Let’s start with what Sir Keir Starmer and his hundreds of MPs might be posting on their social media, sticking on leaflets, or boasting about in interviews.
The government has, as promised, gone ahead with many of the plans it committed to in the Labour manifesto – whether that is shaking up the planning rules, going ahead with nationalising the railways, giving workers many more rights at work, creating GB Energy or getting rid of one-word Ofsted judgements in England.
Like them or not, these are chunky measures designed to make big changes to the country. “Our agenda is massive,” one minister says, “and I feel really optimistic.”
A senior figure in the party warns colleagues that “things are absolutely recoverable” – reminding others that plenty of things went wrong in 1997 for Tony Blair’s new government, and they won big again in 2001, then again in 2005.
At home, many point to the prime minister’s handling of the summer riots. “He is a serious man, he is made for it,” says one cabinet minister, adding he was “absolutely comfortable and resolute…he knew what to do, and gripped it completely”.
Another insider wonders: “imagine how wrong that could have gone,” if the government’s approach had been different on the riots.
There are visibly better relationships between Westminster, Holyrood, Cardiff and Stormont, with the new Council of the Nations and Regions.
Attention has been lavished on the English mayors too, not just in the grip and grin of photocalls, but being plumbed in to policies at an earlier stage of the planning.
