Can Labour escape its doom loop of mishaps?

There can come a time in the life of any government when it lapses into a narrative whereby, from the most trivial of mishaps, a pattern of incompetence and failure emerges. This seems to be happening to the Labour government and Keir Starmer’s premiership tragically early.

It was he, after all, who told us he’d end the “chaos and confusion”. But, without trying too hard, it’s easy to see how events of the past week have turned into a “one thing after another” story.

The release from prison by mistake of Hadush Kebatu is the most obvious component. The man that home secretary Shabana Mahmood rightly calls “a vile child sex offender” first came to prominence as an illegal migrant who went on to sexually assault a 14-year-old girl and a woman while living in an asylum hotel in Essex.

His eventual arrest in July had sparked protests outside Epping’s Bell Hotel, which had been commandeered to accommodate asylum seekers including Kebatu. But some sort of justice was being done: he was sentenced to 12 months in prison, followed by deportation.

But, in the kind of mistake that happens too often in a system under strain, after a matter of weeks, he was mistakenly released from jail. Last year, there were 262 such blunders; none made the news, let alone dominated it.

His release prompted a 48-hour manhunt that ended with him being re-arrested in north London – but not before a second-act farce in which Kebatu spent hours trying to get back into Chelmsford nick, not unlike the plot of a 1960s comedy caper starring Peter Sellers called Two-Way Stretch. Once recaptured he threatened to challenge his deportation – prompting him to be given a £500 bung to go back to Ethiopia.

The revelation that Kebatu was effectively paid to leave the country quietly was branded by the Conservatives as an “absolute disgrace”.

It wasn’t the government’s only “one thing after another” saga causing headlines and headaches this week. We have also had Rachel Reeves and her failure to get a landlord’s licence to rent out the house she no longer lives in – which can be a criminal offence punishable with a fine of up to £30,000. In reality, it may well be little more than a trivial administrative oversight on the part of the estate agency that had offered to apply for it, but dropped the ball.

The chancellor herself was a knowledgeable evangelist for such licences. Her position was made murkier still by having claimed that she was unaware that she needed one – before correspondence then emerged between her husband and the letting agent that showed he had been informed that one was required.

Suddenly, the kind of error that happens every day is contributing to a “Starmer’s worst week yet” narrative. And the chancellor has been particularly prone to such calamities. Remember the “bogus CV” story, where she tried to pass herself off as a sort of modern-day Maynard Keynes – or the kerfuffle over taking freebie tickets to a Sabrina Carpenter gig worth £1,000 as the government cut disability benefits?

Reeves’s latest woes also neatly add to a longer succession of Labour MPs who’ve got into scrapes related to residential real estate. These include: Lucy Powell, new deputy leader (lets a room to a fellow MP, who claims the rent and bills through parliamentary expenses); Angela Rayner (stamp duty, resignation); Rushanara Ali (homelessness minister, evicted tenants, resignation); Tulip Siddiq (anti-corruption minister, faces corruption trial in Bangladesh, resignation); and Jas Athwal (backbencher, one of the biggest landlords in the House of Commons, rented out some poor-quality properties).

Although all are very different cases, we may ask: what is it about Labour MPs and property?

Such disparate threads can be knitted into a cardigan of disaster: a report on the waste of money spent on asylum hotels and Home Office ineptitude; the loss of the safe Caerphilly seat in Wales; Labour’s record low poll ratings; and the arrest of an Afghan migrant granted asylum (under the Tories) now charged with murder. All are presented or perceived as mere steps in Starmer’s blundering walk towards inevitable oblivion, as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

We’ve seen this phenomenon before. I seem to remember it was originally identified by Alastair Campbell, who understood how easily luckless prime ministers in the past could succumb to it. It certainly happened to John Major, thanks to Campbell’s own efforts when he was working for Tony Blair. After the debacle of the Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis, Major presided over a booming economy, but stumbled from sex scandal to parliamentary crisis to money scandal on a weekly basis.

It befell Gordon Brown, who was finished even before he left his microphone on after meeting that “bigoted woman” at the 2010 election, no matter that he brilliantly rescued the banks in the global financial crisis. And we saw it all over again with Theresa May, where the collapse of her wonky party conference set and a sore throat were placed effortlessly, though illogically, into the whole endless Brexit fiasco.

In all cases, there were lost elections, dismal poll ratings (which tended to feed on each other) and a constant, insistent drumbeat of challenges to their respective leaderships. Once the public, eagerly assisted by a mostly hostile media, decides that a prime minister is a bungler who doesn’t know what they’re doing, there’s usually no way back.

It’s getting that way with Starmer, against all expectations set before the general election. Like Major, Brown and May, the reputations for effectiveness before they entered No 10 made their perceived decline even more poignant. Like them, Starmer has now lost too many elections, too many “key” advisers and ministers, and had too many “resets” and new “phases” for a premiership that is still only 16 months old.

It’s not irrecoverable – but the Budget next month and the set of elections next May will fit easily into the “disaster narrative”.

The real tragedy will come if Starmer can somehow survive until things really are getting better, but people – especially his own backbenchers – are so used to broken promises and things getting botched that they can’t really believe it, or him.