The morning after Labour had won a resounding general election victory, Keir Starmer stood outside 10 Downing Street in light summer rain and pledged to lead the country on a “rediscovery of who we are”.

Voters had overwhelmingly rejected the Conservatives and the first-past-the post voting system had delivered Labour a crushing 156-seat majority on just 33.7 per cent share of the vote. But this was already being called a “loveless landslide”: 40 per cent of the electorate had not even bothered to vote.

Less than three weeks later, on 22 July, at the New Statesman summer reception, Starmer told me that he thought the social atmosphere in the country had changed since the election. We had entered calmer, less chaotic and more hopeful times. He would lead transformative change and unify our fractious, disunited kingdom.

But he also warned that evening that the forces of nationalist populism were gathering on the Continent. “You only have to look across the Channel at Europe and you see nationalism and populism in all its forms and all its strengths,” he said. “And do not think for a minute that that could never happen here. It could – and it might – if we fail in our project of delivering change”.

By the end of the month, ethno-sectarian riots had broken out in some of the England’s most neglected towns following the horrifying murder of three young girls at an early morning dance class in Southport. In retrospect, the riots were paradoxically the high point of the first six months of Starmer’s troubled premiership, which one cabinet member described to me this week as being defined by “drift and dysfunction”.

Drawing on his experience as Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer cancelled his family holiday in August and responded to the anarchy on our streets by using the full force of the state to restore order and punish the rioters. Starmer was a lawyer long before he was a politician and he is most comfortable when interpreting and enforcing rules, or the law, when politics becomes a form of legalism rather than a contest about values.

Labour is keen to forget the riots ever happened – they blamed far right thugs and moved on – but I think they revealed something fundamental about the mood of mass disaffection in the country. Perhaps only Morgan McSweeney of those closest to Starmer truly grasps the scale of the challenges ahead in an era in which Nigel Farage’s anti-system Reform UK is rising fast. McSweeney, who is sceptical of left-wing progressivism and insists Labour must put country before party and the interests of the fabled “working people” before university-educated metropolitan liberals, believes people “have had the hope beaten out of them”. It’s not that they do not believe in change: rather, McSweeney has said, “they think nothing can change”.

That is a dangerous sentiment and can lead to something worse than mistrust: fatalism. It’s true that in Britain trust in politics and our elected politicians is at an all-time low, according to a National Centre for Social Research report published in June. That Starmer and senior colleagues such as Angela Rayner, so soon after the winning the election, were embroiled in scandal over receiving freebies and other benefits from Waheed Alli, a Labour fixer, peer and party donor, merely confirmed people’s cynicism about Westminster politics.

In recent days, the government’s refusal to compensate the so-called Waspi women, those leading the campaign against state pension inequality, has alienated many of the same Labour MPs who were already enraged about Rachel Reeves’ decision to abolish the winter fuel allowance for the majority of pensioners.

In opposition Starmer had called the treatment of Waspi women a “huge injustice”. But opposition is different from government and he and Reeves now say it is their duty to “account for every penny of taxpayers’ money”.

Labour came into office promising to power economic growth and its MPs looked to Reeves, the totemic first female Chancellor of the Exchequer, to deliver a Budget as consequential as Geoffrey Howe’s monetarist Budget of 1981, which hardened the free market turn of the Thatcher era. But the economic indicators are not good for Labour. The Bank of England has downgraded growth forecasts, and the economy could contract in the final quarter of 2024. A party committed to growth is delivering zero growth.

Reeves believes that her Budget “got the balance right” between tax rises, notably the £25 billion increase on employer National Insurance contributions, and public spending cuts. She never tires of blaming the previous government for Labour’s dire economic inheritance – the £22 billon “black hole” in the public finances, and so on - and is determined not to U-turn and backtrack.

But some of Reeves’ closet allies believe her early decision to cut the winter fuel allowance for pensioners – opposed by the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and Farage’s Reform but long championed by the Treasury – was an unforced error that together with the hostility from the business community to her Budget has, as one cabinet colleague puts it, “pierced her aura”.

