Starmer looks to regain control after bumpy start

I have a strong sense of déjà-vu.

The build-up music, the stage, the banners, the backdrop, the choreography made it feel like an election manifesto launch.

The event looked like a manifesto launch, the documents on all our chairs looked like a manifesto and the speech that followed the Prime Minister’s speech looked like the day of the manifesto launch.

But the general elections were held five months ago and the time for manifestos, at least new manifestos, has passed.

So, what was going on here?

This was the Prime Minister using the power of government to wow his audience at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire.

Insert your jokes here about whether his job is Mission Impossible or what his first months in government have been like in the eyes of some.

(Carry on Up the Khyber was filmed here among others).

After a walk down Goldfinger Avenue – James Bond also has a legacy here – we are taken into a warehouse that feels like a windowless studio with a space-less quality: we could have been anywhere.

But it was a big space, aimed at displaying big ambitions as the government set out the key things it wanted to focus on and on the basis of which decisions were to be taken.

This is where we enter a dictionary full of names that Labor has used in recent years, in opposition and in government, to explain where it is going.

It’s been almost two years since Sir Keir set out their so-called “missions” for the governmentHe will control ideas and topics about how the country is run.

then came “First Step,” Which, as it happens, were scheduled just before the general elections were called.

Then, in government, he sought to “get the foundation right” and now he is setting half a dozen measurable “milestones” – key priorities in key areas that he aims to accomplish before the next general election in 2029. Let’s hope.

In the audience were a number of Cabinet ministers, who were on hand to talk to us afterwards, a number of Labor supporters and a few dozen journalists.

There’s more to it than “milestones” 43 page document with speech of the foundation, including “safe limits”.

But, as I asked the Prime Minister, this leaves ambiguity as to whether cutting legal and illegal immigration is a priority.

His answer pointed towards him seeing it as a baseline expectation of government rather than one of these half-dozen points of focus, but it strikes me that it leaves room for confusion.

Another thing I should mention is the Prime Minister’s criticism of the civil service.

Tony Blair was two years into office when he complained about “the stain on my back” from trying to transform the public sector.

Sir Keir has managed this in five months.

And he’s not the only newbie in government to make such comments – as our chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman writes here.

Critics, not least conservatives, say the speech screamed “relaunch.”

And yet it had been in the works for months, a long-planned juncture to determine what the government wanted to do next.

Jonathan Ashworth, a friend of the Prime Minister and chief executive of Labor Together, has said Today Podcast on BBC Sounds In the 2020s, governments should never stop explaining what they are doing.

But it is also true that this mockery of the manifesto launch speaks of a government that is very aware and needs to take back the agenda and seems to be in control after a rocky start.