Keir Starmer was very obviously aware of the symbolism in choosing to hold his first set-piece speech as prime minister in the Downing Street garden. And, as with much political symbolism, this included a certain amount of deliberate myth-making. To begin on a fairly prosaic point, while even No 10 described the venue as the “rose garden”, there isn’t really any such thing. Behind No 10 and No 11 Downing Street there is a big, combined back garden, including a large expanse of lawn at one end of which Starmer stood in front of a lectern. There are a handful of rose bushes, but it is very much not a rose garden, the name seemingly used in mimicry of the more famous – and actual – rose garden at the White House. The London version holds a peculiar dual role as a private garden for the prime minister and chancellor of the time, plus their families, and as a public space for some official receptions – and, infamously, for less official ones. Always something of a warm weather spillover for the many dozens of staff who work in the buildings, the garden was the scene of a series of Covid lockdown-flouting parties under Boris Johnson. Perhaps the best-known image of that time showed the then prime minister and his team drinking wine on the large terrace next to the buildings in May 2020, while others gathered around an impromptu drinks trolley set up on the lawn. At another gathering, in April 2021, revellers reportedly damaged a garden swing set up for Johnson’s son, Wilfred. “They didn’t just break a garden swing with their rose garden antics,” Starmer wrote in a slightly clunking analogy in an opinion piece for Tuesday’s Times. “They broke something even more fragile and more precious: the trust of the British people in politics and their politicians.”
Starmer explicitly mentioned the parties in his speech, attended not only by journalists but also members of the public he met during the election. “This garden, and this building, are now back in your service,” he said. In another Covid echo, not mentioned in the speech, the garden was the venue for Dominic Cummings’ slightly bizarre May 2020 press conference at which he sought to explain his travels around the country during lockdown. Probably the best-known official events hosted in recent years in the Downing Street garden came in May 2010, when David Cameron and Nick Clegg used it for their chummy joint announcement about the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. But for the most part, even in summer, the outdoor space is rarely used for events like press conferences, for two reasons. Firstly, getting large numbers of non-staff members into Downing Street is logistically time-consuming, with everyone having to hand over their phones as they enter for security reasons. And then there is the sheer unpredictability of the British weather. And that leads us to the most prosaic element of all in the choice of venue. For all that Starmer made a virtue of using the garden, also another reason: the much more commonly used purpose-built press conference room in 9 Downing Street, built under Johnson, is out of action for refurbishment work.