This is the last chance. That much must be clear to everyone – to Labour MPs, to Downing Street, to the opposition, and to the Prime Minister himself. Keir Starmer is in the death zone. He has not been saved. He has merely experienced a stay of execution. It’ll take something close to a miracle to rescue him now.
Yesterday afternoon, even this felt like an unrealistically optimistic assessment. When Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, stood up to demand Starmer resigned it felt like a body blow, the likes of which he could not recover from. Sarwar was too senior a figure, acting too prominently, for that kind of damage to be repairable.
But somehow, through the fickle herd-mentality of Westminster, the Sarwar gambit actually helped Starmer. In the moments afterwards, Starmer’s office – now without the guiding hand of Morgan McSweeney, his recently departed chief of staff – managed to co-ordinate a series of simultaneous expressions of support from the Cabinet. By the afternoon, the Prime Minister was winning loud backing from Labour MPs in a closed meeting in Westminster.
Partly this was dumb luck. Febrile leadership soap operas in Westminster are no more sophisticated than an episode of The Traitors, and in fact arguably less so. Sometimes an attack triggers a full coup attempt. Sometimes it pushes contenders away from mutiny, because they can’t face the brute reality of it all. That was Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s assessment this morning. “Labour MPs looked over the precipice once Anas Sarwar made his statement and they didn’t like what they saw,” he said.
This might be because they peered at the potential leadership contenders and didn’t think they were up to it. Or it could be because those contenders simply aren’t ready. Angela Rayner is still awaiting the HMRC investigation into her housing issues. Wes Streeting has been undermined by his relationship with Peter Mandelson. Andy Burnham has been blocked from getting into Parliament. There is no obvious clean way to switch Starmer out. So instead he remains. Battered, mortally wounded, bleeding out, but conscious and mobile – forcing himself up on to his feet.
Nevertheless, Starmer is very unlikely to survive in the long term. Too much blood loss. Too many internal injuries. Too many tricky elections coming up, from the Gorton and Denton by-election later this month to the local polls in May.
For all Milband’s supportive noises on the media round this morning, there was a steely edge to his professions of loyalty. “Keir has earned the right to deliver the change he has promised,” he wrote when the Cabinet closed ranks yesterday. It’s hardly gushing praise, but instead a kind of solemn reminder of duty. It had that unmistakable air of giving someone one final chance.
There was a similar type of code underpinning the Energy Secretary’s comments this morning. On the face of it, he was the picture of support, but it came loaded with a pretty explicit warning. “This has got to be a moment of change for the Government,” he said, effectively dictating terms to the Prime Minister live on the airwaves, “a moment of change where we show much greater clarity of purpose, consistency of purpose. And my experience in politics is what gets you through very difficult days is mission and values.”
Miliband’s warning shot is a decent summary of what Starmer must do if he has any chance of survival. The use of the words “values” is the most telling element. By including it, Miliband was tacitly validating the most devastating critique against Starmer: that he does not have values, cannot articulate them, is unable to pursue them.
This is what led to some of the most egregious policies to emerge under the McSweeney era, including the brutalising rhetoric and policies deployed against refugees. How can he expect to prevent voters flocking to the Greens if he sounds like he’s from Reform? It is what prevents Starmer from demonstrating consistency in his public communication. How can he convincingly brand Robert Jenrick “toxic” when he himself has adopted the same hostile view of immigration?
It is also what stopped Starmer being able to make progress in government. Without a clear steer from the Prime Minister, the Westminster system seizes up – the Treasury doesn’t appropriately allocate funds, the Civil Service doesn’t know what to prioritise, advisers can’t predict what he would say in his absence. Without a clear direction of travel from the person at the top, British government simply goes into a holding pattern.
Miliband was effectively paving the road Starmer needs to walk down if he is to survive. He will need to do several pretty radical things in quick succession: jettison the Reform-facing anti-migrant policies; clearly state a progressive vision for the Government; reshuffle Cabinet to bring in figures from the soft left; and deliver for the electoral coalition which put him in power.
Will he do that? It’s unlikely. Would he survive if he did? Probably not. But it is the one avenue left open to him now. The only path out of the death zone.
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