Andy Burnham had it right. “This is a final chance to change,” he said in his victory speech. “This is what people said directly to me on the hundreds of doorsteps that I stood on. We must hear it. We must act upon it, and we must get it right. There will be no second chance, but it is a chance now.”
This really is the last chance saloon. Not just for Labour, but for our whole way of conducting politics. It is a last chance for mainstream politics, based on the promise that democracy can improve people’s lives in practical ways. The promise that we conduct ourselves in rational terms of national improvement.
This promise has been left unfilled since the financial crash. We have lost nearly two decades to stagnation, pessimism, incompetence and despair. Unless this is halted now, voters will take a chance – probably on Nigel Farage, or perhaps on some other nightmarish huckster. Once they are in power there is no guarantee they can be extracted again. And they will inject the poison of their politics into the national bloodstream: race riots, grievance, victimhood, authoritarianism.
We can’t do this again. Another change of prime minister before the 2029 election would constitute a level of chaos akin to that of the fag-end of the Tory government. It has to be Andy Burnham and it has to work, or we’re all in a lot of trouble.
The Manchester mayor stood in Reform’s heartland, a seat composed disproportionately of older, white, non-university educated voters – precisely the demographic which supports Farage. The seat provided the party’s sixth highest vote share in the 2024 election.
Burnham did not attract many voters over from Reform – just five per cent of 2024 Reform voters backed him. But he stopped the bleeding, limiting Labour’s losses to the party to 11 per cent. Crucially, he then united the progressive parties, stripping the Lib Dem and Green vote down to a statistical rounding error as voters threw their lot with him to stop Farage. This is what can be done on a national level to win the next general election.
It is now clear that Burnham has the charisma, the ideas and the strategy to beat Reform. He may fail. But if anyone can do it, it’s him.
Starmer’s immediate response was to insist that he isn’t going anywhere and will stand in any coming leadership election. If he really believes this, he is the last person left in the country who does.
It’s not unusual for leaders to behave this way. If they had the kind of temperament which gave up easily they would never have made it to where they are in the first place. Prime ministers rarely go of their own volition. They go because either voters or their party extract them.
In this case, it will probably involve the Cabinet. We know that home secretary Shabana Mahmood wants him to go. Foreign secretary Yvette Cooper hasn’t said anything publicly but it was notable that she could not bring herself to say that he was the right person to lead the country when recently asked about it in an interview. Energy secretary Ed Miliband reportedly no longer takes the prime minister’s calls.
If Starmer won’t take the decision himself, it will be up to these figures and those around them to force the issue, through ultimatums and eventually a series of rolling resignations. We saw this sort of thing happen in the wake of the local elections, when it was unclear exactly who could take over. Now that it is crystal clear who would take over there is a greater incentive for Cabinet secretaries to pull the trigger.
If ministers fail to act, it will be up to the parliamentary party, with more Labour MPs joining those who have already demanded that Starmer goes. The number currently stands at over 90. Double that would make it almost impossible for Starmer to stay on.
Failing that, the task would fall to party members. Burnham would be forced to launch a formal leadership challenge, which would take place over the summer months. At the end of it, barring some impossible miracle, Starmer would lose.
There is really no reason for it to play out this way. There is nothing to be gained, given that every avenue anyway ends in defeat.
Starmer has been a bitterly frustrating prime minister. He has failed to challenge the ideas of the far-right. He has pursued a foolhardy electoral strategy of trying to appeal to voters who will never support him by offending those who elected him. He has failed to create a stable governance machine in No 10. And most importantly, he has failed to work diligently and conscientiously on the policy agenda in front of him. He failed at the basic task of improving lives, the promise on which mainstream democratic politics is founded.
He’s not the worst prime minister we’ve ever had. He’s not even the worst prime minister of the last five years. But he is by some distance the most disappointing. He will be remembered as the man who squandered a precious opportunity.
Nothing can change that fact. But if he spends his last months in office pushing the government into chaos through a doomed battle to save his own skin, his reputation will be even more damaged than it already is. It will remove any last lingering threads of respect and sympathy from political observers. His best chance now is to give way, propose a dignified timetable for his departure, try to establish some sort of minimal legacy in the meantime and have Burnham become prime minister in time for the Labour conference in autumn.
It would preserve his sense of honour. It would give the party some stability. And it would allow Burnham the best possible start in government.
This really is our last chance. Starmer’s personal interests are immaterial and so are those of the Labour Party. This is about the future of the country. It is of historic importance that it is done well.
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