Peston: What have we learned from 365 days of PM Starmer?

Keir Starmer seems to believe running the country is like running a giant supermarket chain.

Because in his own evaluation of his first year in office, he reels off a list of his government’s achievements, as if it were a list of products he has sold to us.

These include, he says, millions of additional medical treatments, more free school meals, a tariff deal with America, enhanced employee rights, and a £6 billion increase in defence spending.

Among other things, on other shelves.

Oh, and then there was the small matter of a massive autumn budget that mended the public finances and began to fix public services by raising taxes to the tune of £40 billion.

So his government has not been a big fat zero.

But for reasons that must puzzle him, we, the British people, are remarkably ungrateful.

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His unpopularity in opinion polls is setting records for a PM so early in a term.

Farage and Reform are ahead of all the parties, including his own.

And even his own MPs have become treacherous allies, as we saw when they forced him to make humiliating and expensive u-turns on his plans to cut spending on disability benefits.

So what’s gone wrong?

Well, it’s largely that so much of what his government has done is the useful stuff that we voters think governments should do as a matter of course. We are rarely grateful to someone who we see as just doing their job.

Here is what you might call Starmer’s argument with the electorate. He thinks being halfway competent is enough.

He says, for example, that his sole ambition is to “improve the lives of working people”.

He doesn’t “believe” in anything else. He is not ideological. He recoils at the suggestion he should sell us a “vision”.

He will never be “performative”.

All that may be admirable, as is his extraordinary personal resilience when things go wrong.

When I speak or interview him after some or other debacle of his own making - for example, after the u-turns on grooming gangs or on means testing the winter fuel allowance - he is as chirpy as a lower division football manager whose team has lost only by a couple of goals to the likes of Liverpool.

“We’ll learn from this and get stronger” is a favourite phrase.

He believes that we’ll join the dots before the next election, see the shape of all the good things he’s done and reward him. Well maybe.

It is all very well eschewing grandiose visions. But running a country requires more theatre and public leadership than running Tesco.

So it is entirely possible that if he can’t and won’t join the dots for us and describe, to us and to the vast civil service team, quite how his miscellany of initiatives and policies will make us richer and safer, then there will be no sunny uplands.

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