.png)
4 hours ago
1
Keir Starmer has been warned against adopting the language of Elon Musk after railing against “blockers and checkers” and the “flabby” civil service this week.
Gus O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary, was one of those urging the prime minister to “get a grip” on his messaging, telling the Institute for Government podcast: “My God, he has mishandled the communications on this terribly.”
O’Donnell cited the Guardian’s report that Downing Street was interested in proposals drawn up by Labour Together, a thinktank with close links to the government, to reshape the state under plans dubbed “project chainsaw”.
The nickname is a reference to Musk’s stunt wielding a chainsaw to symbolise government cuts for Donald Trump’s administration.
O’Donnell said Starmer was “really, really offending civil servants” but did not believe the prime minister actually intended to do that. “He’s got to get a grip on the media machine that is trying to pretend he’s some kind of Elon Musk. That is just not helpful for anybody.”
In his speech setting out civil service changes this week, Starmer hit out at “a cottage industry of blockers and checkers”, while acknowledging that previous governments had set up the state in such a way.
Starmer also used an intervention in the Daily Telegraph to hit out at the “overcautious, flabby state”, while stressing that “the problem isn’t our fantastic civil servants – it’s the system they’re stuck in”.
Jill Rutter, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government, said the “low point” for Starmer had been his description of civil servants as bathing in a “tepid bath” of managed decline, which he later softened by assuring officials he valued their work.
“The Musk approach is not something that government should want to go anywhere near associating with itself and I think whoever has been going around briefing about ‘'project chainsaw’ should be retired from the comms efforts,” she said.
Rutter said tackling poor performance in Whitehall would be a good thing and civil servants would be pleased he was railing against the system rather than the quality of their work. But she said: “He could have had more substance behind the rhetoric and an action plan.”
Civil service union leaders have also objected to the prime minister’s tone. Dave Penman, the general secretary of the FDA, said: “Blaming public servants for doing the job they were tasked with by ministers is just cheap politics and is increasingly following a pattern where the government appears more interested in headlines than leadership.”
Starmer’s language has been praised by the rightwing Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a thinktank that was closely associated with Liz Truss.
Tom Clougherty, the executive director of the IEA, said: “Increasingly, the government is getting its rhetoric right. But its actions haven’t quite caught up. The British state is overloaded and that hurts both public services and the private sector. Changing structures might help, but ultimately government just needs to stop doing some things altogether.”
Starmer’s shift to using more robust language has increased in his eight months as prime minister. He said he would “build, baby, build” to meet his pledge on more housing, channelling Trump’s mantra of “drill, baby, drill”.
The prime minister also declared he would not tolerate building projects held up by excessive consideration for newts or bat tunnels, pledging to tackle environmental obstacles.
While Starmer comes from the opposite side of the political spectrum to Trump, some in Downing Street have been struck by the sense of energy around attempted changes in the US – even if the aims are different.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, told LBC: “We’re different political traditions, but I think we’ve all been struck by the pace at which President Trump’s new administration has come in and made a whole bunch of changes to the way that Washington and the way that government works.
“We might look at some of those changes and think, well, they’re not quite the changes we would make, from a centre-left perspective, but the speed at which they’ve operated, we’ve actually thought, you know what, we can go further and faster. We will, we are. That’s what the prime minister’s doing.”
Asked about criticisms of Starmer’s language, the prime minister’s deputy spokesperson said he was focused on “an active, agile and productive state that works for working people”.
after newsletter promotion
The prime minister’s punchy language
‘Blockers and checkers’
Starmer has said caution is holding back decision-making in Whitehall. He appears mainly to be referring to regulators and quangos telling ministers their plans are difficult to implement or problematic.
‘The absurd spectacle of a £100m bat tunnel’
The prime minister blamed bat tunnels for holding up planning processes, including HS2, as their protected nature means they often have to be considered before construction is approved. Angela Rayner has also said newts should not be considered more important than people, in the vein of Boris Johnson, who previously criticised “newt counting delays”.
‘Flabby’ and ‘bloated’ civil service
Starmer said the civil service had got too big and unwieldy, although he stresses that he is not interested in ideological arguments about its size. He is overseeing tens of thousands of job cuts among public officials.
‘Build, baby, build’
Last month, the prime minister used Trumpian language as he pledged to make it easier to construct mini nuclear power stations in England and Wales. Starmer told the BBC the government was going to “take on the blockers”.
‘Smash the gangs’
Starmer has long used forthright language to talk of his desire to stop people-smuggling across the Channel. The gangs do not appear to have been smashed yet, with 4,000 people arriving in small boats so far this year.
