My six-point plan to make the Tories electable again

Britain’s new Labour government has got off to a flying start.

- CHRIS PATTEN

After 14 years of increasingly incompetent and fractious Conservative government, the Labour Party under Keir Starmer seems to have got a remarkably firm grip on the beginning of the effort to deal with the mountain of problems facing the country today.

Starmer himself has travelled around the United Kingdom, from Westminster to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, seeking to rebuild at least a modicum of trust between the central government and the devolved administrations around the United Kingdom.

He has brought elected mayors from around England – Labour and Conservative – into his tent and enlisted their support for the efforts pioneered by the new chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to recharge economic growth.

His government has set out to deal rapidly with the appalling crisis of overcrowding in our prisons, left behind by the Conservatives. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, is attempting to improve industrial relations in the health service so that it can get on with the job of reducing the waiting lists for even serious treatment.

Abroad, the new foreign and defence secretaries are busy restoring relations with our partners in Europe. Starmer himself has been in Washington for a Nato summit, pledging more support for Ukraine, and preparing for a meeting in Britain on security and foreign policy with the other European democracies.

And what of the Conservative Party? The earthquake of the recent election handed out what is probably its worst-ever defeat. It lost votes across the board to Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Nigel Farage’s Reform party. There was a spectacular cull of ministers left, right and centre, good and bad. Long-serving MPs watched majorities which had seemed impregnable reduced to handfuls of votes, or even wiped out altogether.