Keir Starmer is to give a speech on Monday responding to Labour’s pasting across large swathes of the country in the local and regional elections.
It is billed as promising to accelerate reconnection with Europe – but without messing with the “red lines” on rejoining the European Union (EU) or even the Customs Union. A youth mobility scheme is the nearest avatar, which is welcome but not really what the outrage at Labour’s failures was about, nor even massively relevant to a huge amount of voters.
The speech is set to offer a mood of new “hope and optimism” – a counter-intuitive tone to strike when Labour has seen a rout in local government: losing control of half of its London councils, squeezed into third place behind Plaid Cymru and Reform in Wales, and trailing a resurgent SNP north of the border.
Sir Keir Starmer is now fighting for his political life, in the knowledge that expectations for his survival are ebbing away. For all the attempts to stabilise the situation tomorrow and the King’s Speech laying out a scrappy legislative programme later this week, it feels like an existential Dover Beach moment, in the Matthew Arnold poem of eloquent lament for a disappearing certainties: “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night”.
But the battle is intensifying around him – and the placid view that it is better to stick with an ailing commander than risk change is evaporating fast in Labour.
Indeed, anything said a couple of weeks ago is now looking out of date. One was that Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s chances of ascendancy had been neutered. Now, however, he is a candidate who retains enough active support on the backbenchers to give it a crack.
Indeed, the opening may also have presented itself, as Catherine West made headlines on Sunday as a “Dambuster” making a call for Starmer to declare his departure timetable. She channels a widespread frustration that the Cabinet response is stuck in inertia, self-interest and denial of the fact that if Starmer is no longer able to turn the decline around, someone else needs to have a go.
Streeting’s camp insists that he has not told Starmer he is preparing to challenge him. It allows the quiet part to be said out loud: that the Starmer era is drawing to a close and that Streeting can make his availability clear – while insisting that he is not the murderer, just the accomplice. Former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, too, stepped up the readiness on Sunday evening, saying the Labour project is “not working” and “needs to change”, while ominously talking of a “last chance”.
One of the most curious responses to this trauma has been to place an emergency call to the ghosts of Labour past to return in a choreographed photo call this week. Former prime minister Gordon Brown returns as a “global finance envoy,” focusing on pursuing defence and security-related investment and will, the announcement tells us, “engage with international leaders and finance institutions as well as private finance partners to establish multilateral finance mechanisms”. And they say the art of uplifting political prose is dead.
Just for fun, try to imagine Brown in his pomp as Chancellor farming out this role – engaging “with international leaders” in a mission-critical, lagging attempt to get bigger defence deals abroad – to a Chancellor predecessor. Several staplers would have been hurled across the desk at the notion.
The symbolism is more interesting than the facts of the appointment: explicitly, the announcement refers to Brown’s brilliance in stabilising the economy in the wake of the financial crisis. So now, 18 years on, the big reveal of the way forward was to call 2008 and ask to be connected.
Whether focusing on laudable domestic causes on child poverty and curbing online gambling excesses, with a foray into a summary justice campaign for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims and score-settling over newspaper hacking, has been the best preparation for diving back into the international finance scene is doubtful. Neither will the battered fiefdom of the civil service relish dealing with the greyzone of “envoys” who are not ministers.
Another septuagenarian return is also on the cards for Labour stalwart Harriet Harman, with a vague role to “galvanise” the Government to deliver for women and girls, tackling “structural misogyny”, as one social post from the Government put it, which made it sound like a gender studies university seminar. While Harman is a deeply respected figure in Labour as its first female deputy leader, it’s hard to say why this appointment will make much difference.
It’s also an appointment that stirs up dissatisfaction about Labour’s woolly transgender stances (Harman is on record as saying in 2022 that “women are also women who are trans women”). Additionally, it is an irk to Bridget Phillipson, whose ministerial realm oversees the topic and who does not look absolutely thrilled at the innovation.
So why do it? Starmer understands, at some gut level, that he is not really seen or regarded as a man of the Labour party in its most sentimental vein, and the Brown-Harman move is intended as the emotional glue he has lacked as a leader. But frankly, we are way past this sort of symbolic palliative.
The immediate future depends on two characters, whose fates are intertwined: Streeting, the ambitious Health Secretary and by common acclaim the only candidate with an operation developed enough to raise the 81 MP signatures demanded for the mechanics of leadership challenge and Rayner.
That is why West’s Spartacus moment is so important: leadership manoeuvres are, in the end, about whose machine can work at the right time to get the best result for their candidate, and Streeting has the most obvious case here. If he has the backers among MPs prepared to align themselves behind West as a staging post, he effectively has a large group of people who will wield the knife for him.
At that point, either Rayner enters the race to his left – and brazens out the fact that her tax affairs from the mess of her failure to pay correct stamp duty are not yet fully resolved, citing extraordinary circumstances – or backs his charge.
In truth, the Labour gut instinct is to have Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham back to the fray. Indeed, Rayner’s statement said bluntly that blocking Burnham was “a mistake”. But Streeting has a chance to act while that gap is open. He can offer some role to Burnham while nabbing the top job himself. And if he acts, Rayner will feel obliged to follow, or miss her moment too.
As soon as one domino falls, the others will tumble. In these matters, timing is as important as talent or ambition, something that must be on Streeting’s mind.
Never mind the return of Brown and Harman, the K-Tel Labour classics. The question haunting the hopefuls is the cost to their own chances and their party’s future, and whether failing to speak up now carries a higher risk than remaining Keir-compliant – a thought Streeting must surely have had this weekend too.
Uneasy as that silence is, it is looking now more like complicity in failure than loyal discipline.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at POLITICO and co-host of Politics at Sam and Anne’s podcast
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