Keir Starmer is surrounded by advisers who are a bit too male and stale and it’s really showing

What is Keir Starmer’s problem? The prime minister seems to be struggling to connect with voters and some parts of his own party, making government look even harder than it actually is – especially when you have a majority the size of his. The feeling in Westminster is that his backbenchers and some ministers seem depressed and as though they are in the midterm of a beleaguered government; still not breathing a sigh of relief and joy at returning to power and being able to change things for the better.

An increasing complaint is that he is listening to the wrong people, surrounded by advisers who are too much like him – maybe too white, too male, and a bit too stale.

This week Sir Keir Starmer has been accused of betraying women affected by changes to the state pension age after using Waspi women to get elected. The prime minister came under fire on Wednesday after work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall rejected calls for 3.8m affected individuals to be given £1,000 and £2,950 each in compensation.

When Starmer chose Chris Wormald as the new head of the civil service recently, it was taken by some as new evidence of his ability to overlook top women. The frontrunners for the cabinet secretary job had been Tamara Finkelstein, currently at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, or Ministry of Justice permanent secretary Antonia Romeo.

Starmer had apparently gone off the idea of the latter after consulting with colleagues, and his pick of Wormald was a more traditional choice: Romeo enjoyed being photographed at Westminster parties, whereas Wormald prefers to be out of the limelight and firmly within the corridors of Whitehall. Once again, Starmer was thinking more like a civil servant rather than a politician who really wants to challenge the system, regardless of what he claims. So it is more of a mindset problem.

As is so often the case, Angela Rayner put her finger on it in a recent interview. She was ostensibly praising Starmer when she described him as being “like a civil servant”, telling the BBC: “I’ve described him before as like a civil servant in the way that he does it, because he has a duty and he feels that public service duty to deliver for the people.”

Awkwardly for Rayner (or perhaps not, depending on your view of how ready she really is to praise her leader), the very next day Starmer attacked “declinism” in Whitehall in a speech that civil service unions claimed adopted “Trumpian language”.

But her “civil servant” line did pinpoint one of the key problems with Starmer, which is that whether or not he attacks the civil service, he does think like an official, rather than a politician. Officials are indeed there to deliver, and don’t need to worry about connecting with the public or telling a wider story. Starmer is struggling with precisely those two things.

Some Labour backbenchers feel as though Starmer needs more of a challenge within his team to a dominant technocratic white male worldview. They point to the split that opened up in the party over assisted dying as an example. In the second reading vote on that legislation, Labour MPs were given a free vote, but a number of those who voted against have privately pointed out that MPs from ethnic minorities were much more circumspect about the legislation because they understood the mistrust that many non-white communities have towards the health service.

One of the most moving speeches in that debate came from Florence Eshalomi, who recalled trying to advocate for her sick mother in hospital and “explaining to a doctor who would not believe her when she told him that she needed life-saving medication” for her sickle cell anaemia.

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She also reminded MPs of the death of Evan Smith, who also had sickle cell and who “had to ring 999 from his hospital bed because he was denied oxygen and basic care by the doctors”. That was Eshalomi’s attempt to warn colleagues that not everyone experiences the NHS in the same way, and that not everything is as simple as they might like to think. Using her own real-world experiences she was trying to prevent a cognitive disconnect from leading to bad legislation.

Cognitive disconnect is a constant risk in all governments, not least because even if the people at the top look like they come from a mix of backgrounds, they might be living very similar lives by the time they are all working together in Westminster. And if people with similar outlooks on life are all working together on a policy, they might not have the instinctive response that means they are able to spot a fundamental flaw early on.

The example that is always used of cognitive disconnect in policy making is of the poll tax: the group of ministers and officials who drew it up was so small and so narrowly drawn that those developing it had a wonderful time working together and didn’t at any point make the instinctive remark that a civil servant later made of “try collecting that in Brixton”.

They could have saved themselves and the country a lot of bother if they had thought of this problem at the design stage, rather than when they did indeed try collecting the poll tax.

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Starmer is not surrounded by people who are all like him. That’s too simplistic an accusation: he has a very strong front bench team of women, along with many of his senior aides like Vidhya Alakeson, Claire Reynolds, Henna Shah and Sophie Nazemi. When Sue Gray left as Starmer’s chief of staff, it was seen as being proof that Starmer had a “women problem”, but his reshuffle of his top team brought more women in, so it’s not that simple.

When she was making her “civil servant” comments, Rayner also argued that Starmer was good at bringing different people around him. She said: “I think leaders often have to recognise their skills and the way in which they can deliver, and also their weaknesses and how they can bring a team around them. I think that’s what the PM is able to do, is bring a team around him, and recognise that actually the way in which he approaches a challenge is very forensic, and he goes through it.”

But, of course, it is not just about who is around you, but who you really listen to, which is one of the reasons there was such a power struggle between Gray and Morgan McSweeney – Starmer’s campaign director and now all-powerful chief of staff – in the first place.

Both wanted to be the person who had the quickest access to Starmer’s ear. Those kinds of tensions are always present between aides in any government, but they are far greater when the leader isn’t someone with a particularly strong vision because the prize is bigger: not only does a leader listen to you, but they also bear your imprint more strongly.

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Theresa May’s aides Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill were some of the most enthusiastic special advisers of their time when it came to extolling the virtues of their boss, but this was largely because they were able to pour their own views into her, and thus saw a reflection of themselves – which they liked – when they looked at her. The same is true of Starmer: the people around him know that they can have huge influence over the whole direction of the government if they get close enough to his ear.

That’s all very well and interesting for those people around Starmer, but whether he is listening to the right people or the wrong people, there is still a fundamental problem. If he doesn’t have an instinctive vision, other than wanting to do things better than the way the Tories managed, then he will always struggle to connect, both with his party and the electorate.

He has spent a lot of time since coming to power talking about “mission-led government”, setting up “mission delivery boards” (which seem to be slowing decision-making down rather than getting things done), announcing “first steps”, “pillars” and his latest project management concept, “measurable milestones”. He seems to know how he wants to change government so that he can get what he wants, but that is a problem when he doesn’t actually know what he wants to do.

His senior colleagues have long recognised this, worrying that he still thinks complaining about how the Tories got things wrong is enough to show voters Labour is on their side. He briefly felt he could connect with the electorate in their mutual disgust at the Conservative meltdown, but has struggled since to prove he is still connected.

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His “Plan for Change” was an attempt to reconnect, showing voters something tangible in the form of “measurable milestones”. It hasn’t led to any measurable change in public sentiment about Labour, other than that Reform has polled ahead of Starmer’s party for the first time. It is almost as though voters don’t really buy what Starmer is saying. Or maybe they still don’t know what he is telling them.

Starmer has been clear that the real test of a government is what it does, not what it promises. The problem with thinking like a civil servant, though, is that it’s not what a prime minister is supposed to do. And it doesn’t really matter who is around him if the man at the top doesn’t have his own vision.

Aides will come and go, their views pouring in and out of the prime minister’s ears, but unless there is something that personally animates Starmer beyond doing things properly, then Rayner’s description of him is the correct diagnosis of a problem.