A week is a long time in politics. If you’d asked me a week ago whether Sir Keir Starmer should remain as Prime Minister, I would have insisted that he should. This morning the answer is not so clear.
What we can say with certainty is this: No 10 is behaving in the most irresponsible, inward-looking, solipsistic, self-interested manner imaginable. It is an embarrassment to watch them do this and a betrayal of those who were relying on them to demonstrate grown-up government. It is a playschool tantrum in place of a functioning administration.
Until this week, the ledger on whether Starmer should go weighed on the side of no. Obviously there were significant flaws in the administration, great big gaping inadequacies which urgently needed to be addressed. But the man had just won a general election with an unprecedented 411 seats. Replacing him seemed mad.
Historically, there have been very few Labour leaders who can win majorities in the Commons. Over the entire 125-year history of the party, the list includes only four men: Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Starmer himself. When you find one, you better have a very good reason to get rid of them, because it’s not clear that another one will be along anytime soon.
The route to a Labour victory at the next election does not lie in leadership bids, or talking about asylum seekers, or embracing the culture war. It lies in demonstrating that a stable and competent government can improve people’s lives: repair the economy and rebuild public services. It lies through shorter NHS waiting times, repaired potholes, functioning courts, and families who can eat out on a Tuesday night without having to remortgage their home.
Getting involved in a leadership contest is therefore the precise opposite of what you need to be doing. You need to demonstrate seriousness, gravitas, conscientiousness, diligence. You need to put every molecule of your being into securing results that people can feel by the time of the next election. In Starmer’s words when he became Prime Minister, you need to return to a “government of service”.
These points were a very effective counter to the idea that Starmer should be replaced. But now that calculus is changing.
It is not changing because of his critics. It is changing because of the behaviour of his own officials, in his own administration, against his own secretaries of state. Over the course of yesterday afternoon, they began a pre-emptive briefing war against Health Secretary Wes Streeting. One political correspondent after another was given the briefing, in a closely co-ordinated and highly targeted attack. This is what they spent their time doing, instead of focusing on the things in this country which must be repaired.
It might be the first time in modern British political history where No 10 has briefed against someone for a leadership challenge which does not exist. Streeting patently holds leadership ambitions. He should do – he is competent and plain-spoken, in any bid for the leadership he would be a de-facto front-runner. He has raised his profile in recent months, but only in a completely typical way for a politician and well within the normal parameters of loyal behaviour.
It’s likely that No 10 thought it was replicating the successful operation it had recently conducted against Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. During the Labour conference they had struck out at his not-very-secret leader aspirations effectively. But the difference was that Burnham was quite obviously on manoeuvres. Streeting was not.
That puts the onus of responsibility for starting an internal war on Downing Street, not its critics. Starmer has thrown away the most convincing argument in his favour: that the instability of a leadership challenge would be ruinous to the party’s prospects. He has done it by starting the challenge against himself.
Speaking on the Today programme this morning, Streeting was careful to fire back at those around Starmer for doing the briefing, rather than the Prime Minister specifically. This was a sensible approach. But his basic argument simply cannot be true and in fact is logically impossible. Starmer put these members of staff in charge. He either signed off on the briefing war, in which case he’s culpable, or he did not, in which case he has lost control of his operation. Either way, yesterday’s developments reflect very badly on him indeed.
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To have entered into this kind of madhouse Westminster squabbling so soon after an election – with such a large majority, when the country so urgently needs serious government – is simply unforgivable. It is especially grave coming just two weeks ahead of the Budget, when market reactions will prove economically and politically pivotal to the Government’s agenda.
Of course, none of this is in any way new. We’ve just lived through 14 years of it – an endless merry-go-round of Tory leaders and ministers, engaged in a perpetual mutual blood-letting, pausing occasionally for an election before returning to their narcissism, a circus in place of a government. But damn it – Starmer was supposed to be better than this. He was our last chance to show that competent centre-left government works and can provide answers that populism never will.
He’s squandering it. Right now, this very second: the chance of a lifetime. And by allowing himself to become involved in these petty Westminster games, Starmer has done the opposite of what he intended to do. He has come up with the best possible argument for why he should be replaced rather than retained.
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