“Delivery, delivery, delivery.”
The words of the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, about his priorities in his curtain-raising interview for the new political term with Matt Chorley on BBC Radio 5 live, which you can listen to here.
It was a tacit admission that despite campaigning on a platform of “change” before the general election, there is plenty of evidence that plenty of folk think there has been nowhere near enough of it.
Or, plenty may have concluded that what has changed has changed in the wrong direction.
Sir Keir argues it was always going to take time to get things changing, but he is frustrated he hasn’t managed to deliver more of it up to now.
Part of his solution is another shake-up of his Downing Street team.
You can read more about that from Henry Zeffman here.
The other is to set out what he and the government are doing and to make the case that it is better than what he and his ministers are increasingly framing as the likely alternative – Reform UK.
Privately, figures in government acknowledge that Reform had a visible and noisy summer.
The party set out to try to dominate the political conversation when others often take a break and by and large they achieved that.
The prominence of the issue of asylum, particularly the rows about the Bell Hotel in Epping in Essex, gave a salience to a theme Reform regard as their own.
“And we didn’t come this far just to get this far,” a senior Reform figure tells me, as party leader Nigel Farage heads to Washington to rail against the government about the Lucy Connolly case, and then heads to Birmingham on Friday for his party conference.
The party is doing all it can to maintain its momentum.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that barely hours into this new political season and both the prime minister and the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper were each attempting to make a virtue of their approach – and try to contrast it with Reform’s.
The pitch from them both amounted to arguing that they are assembling what they see as a careful set of thoughtful, workable, iterative steps forward on asylum policy.
The new detail this time was the government’s decision to suspend family reunion applications from refugees.
They contrasted that with what they claim is not only opportunistic rhetoric from Farage, but an attempt to sow grievance without providing solutions.
Reform counter that it is only they who are offering solutions that might actually work – such as withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, which both Labour in government now and the Conservatives before them baulked at.
This tussle gets to the heart of our politics right now – and in the coming months, even years.
Are people running out of patience with a government with a strategy that, until now at least, has demanded just that – patience?
And if plenty are, and the opinion polls suggest many are, would they embrace an insurgent, barely tested alternative, Reform UK?
These are the questions politics looks set to keep returning to.
And, in time, we will get an answer.
