Keir Starmer has been Prime Minister since July 2024. Before politics he was Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013, after a career at the bar specialising in human rights law. He has been MP for Holborn and St Pancras since 2015. He became Labour leader in April 2020, immediately after the worst Labour defeat since 1935.

His route to Number 10 was not a wave of national enthusiasm. Labour's 2024 vote share was modest by historical standards. The size of the parliamentary majority was inflated by Reform splitting the Conservative vote across hundreds of seats. The mandate is real but smaller than the seat count suggests, and that mismatch defines almost everything about the early period of his government.

The character of Starmer's politics is essentially professional. He runs the operation tightly. The party machine is disciplined for the first time in over a decade. The cabinet, with occasional exceptions, sticks to message. The contrast with the previous fourteen years of Conservative chaos was deliberate and was, electorally, the point. Voters in 2024 were not voting for a programme. They were voting for the absence of one more crisis.

That trade has costs. Discipline produces a frontbench that often sounds the same. Caution produces a government that has been slow to make the politically risky moves its own backbenchers want. The first year has been defined more by absence of disaster than by visible progress on the structural problems that have defeated successive governments: housing, productivity, NHS performance, regional economic stagnation.

The political record so far has flashes of substance. The Employment Rights Bill is real. GB Energy is real. The planning reforms in the NPPF are real, although the test is whether they produce houses. The winter fuel payment reform was politically badly handled. The inheritance tax changes around family farms were politically badly handled. The Sue Gray episode early on showed that the operation, however disciplined, is still capable of mishandling its own internal politics.

The harder critique is that Starmer is more comfortable saying what Labour is not than what Labour is. He has spent fifteen years of his political life on positions that have shifted as the politics shifted, from the soft Brexit pivot to the leadership reset to the move away from the policy commitments of his own 2020 campaign. His allies frame this as pragmatism in service of winning. His critics frame this as the absence of a settled politics. Both are partly true and the country has not yet settled on which weighs more.

The specifics are striking. He won the leadership in 2020 on ten pledges and has since walked away from many of them. He promised to abolish tuition fees, then said in May 2023 that Labour would likely move on from that commitment. He pledged common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water, but in office only rail remains slated for public ownership, with water reframed as a question of tougher regulation. His first pledge, to raise income tax on the top five percent of earners, was set aside by May 2023. He committed to defend free movement after Brexit, then said in November 2022 that it would not return under his government. He promised to scrap the two child benefit limit and reversed that in July 2023, while the £28bn a year green investment pledge was delayed and then dropped.

He is not corrupt. He is not theatrical. He is, by some distance, the most disciplined Prime Minister Britain has had since the early Cameron years. Whether discipline is enough to address what is actually wrong with the country is the question the rest of this parliament will answer.