were sent from one region to another to stave off repeats and to arrest perpetrators at the time of the riots and afterward.
Each day has seen tough law and order meted out. Although Starmer did not instruct judges to take a hard line—the executive and judicial branches of power fiercely guard their independence in the U.K.—judges handed down unprecedented jail sentences, in some cases up to six years, for disorder.
Several people have been jailed for posting inflammatory anti-immigrant comments online, a clampdown that has irked free speech absolutists (including, noisily, X owner Elon Musk), but has so far largely drawn support.
The right-wing newspapers, which still dominate the British media landscape, felt they had no choice but to support the government in its zero-tolerance approach. But their hearts weren’t really in it; after all, they had been goading citizens to rise up against the liberal elite for years, decrying those very same judges as “enemies of the people” when they objected to May’s attempts to push Brexit through without a parliamentary vote.
Just over a week after the unrest broke out, order was restored. The prime minister had passed his first test—a test that was tailor-made for a former director of public prosecutions. Starmer is a rare example of a leading British politician who ran a major civil service before moving into politics. And driving home his serious juxtaposition with his predecessors, Starmer decided to cancel his family holiday after the riots broke out.
Conservative media outlets were left chomping at the bit for an opening to criticize the new government. As soon as they sniffed an opportunity, they took it. The object of their fire was Starmer’s right-hand woman, Downing Street Chief of Staff Sue Gray. Once the Mail on Sunday broke the story of a feud between Gray and the prime minister’s other chief consigliere, Morgan McSweeney, the man charged with political strategy, the other newspapers piled on.
Gray has long enjoyed (or suffered from) a legendary status in the British government; for six years she oversaw propriety across the civil service. It was said, somewhat dramatically, that she instilled fear along every corridor of power.
Her moment in the international limelight came when she was appointed during her time as Second Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office to investigate the “partygate” affair, in which Johnson and his bibulous friends were accused of frolicking inside 10 Downing Street during the COVID-19 pandemic, not only failing in their duties to try to manage the pandemic but also breaking the social distancing rules they had set for the public. “Wait for Sue Gray” became the mantra of ministers when asked to predict the result of the long-delayed enquiry. When her report eventually came, it was sharply critical but stopped short of ending ministerial (or prime ministerial) careers.
Shortly after, when Starmer poached Gray from supposed civil service neutrality to head his office in opposition and then in government, many Conservatives were furious. They have been gunning for Gray ever since.
The Mail’s most serious allegation was that the prime minister was being denied important security briefings because Gray was blocking access to him, a charge that was angrily denied. More plausibly, her detractors say she has been creating bottlenecks as she hoards power. The story was a mix of “silly season” mid-summer journalism, possibly fueled with an extra dose of misogyny. It was certainly exaggerated, but not necessarily without foundation: one of those cases of not quite right, but not quite wrong either.
Starmer has been annoyed by the stories, but also perhaps a part of him accepts that they are unavoidable collateral damage from having an uber-enforcer by your side. All prime ministers assume that they are never more powerful than at the start of their tenure, and they must move quickly. Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke of the “scars on his back” as he struggled to reform public services in the face of an obdurate bureaucracy.
Armed with a huge parliamentary majority, Starmer is determined to steamroll all opposition to his plans to drag the U.K. out of its economic and civic mire. The more his ministers dig, the more they claim to be shocked by the state of the inheritance from the Tories. The public mood is sour, and they know they have limited time to demonstrate real-life improvements before the blame shifts to them and votes perhaps start to shift back to the right-wing populists, toward Nigel Farage and his recently hatched Reform party.
While the Conservatives have settled comfortably into opposition (some former ministers are earning serious sums of money on the right-wing U.S. and international speaker circuit), Starmer has been a non-stop frenzy of activity since July 4.
He took on a series of international summits and made sure in the remaining three weeks of parliament that several legislative announcements were made. Then, just as he was preparing to catch his breath for a week off in the sun, the riots took place.
Starmer’s biggest challenges have yet to come. He may have headed off the unrest, but he has not eliminated the causes of it—discontent over the state of the British economy and public services, from its health service to housing to the state of the streets. These issues have entrenched a deep-seated loss of trust in politicians and their ability to bring about change.
Across Europe and beyond, it has become axiomatic to compare populists, who throw caution to the wind, with mainstream leaders who are wary of taking risks and of being bold. Starmer has already shown determination and ruthlessness. His first weeks in office suggest he might buck the trend.
And a postscript: Earlier this month, Johnson’s sister tried to solve the mystery of the mayor’s disappearing act a decade ago. Rachel Johnson said on her radio show that her brother had been with his family driving around Canada and didn’t have phone signal for much of the trip. When he did learn of the emergency, he couldn’t leave his then-wife and their four children, as her feet couldn’t reach the pedals of their large trailer. “That is why—I kid you not—he didn’t come back immediately,” she insisted. “He had to drive the RV to an international airport and then fly back.” Not all listeners were convinced.