For all the errors and crises, the blight on Starmer’s first year is still the lack of vision | Martin Kettle

Prime ministers have recovered from bad starts. But unless Starmer can articulate an idea of the Britain he wants, the public – and his party – may desert him

There will be no birthday candles in Downing Street this week. Nor should there be. Twelve months after Labour’s landslide election win on 4 July 2024, Keir Starmer’s government has capped a year in office with a week of political dishevelment and ineptitude. The welfare reform bill itself is now a meaningless shell. The Labour party is united only in its frustrations.

The welfare rebellion was not a bolt from the blue. Instead, it provides the keystone to an arc of earlier blunders. It poses urgent issues about professional incompetence in Labour’s Westminster machine. It embodies what is not working in the way Starmer’s top-down party does politics more generally. This will not be the end of it, as the furore over Rachel Reeves’s tears at a raucous prime minister’s questions seems to confirm. Things can’t go on like this.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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