I still think a Labour government is better than the alternatives currently on offer, but I do wish Keir Starmer could get stuff right the first time around.
I count 12 U-turns since the PM came to power, though others tot that up to 14. But even a dodgy dozen is too many. And there is reportedly another in the offing over minimum wage age rates to address the one in six 18 -24 year olds out of work.
Just a couple of hours after promising no more abrupt turnarounds, the PM did another screeching 180 by reinstating the 30 local authority elections previously cancelled.
You can just imagine the fruity language about the PM in council offices whose staff will now have to slog through evenings and weekends to get ballots ready in time for 7th May.
And because Parliament is in recess this week, the PM ducked a duffing up from MPs at PMQs. The urgent question Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle would undoubtedly have granted the opposition was MIA too.
Postponing these elections until next year struck me as the right thing to do at the time. The effort and expense of holding them seemed pointless for councils working flat out on preparations to abolish themselves under local government reorganisation.
But then I also assumed, naively as it turned out, that doing so must be lawful. The Government’s top legal brains are paid £150,000 plus of our money to deliver sound advice.
And I can only think that the decision to deny 4.5 million people a vote must have been handed to a trainee lawyer struggling to get by on £34,695, which is the starting rate for a first-year Whitehall junior.
A pricey mistake now that Reform’s £100,000 legal costs have to be funded by taxpayers, and councils are getting an extra £63million to help them navigate this mess.
A dodgy dozen U-turns is too many. The PM should take a leaf out of Margaret Thatcher's book - Nigel Nelson | Getty Images
Ministers may not want to release the evidence this cock-up was based on, but they should be forced to come clean. If only to dispel the suspicion that they only did it to keep Reform voters out of polling stations.
U-turns are so damaging for governments because everyone remembers the original madcap proposals that led to them, and no one gives ministers any credit for belatedly coming to their senses.
Take the bonkers plan in July 2024 to deny pensioners their winter fuel payments when simply taxing the handouts to high-income elderly would have done the trick.
In July 2025, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced exactly that, but I bet she will always cop it for her meanness and not be forgiven just because she got it right eventually.
She clearly hadn’t learned her lesson because she went on to try to nick £5billion in disability benefits dressed up as welfare reform.
Her backbenchers wouldn’t wear that, and quite right, too. The Employment Rights Bill is a fine piece of legislation banning zero hours contracts, fire and rehire and making sickness pay available as soon as you are ill.
But both bosses and unions clocked the detrimental effect of day one employment rights on the hiring of staff. Unions reasoned that you can't go to an industrial tribunal if you haven’t got a job.
Scrapping that provision was welcome, but better not to have included it in the first place. Waspi women who were not told they would have to be wage slaves for longer were promised compensation. That had to be junked when the cost came in at an eye-watering £10billion.
It is right to lift the two-child benefit cap as it will take 300,000 children out of poverty and give them opportunities to make something of themselves. But ministers said they were not going to do it before U-turning.
Despite the PM’s enthusiasm for digital ID to prove the right to work, it was binned in January when it became clear no one else shared his excitement.
Pubs got a £300million lifeline after being told they wouldn’t, the threshold for farm tax was raised when ministers were adamant there would be no change, and there is now a grooming gangs inquiry despite earlier protestations of no need for one.
We were promised no more tax rises in October 2024 and got them in November 2025. Income tax was floated as one of them and then sunk.
Keir Starmer urgently needs to end the perception that he's floundering around and leading an administration adrift. Perhaps he should take a leaf out of Margaret Thatcher’s book. U-turn if you want to. The laddie is not for turning.
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