Starmer seeks to take control after bumpy start

I have an overwhelming sense of deja-vu.

The build-up music, the stage, the banners, the backdrop, the choreography made this feel like an election manifesto launch.

The event looked like a manifesto launch, the document on all of our chairs looked like a manifesto and the speech that followed from the prime minister sounded like the one on manifesto launch day.

But the general election was five months ago and the time for manifestos, at least new ones, has passed.

So, what was going on here?

The 40-page document setting out the Labour government's "milestones"

This was the prime minister using the pulling power of government to tempt his audience to Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire.

Insert your own jokes here about whether his job is Mission Impossible or what a Carry On his opening months in government have been in the eyes of some.

(Carry On Up the Khyber was filmed here, among others).

Having walked down Goldfinger Avenue – James Bond has heritage here too – we are led into a warehouse like windowless studio exuding a place-less quality: we could have been anywhere.

But it was a big space, intended to project big ambition as the government set out the key things it wants to focus on and be judged on.

This is where we enter a dictionary full of names for the signposting Labour has sought to do in recent years, in opposition and in government, about where it is heading.

It is almost two years since Sir Keir set out his so called "missions" for government, the controlling thoughts and themes of how he would approach running the country.

Then came the "first steps," which were set out, as it happens, just before the general election was called.

Then, in government, he sought to "fix the foundations" and now he is setting out half a dozen measurable "milestones" - key priorities in key areas that he hopes to deliver before the next general election no later than 2029.

In the audience there were a smattering of cabinet ministers primed to talk to us afterwards, plenty of Labour supporters and a couple of dozen reporters.

Beyond the "milestones" there is also talk in the 43-page document accompanying the speech of the foundations, including "secure borders."

But, as I asked the prime minister, that leaves an ambiguity as to whether cutting immigration, legal and illegal, is a priority or not.

His answer pointed to him seeing it as a baseline expectation of government, rather than one of these half dozen points of focus, but it strikes me that leaves space for confusion.

One other thing I must mention is the prime minister's criticism of the civil service.

It took Tony Blair two years in office before he grumbled about the "scars on my back" from trying to change the public sector.

Sir Keir has managed it in five months.

And he is not the only one new to government making similar observations – as our Chief Political Correspondent Henry Zeffman writes here.

Critics, not least the Conservatives, say this speech screamed "relaunch."

And yet this had been in the works for months, a long-planned junction to set out what the government wants to lean into next.

Jonathan Ashworth, a friend of the prime minister's and the Chief Executive of Labour Together, has told the Today Podcast on BBC Sounds that governments in the 2020s must never stop explaining what they are doing.

But it also true that this mimicry of a manifesto launch spoke of a government very aware it needs to wrest back the agenda and look like it is in control, after a bumpy start.