Labour is not only in a terrible mess of its own making but it is also caught on the horns of an apparent dilemma.
Everyone knows that Starmer is going to have to leave Downing Street before very long – the only questions are exactly how and precisely when. Virtually no one expects him to last the year (I consider the odds of 1/3 that he is ousted in 2026 to be very attractive). He may even be gone in days. Today’s departure of Morgan McSweeney is as likely to hasten Starmer’s departure as it is to delay it.
It is true that the two main contenders – Rayner and Streeting – face their own timing problems. Outrageously, HMRC have still not pronounced on Angela Rayner’s tax case after six months of mulling it over – a matter that should take no more than six days, perhaps even just six hours, to resolve if we had an even half-competent tax office.
This means the current favourite is hamstrung by a useless bureaucracy refusing to give her a straight answer. However furious you might be about her failure to pay stamp duty, she surely has a right to know by now where she stands. Her putative candidacy could be derailed at any moment by HMRC declaring she owes huge fines for egregiously dodging her dues. If that is their judgment, she deserves to hear it now.
Meanwhile, Streeting will be going through all of his social media feeds desperately deleting any photos of – or positive references to – Peter Mandelson. This could take some considerable time. His partner has already cunningly airbrushed out of his CV any reference to having worked for the Prince of Darkness.
Andy Burnham would be the nailed-on favourite to replace Starmer but for the fatal flaw of not being a Member of Parliament. That is not something he can fix anytime soon.
All of these considerations might incline these three individuals – and their supporters – to hang back and wait.
That calculation is seemingly, but foolishly, given more weight by an electoral judgment which seems to be permeating a lot of private discussions within the Labour Party and across the wider media. The argument goes that the upcoming by-election later this month and the local, Scottish and Welsh elections in May are likely to be so apocalyptic for the Government that they would immediately kill stone dead any hoped-for honeymoon for a new Labour leader. But I think this line of reasoning is seriously wrong headed.
It seems incredibly unlikely that Downing Street will have a new occupant by February 26th, even if Starmer has announced his intention to resign by then. So, the blame for the catastrophe that is about to engulf Labour in the Manchester by-election (probably coming a poor third behind the Greens and Reform in a once rock-solid safe seat) easily can be pinned on the current administration.
However, there is no good reason for pretenders to the throne to then wait until Labour is eviscerated across local authorities and in Scotland and Wales before forcing Starmer out of No 10.
There is, of course, a very fair chance that the Prime Minister will choose to fall on his sword in the next week or so – either because he finally realises his position is untenable or because further embarrassing revelations about the Mandelson scandal finally force that penny to drop.
If, however, he insists on limping on, humiliated and bleeding, for a couple more weeks, the rebels should wait until the Gorton & Denton result comes in, but not much longer than that.
Assuming the result is bad for Labour (and it’s likely to be dreadful), this provides the obvious grounds for triggering a leadership election. One presumes that some sort of residual level of sanity survives in Keir Starmer’s brain and he would choose not to contest it.
Either way, it takes around a couple of months to complete a leadership contest and the timetable is in the hands of Labour’s National Executive Committee and they can set the schedule to suit their own partisan interests.
It would be reasonable for them to determine that the ballot would close on Friday May 8th and to announce the winner on Saturday May 9th. Whoever triumphs would then become prime minister on Monday May 11th.
This would have echoes of Theresa May’s or Boris Johnson’s departure from the highest political office in the land. May declared her intention to step aside on May 24th 2017. She continued as a lame duck PM for exactly two months until Boris beat Jeremy Hunt in the ensuing leadership contest and entered Downing Street on July 24th. Similarly, the gap between Boris resigning in 2022 and him being replaced as prime minister by Liz Truss, after she defeated Rishi Sunak, was also a couple of months.
In my scenario, Starmer is forced to resign no later than in the week beginning March 2nd. The Labour NEC determine – in their infinite wisdom – that the final day for party members to cast their ballot papers will be May 8th, the day after the local, Scottish and Welsh elections. If Starmer decides to resign earlier, the NEC should also consider stretching the leadership contest by a few weeks to only conclude in the immediate aftermath of May’s elections.
This brings a wide range of benefits to Labour.
First, taking the blame for the awful results in May will essentially be Starmer’s last act as party leader. There is no new prime minister yet in place to take the rap.