Reeves is aware of the unease about her performance among some Labour MPs and is desperate not to appear remote or imperious. Nor does she believe she has been captured by the Treasury. She makes sure she has breakfast at least once a week with a cabinet colleague and visits the members’ tearoom after Treasury questions. She also believes that, with patience and resolve, her strategy of state interventionism, supply-side planning reform and investment in green technologies will be vindicated: Labour offer stability and a clear direction of travel, she says. Economic growth will follow.

But what if it doesn’t follow? Or at best remains anaemic?

What is clear is that Labour had a strategy to win the general election, led by Morgan McSweeney (now chief of staff) and Pat McFadden (now the de facto deputy prime minister), but not to govern. Sue Gray, a veteran Whitehall insider and Starmer’s first pick as chief of staff, was sacked after prolonged feuding and the party’s underwhelming conference in Liverpool in September. The reward for her defenestration is a peerage. She is one of 30 new peers created by Starmer as he seeks to strengthen Labour against the Conservative majority in the House of Lords.

Yet inside No 10 Gray is widely blamed for what one Labour grandee describes as the worst start by any incoming government in their lifetime. “The riots saved Keir, a bit like Gordon [Brown] and the financial crisis,” the grandee told me. “In 1997, Jonathan Powell [Tony Blair’s chief of staff] had a plan for the first 100 days of government, and then a plan for the next 100 days. But this lot had no plan.”

Or if they did have a plan, it was incoherent and undermined by factionalism, with Gray seeking to exclude McSweeney and Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s director of communications, from cabinet and other key strategic meetings.

McSweeney is determined to do things differently. Labour aspired to be a grand, mission-led government but its tone and ambitions have changed. It now speaks of milestones rather than missions and, as with the New Labour years, it believes in setting targets so that progress can be measured. In that way, a sceptical electorate may be persuaded by a process of delivery. “We can use measurable targets on NHS waiting lists for example to show the difference being made,” one No 10 insider says.

The cogs in the machine are turning. Blair era stalwarts Jonathan Powell, the new national security adviser, and Liz Lloyd, the new director of policy, are returning to the heart of government as Starmer goes back to the future in pursuit of renewed purpose. And Peter Mandelson, aged 71, will be the next British ambassador to the United States, tasked with insinuating himself within the Trump administration. Mandelson is an arch Machiavel who loves the game of politics – the gossip, the networking, the scheming. But like so many Labour progressives he has publicly traduced Donald Trump. He is also a politician from another era and may struggle to understand and respond to the protectionist forces unlocked by the American New Right. In a post on social media on Friday, Chris LaCivita, co-chair of Trump’s presidential campaign, dismissed Mandelson as an “absolute moron”.

These are new times at Westminster and Labour is still coming to terms with the responsibilities of power. At a Christmas gathering of lobby correspondents at No 10 on Wednesday evening, Starmer joked about his appalling personal ratings and Labour’s unpopularity. But this should be no laughing matter. We are living in an era of extraordinary politics and great electoral volatility and shocks. Despite commanding a huge majority in the House of Commons, Labour is inspiring no one, least of all its own MPs.

In mitigation Labour inherited a country suffering from a crisis of morale, economic decline and a crumbling public realm. Starmer and Reeves are correct to ask for patience, but they need to offer more than a form of arid social democratic incrementalism, a desiccated politics of targets and delivery. Something fundamental is missing – a propulsive national story to tell the country about what Labour is and what it wants to achieve and to what end. What, one might ask, did Starmer really mean by a leading a rediscovery of who we are. Or was this yet another a slogan uttered without any serious thought or deliberation?

More than this, Labour seems at odds with the spirit of the times as they are being channelled by Donald Trump and Elon Musk in America. In an age of raw power, the primacy of the nation state is being reasserted and there is a growing revolt against the overreach of the bureaucratic state. If the struggles of the government’s first six months in power are replicated in the next six months, the populist right will be further emboldened and unrest among Labour MPs will grow.