No. 10 Downing Street is making a habit of blaming officials for its woes.
Noah Keate
In a session with parliament’s Liaison Committee last December, the PM whined that delivering change is much harder than it looks.
“My experience now as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies,” he told senior MPs quizzing him about his record in office. “The action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be.”
Starmer said he was trying to take action by reducing regulation, but “it takes time to take it down.”
Whether the public will be quite so forgiving is unclear.
5. Military moaning
Military chiefs don’t appear to have escaped the ire of Starmer’s operation either.
Under fire over Britain’s flat-footed response to U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, The Spectator magazine was briefed that U.K. Chief of the Defense Staff Richard Knighton argued at a private meeting that Britain didn’t need to send an aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean — enraging Cyprus, Jordan, and the UAE.
