The honeymoon's over. He didn’t even get 100 days.

Though he generally received approval from most sides of the political spectrum and from most parts of the nation for the firm and effective stand he took against an upsurge in racist violence a month into his premiership – proving at least that in the minds of most you still won’t go far wrong if you choose to oppose the Far Right – Keir Starmer’s approach to the nation’s finances has thus far proven rather less popular.

In her first month in office, his Chancellor announced that those finances were in an even worse state than she’d feared, and laid the blame firmly at the feet of the former, Conservative administration.

The Tories cried foul and blamed both the new government and officials at the Treasury for claims that the successive Conservative governments had left a “black hole” in the country’s coffers.

However, earlier this month, a letter emerged from the UK’s most senior civil servant pointing out that budgetary uncertainties had indeed resulted from the Tories’ failure to conduct a formal Spending Review during their last three years in power.

Nevertheless, Keir Starmer’s dour perspective on Britain’s dire fiscal straits hasn’t gone down particularly well with the left wing of his own party and has given the Right ammunition with which to attack his fledgling administration.

First, he suspended a handful of Labour rebels who supported a legislative amendment calling for the repeal of a two-child cap on child support benefits which had been introduced by the Conservatives as a measure to save much-depleted public funds – but which undoubtedly had contributed to a rise in family poverty.

Next, his Chancellor had abolished a universal benefit whereby pensioners of whatever financial means would receive payments to help with their winter fuel costs.

Despite the sensible argument that such allowances should be means-tested – and that the country could no longer afford to subsidize the heating of its more wealthy pensioners – this emotive issue was seized upon by the right-wing tabloids to trigger a wave of resentment in the public imagination.

The argument offered by one minister – that a failure to take such actions would have resulted in “a run on the pound and the economy crashing” – fell on deaf ears among those newspaper editors who had once gleefully cheered Liz Truss’s disastrously misjudged efforts to bring the nation to the brink of fiscal and economic collapse.

Nor did the news that the state pension would next year rise by over £400 above inflation – rather more than the winter fuel allowance due to be lost by wealthier pensioners – do much to dampen that self-righteous, populist ire.

Related News

News from Nowhere: Local difficulties

News from Nowhere: Trumped Again

Indeed, even some of the nation’s more militant trade union leaders joined those tabloids in demanding the decision be reversed.

When last week the controversial measure came to a parliamentary vote, only one Labour MP voted against it – but 52 of Keir Starmer’s MPs, including seven government ministers, were absent from the House of Commons.

Although his supporters appreciate that the United Kingdom’s economic woes are hardly the new government’s fault, even Sir Keir’s most ardent fans are feeling profoundly disappointed that it’s turned out that he’s had no choice but to reduce public spending.

In fact, it’s perhaps his most faithful fans who feel most acutely let down by his failure to perform immediate fiscal miracles.

Many Labour MPs are privately grumbling about the way that their party’s new-found economic realism has turned out to be an unremitting tale of doom and gloom. And some are doing so rather more publicly than that.

It also hasn’t helped his public image that, even as he’s clawed back benefits from pensioners and maintained the deprivation of the poorest families, he’s advanced pragmatically quick fixes to long-running industrial disputes by agreeing to major pay rises for junior doctors and train drivers – people whose salaries were already significantly above national averages – and who, in the case of the latter, could hardly be considered the UK’s highest skilled or best qualified workers, but who are represented by a particularly vocal, militant and powerful trade union.

Why – as the former premier Rishi Sunak asked in parliament earlier this month – did Mr. Starmer choose to take money away from “low-income pensioners” and give it to extremely well-paid transport workers?

The Labour leader might as well have handed his predecessor a cricket bat and asked him to hit him with it.

Meanwhile, Starmer’s well-meant attempts to promote compromises on such issues as European reintegration and global geopolitical crises have been pretty much guaranteed to alienate everyone on all sides.

His administration has also been accused of cronyism for affording access and advisory roles to friends and donors.

Of course, everyone knows that Keir Starmer didn’t invent cronyism, nor was he responsible for the UK’s massive levels of inflation, high interest rates, economic mismanagement, environmental indifference, Brexit, or more than a decade of underinvestment in key public services.

Yet there have been hugely unrealistic expectations placed upon the shoulders of a new Prime Minister who so earnestly and often promised change.

Sir Keir didn’t start the fire. But it’s his job to put it out before the country can rebuild itself. And everyone expects that work of reconstruction to have begun, as he'd pledged, on day one.