Second, the news coverage around Labour’s electoral evisceration will be diluted – perhaps even largely displaced – by the conclusion of the party ballot and the announcement of a new leader and PM who can begin by saying that they have heard the opinion of the electorate and promise a brave new dawn. The piecing together of a new Cabinet will also attract considerable media interest again overshadowing a full postmortem of the (disastrous) May election results.
Third, the contest would distract from campaigning efforts in the May elections. That might sound like a bad thing, but it isn’t. I am hearing that the doorstep reaction greeting Labour campaigners is so horrifically hostile that it is further crushing activist morale, which is already on the floor or in the basement. Canvassing and leafletting is doing virtually nothing to improve Labour’s electoral standing at present, but a full-blown contest to choose the next PM (the first time the Labour grassroots would ever have taken such a decision) could energise and enthuse their (admittedly much reduced) membership base.
Fourth, knowing that Starmer is definitely leaving might just help the Labour Party by a smidgen in the polls. I don’t expect it to make much of a difference, but it could be worth something at the margins. Voters who currently wish to send a message that they want Starmer out will have less of an incentive to vent their fury by means of casting an anti-Labour ballot on May 7th. They can be assured that he is going anyway.
Overall, if I were a Labour supporter (a difficult act of empathy for me to engage in, to be honest), the above is an indication of the chain of events I would seek to put in motion. It would, of course, require the leadership election to be contested (otherwise, as in the case of May replacing Cameron, the new PM will be in post too early and will have to take the May 7th hit on their own shoulders) – but that should not require too much in the way of organising, it’s very likely to happen in any event.
However, it may now be the case that the scale of chaos and confusion now gripping Labour is so great that we are in a situation in which whatever happens next will be the result of accident and mishap rather than any form of intelligent design.
Mark Littlewood is Director of Popular Conservatism. This article originally appeared on Mark’s Substack. You can subscribe here
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However bad this government is, its post-Starmer iteration will be worse
HENRY HILL
Has sacrificing the critical advisors ever worked? It depends, I suppose, on how one defines ‘worked’. Theresa May managed to limp on for a couple of years after the departure of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, but her authority was broken. Does that count?
Perhaps Sir Keir Starmer will cling on following Morgan McSweeney’s exit (and, it is sincerely to be hoped, that of Jonathan Powell). As in May’s case, one might argue that this would simply be an exercise in prolonging his misery. But the circumstances aren’t entirely similar; whereas May at least started out with a distinct vision for her premiership, Starmer did not.
Certainly, Conservatives hoping for – or trying to precipitate – the Prime Minister’s resignation should be clear-eyed about the potential consequences. Not because any of the hopefuls out on manoeuvres in the press would deliver any lasting revival of Labour’s fortunes, but the opposite: a change of leadership is likely to see the party retreat even further into its castle in the sky, indulging the whims of backbenchers even as reality closes in around it.
To put it another way, the status quo is about as right-wing as any Labour government in the current parliament is going to get. Even if the Parliamentary Labour Party were more disciplined and less self-indulgent, the fact that the final choice of the leader rests with the party membership militates against any candidate prepared to tell hard truths or try to sell difficult choices. There seems little prospect of Shabana Mahmood’s bare-minimum changes to indefinite leave to remain surviving a leadership contest, let alone a victor emerging with the will or means to combat the unsustainable trajectory of this country’s public spending.
There is some little irony in Starmer’s outriders warning that the markets would react very badly to his ousting; everyone hates being in hoc to the bond vigilantes until they’re the reason you can’t be sacked. But the warning is not wrong. However bad this Government is proving – and that is very bad indeed – it is by no means the worst we could get.
Nor is there likely to be a general election. Constitutionally none is required, and politically it just seems highly unlikely that any new prime minister would choose to go to the polls when hundreds of Labour MPs are sitting on slender majorities and Reform UK is still in first place. (The Conservatives, at least if they think Kemi Badenoch’s recent rally in the polls has legs, might quietly welcome this, although they wouldn’t say so.)
Perhaps a new leader in those circumstances would accelerate the collapse in Labour’s position, making life easier for the Right at the eventual 2029 general election. But the trade-off would be that the scale of the problems facing the country – and thus, the unpleasantness of the decisions a future government would have to make to fix them – would be that much worse. Which is an ill omen, given that neither the Conservatives nor Reform are currently exhibiting much willingness to face up to those problems in their current form.
Were we the southern European country whose politics ours increasingly resembled, this is about the point where the European Central Bank would step in and appoint the prime minister for us. Happily, our democratic system is stronger than that; less happily, that means we have nobody to save us from the consequences of our choices.
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