Keir Starmer rewrote the history books on July 5 last year when he delivered a majority of 174 for Labour in the House of Commons. The scale of the landslide meant it was widely assumed that, as the Institute for Government put it, he would “find operating in Parliament more straightforward than recent prime ministers”. But it has not come to pass.
Less than a year after inflicting on the Tories the biggest defeat in their electoral history Starmer was forced to climb down on a central plank of his promise to voters: “fixing the broken welfare system”. A rebellion of about 120 fractious Labour backbenchers gave the Government no option but to offer up a £5 billion watering down of proposed cuts in disability benefits, seen as essential if Rachel Reeves was to have any chance of getting a grip on the deficit.
