A Prime Minister on borrowed time cannot run the country

William Hague had just concluded a four-year tenure as Foreign Secretary - a lifetime by modern standards. But as I look back on my eleven years in the diplomatic service, which I resigned from earlier this year, I count nine different Foreign Secretaries and six Prime Ministers I served under between 2015 and 2026.

Britain increasingly governs in a state of permanent political turbulence, where ministers arrive with fanfare, announce a new set of priorities, and then depart before any meaningful progress can be made.

This seems to be Keir Starmer’s central argument for staying in office, as he battles to save his job. In his big reset speech today, he argued that to stand down would be irresponsible. It is overblown to claim, as Starmer did, that another change of PM would plunge the country into chaos. But the level of churn we’ve seen over recent years is certainly not healthy for any institution or country.

However, there are no good options in our present predicament. One has to ask what purpose Starmer now serves, for it seems increasingly clear he is in office but not in power. Many Labour MPs have decided he is not up to it. And the civil service can sense that Starmer is now on borrowed time.

This sense by mandarins is crippling to a PM’s ability to get things done. The civil service relies on strong political leadership to function - and from this PM, it is not getting that. This is not just about officials needing to know that the PM will still be there next month. It is also about having a clear political vision and policies to enact. And those are sorely lacking.

As an official, I saw the widespread enthusiasm in the senior ranks of the civil service when Starmer came to power. There was a sense that, after all the instability of the late Tory years, here was an incoming administration that had 14 years to prepare for office and would bring seriousness of purpose and proper legislative plans to the job. That illusion shattered extraordinarily quickly. It became clear little planning had been done, the much-vaunted ‘Five Missions’ were soon quietly dropped, and Starmer’s government lashed out at senior civil servants for its own failings.

The PM’s shoddy treatment of Olly Robbins last month did much to burn goodwill with the senior civil service. And by expending his political capital on that botched and unfair sacking, the PM lost both the stomach and the support to implement urgently-needed reforms to fix the state. On the eve of the local elections, Starmer went out of his way to reassure the civil service he was on their side, writing a letter to all civil servants in which he praised the principle of ‘speaking truth to power’.

But difficult truths cannot travel in only one direction. Starmer said nothing in his letter about the deeper structural failures driving dysfunction across the state. He did not take the opportunity to point out that civil service productivity is falling when it should be surging in an AI age. He did not urge officials to comply with the rules that require them to spend at least 60% of their time in the office - rules which are being widely flouted in favour of work-from-home. And whilst the new Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo’s decision to publish her objectives at least gives us something to judge her performance against, there is no equivalent drive across the civil service to finally start prioritising results, not just process.

No organisation can operate effectively when the overwhelming focus is on individuals' futures rather than on the issues. Like it or not, that is the position Keir Starmer's government now finds himself. We need a PM who will prioritise fixing the state and enabling effective government. That is the mission of the Centre for Government Reform I have set up: to find and prepare a new cadre of people to radically reform and competently run Whitehall, improving productivity and restoring accountability to our broken government machine.

Sadly, as Starmer seeks to cling on long after his MPs have lost faith in him, it looks next to impossible that Starmer is a Prime Minister able to take on that vital task.

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Ameer Kotecha is CEO of the Centre for Government Reform. He was formerly a senior diplomat, serving as the head of the British consulate in Russia 2023-25.

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