Keir Starmer informed me he'd met each problem. However issues look dangerous proper now

Will Keir Starmer permit himself to have a good time his first anniversary as prime minister this weekend? Or will he be taking a protracted, exhausting look within the mirror and asking himself what went fallacious?

That’s what is in my thoughts as he greets me within the Terracotta Room on the primary flooring of 10 Downing Road for a long-planned dialog about his first 12 months in workplace, this week.

He seems surprisingly relaxed, on condition that his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had been in tears sitting behind him within the Commons simply hours earlier. That triggered fevered hypothesis about how lengthy she would final within the job, transferring markets to promote the pound and improve the price of borrowing.

Maybe that’s the impression he desires to convey to me as he shares a narrative about his picture alternative with System One automobiles parked exterior his entrance door – essentially the most well-known door on the earth.

Starmer is set that the issues of latest weeks – and boy there’s been a protracted checklist of these – won’t overshadow the achievements he believes deserve simply as a lot consideration.

“We’ve got finished some incredible issues,” he tells me, “actually pushed down the ready lists within the NHS, actually finished a great deal of enhancements in colleges and stuff that we are able to do for youngsters – whether or not that is rolling out college uniform tasks, whether or not it is college meals, breakfast golf equipment, you identify it – and in addition [brought in] an enormous quantity of funding into the nation. And naturally we have been busy getting three commerce offers.”

It is clear that, given the possibility, his checklist would go on. And but, I level out, there may be one other lengthy checklist – of issues he is not too long ago admitted to getting fallacious.

Within the final yr, he is stated hiring Sue Grey – Starmer’s former chief of workers who left Downing Road in October – was fallacious. He is additionally held his arms up about plans to finish winter gas funds, about rejecting a nationwide grooming gang inquiry, and slicing advantages for disabled individuals. That is not even the complete checklist, but it is fairly a lot of issues that he is admitting to being a mistake.

The prime minister thinks I’ve fairly crudely summarised his private reflections on what he may need finished higher. He challenges the thought, which is prevalent in Westminster, that altering your thoughts represents weak spot, or a “humiliating U-turn”.

That is the fourth time we have sat down for an prolonged and private dialog for my Political Pondering podcast.

“You understand this from attending to know me,” he says. “I am not certainly one of these ideological thinkers, the place ideology dictates what I do. I am a pragmatist. You’ll be able to badge this stuff as U-turns – it’s normal sense to me.

“If somebody says to me, ‘this is some extra data and I actually suppose it is the fitting factor to do’, I am the type of particular person that claims, ‘nicely wherein case, let’s do it’.”

There’s, although, little question that scrapping a lot of his welfare reforms was a U-turn – a expensive and humiliating one. Starmer and his chancellor haven’t solely misplaced authority and face, they’ve misplaced £5bn in deliberate financial savings, one thing that should be paid for someway, by means of additional borrowing, decrease spending or, almost certainly, increased taxes.

“I take duty,” he says, “we did not get the method proper”. However someway he implies that it may need been somebody aside from the chief of the Labour Celebration’s duty to influence Labour MPs to again his plans.

He does not spell out what he means by getting the method proper and, maybe extra importantly, he dodges my makes an attempt to get him to spell out clearly what story he is making an attempt to inform the nation about advantages.

Ought to Labour be on the aspect of disabled individuals and folks like his personal mom, who had a crippling illness that meant she finally needed to have a leg amputated? Or ought to they undertake her unwillingness to be written off, which he described to me the final time we spoke? When informed by her medical doctors that she would not stroll once more she refused to hear.

Wounded by the occasions of the previous week, Starmer refuses to even tackle that alternative. However certainly, I recommend to him, the nation does not simply need a problem-solver, or a chief govt of UK plc? Voters certainly need a chief who has a narrative to inform?

Starmer clearly knew this query – or a variation of it – was coming. I’ve pushed him on it each time we have spoken at size.

“It is a few ardour, if that is the fitting phrase,” he says. “However actually a dedication to vary the lives of tens of millions of working individuals and, particularly, to sort out this query of equity.”

“It is virtually like a social contract,” he provides, “that individuals are getting again what they’re placing in, that there’s a fairer setting for them that helps them and respects them.”

That is a bit lengthy to stitch on to an election banner, to chant within the streets, or write in a publish on X, however it’s a theme. He’s a self-proclaimed pragmatist who does not need there to be one thing that may be labelled as “Starmerism”, however at the least we are able to now say that his guideline is equity.

“Each problem that is been put in entrance of me I’ve risen to, met it, and we’ll proceed in the identical vein,” he says.

I finish our dialog by reminding him what they are saying about failing soccer managers who’ve “misplaced the dressing room”. Has he misplaced the Labour Celebration dressing room? His reply is emphatic.

“Completely not,” he says. “The Labour dressing room, the PLP, is proud as hell of what we have finished, and their frustration – my frustration – is that typically the opposite stuff, welfare could be an instance, can obscure us having the ability to get that on the market.”

Nearly as an afterthought he provides: “I am a hard-enough bastard to search out out who it was who stated that, in order that I can have a dialogue with him.” Figuring out Starmer I believe he is more likely to ship a crunching sort out on the pitch than a quiet phrase off it.

However the prime minister’s message is obvious to me: Do not depend me out, nevertheless dangerous it seems now. To just about everybody aside from him it at the moment does look dangerous. Very dangerous.