Labour is back in power, but the twenties are not the nineties.

Your author campaigns as a candidate in the 1997 election. Things could only get better then.

It was inevitable back in early July that comparisons would be drawn between Sir Keir Starmer’s victory and Sir Tony Blair’s in 1997. Both men achieved a very similar, large majority in Parliament on the back of a centrist programme with few major promises or hostages to fortune. They both came into office after years of Tory decline, mismanagement and sleaze.

Here we are in mid-August, however, and it’s very apparent that the fortunes of the two leaders are likely to be very different.

In 1997, there was a sense of real optimism and excitement. The economy was broadly on the up and, although Labour committed to sticking to Tory spending plans for two years, there was a sense of a very clear agenda for change. Gordon Brown’s dramatic decision to grant independence to the Bank of England was an early symbolic gesture that seemed to set a tone.

These guys were in control. They were on a mission.

Five or six weeks into Starmer’s administration and we see a government that has already been badly blown off course by the right-wing riots. Thankfully, the government’s response to the unrest has been decisive, with the criminal justice system pulling out all the stops to get the perpetrators into court. But Starmer’s personal favourability ratings are now back to pre-election levels. His political honeymoon lasted about as long as some people’s actual honeymoons.

I’ve written before about how Sir Keir is broadly a decent man who can govern a lot more competently than the shower who dominated the political scene over the past 14 years. We should all wake up each morning and give thanks over our cornflakes for this. The problem is that I don’t think he’s hugely visionary or someone with any clear sense of ideology, despite some of his youthful years embracing the mantras of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

And the messaging from the government has, quite frankly, been all over the place so far.

Take the central issue of the economy, for example.

If you look back at the news headlines of recent weeks — whether journalists are relaying public statements of Labour ministers or reporting off-the-record briefings from advisers and spin doctors — you’d come away completely bemused about the direction of travel.

We have been told the nation’s finances are in a terrible state.

So how are we going to fill it?

Starmer, in the run-up to the election campaign, explicitly rejected the idea that the options were higher taxes or lower spending.

“I understand why so far in this campaign,” he said, “what’s being put to us is ‘are you going to tax more or spend less?’ But I’m rejecting that that is the only argument, so this manifesto is a total rejection of that argument. We’re going for growth.”

So, we’re not going to raise taxes. And we’re not going to cut spending.

But hold on a second. The nation’s finances are even worse than we thought they were.

Yes, we do want growth, but there’s an immediate black hole.

So when we said that we wouldn’t raise taxes, we meant we wouldn’t raise the taxes we were explicitly forced to rule out raising. But other ones will have to go up in the autumn Budget.

And when we said we wouldn’t cut spending, we’re actually asking government departments to start looking for cuts.

But please don’t worry.

Even though we’re stony broke, there’s still money available to give the hard-pressed junior doctors a substantial payout. And other public-sector workers above-inflation pay rises. And we’ll almost certainly lift the two-child benefit cap before the end of the year.

In relaying all this, I am not taking particularly taking sides in any of the substantive debates. There’s a good case that the doctors need more money and that the benefit cap has increased child poverty and needs to go. The black hole in the finances may well dictate spending cuts elsewhere and rises in, say, capital gains tax.

My point is that the messaging is utterly inconsistent and changes week to week. If you asked a member of the public who was keeping just half an eye on some of this stuff, they really wouldn’t be able to tell you what was happening or what the government intended.

This all feels a million miles away from the assuredness of the New Labour administration of the 90s.

Then, look at the prisons.

In the election campaign, Labour pledged to create more prison places and condemned the Tories for promising an expansion, but never actually delivering it.

After the election, we were told that the prisons were at breaking point and the only way around the problem was to give early release to inmates serving shorter sentences.

When the riots came along, we immediately created 500 extra prison places.

Nothing about this expedient flip-flopping will make much sense to voters or give them any real feeling for what the government actually stands for.

Is the message that too many people are behind bars and that they can often be released early without any consequences for society? Or is it that we need to lock more people up and have stronger deterrent sentences in the wake of the wanton violence and vandalism we’ve seen in recent weeks?

(Yes, I know the two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Some of the people currently serving time are not going to be a danger and many of the rioters are. But in terms of political messaging — where simplicity and consistency really matters — this is way too messy.)

Even governments that come to power with very clear agendas can be thrown off course. Harold Macmillan’s ‘events’.

Some of these events are short-term and domestic in nature. People’s impressions of the early days of this administration will now sadly be dominated by the riots in the wake of the Southport tragedy.

Some of the events will be longer-term in nature and global. The Labour government will face considerable challenges if there is a major confrontation between Israel and Iran or its proxies, for instance. Even the war in Ukraine is showing itself to have a dynamic quality that gives it a renewed sense of unpredictability.

Few issues stir online controversy as potently as Israel. Few social media feeds are immune from the influence of Russian bots. So domestically, these international events create local tension and conflict. We then have the real-world consequences that come from the resulting energy shocks, supply-chain issues, humanitarian crises, migration pressures and so forth.

And what about the United States? The Democrats are on a high following the decision to dump the aged Biden in favour of Kamala Harris. But this will be a closely-fought and tense election that may not be resolved in a normal way with the smooth transition of power anticipated in a healthy democracy.

US political instability will mean market instability. And the shockwaves of any internal conflict will be felt around the world. A Trump victory, the prospect of which is thankfully receding, would have huge implications for trade and defence in Europe. It cannot yet be ruled out.

These are the kind of headwinds against which even a government with a very clear and steady agenda would struggle. My feeling is that the current Labour administration will be buffeted pretty heavily.