The conventional wisdom for months has been that Britain’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is cooked, finished, insert your metaphor here.
He was done long ago, it has been said, and has only been kept around by his Labour party until now, to take the fall for their inevitable drubbing at the ‘midterm’ elections, so as not to sully the shiny new leader with the air of failure. Now that the job is done, he should be on his way post haste so his replacement can save the Labour Party and lead Britain to a socialist utopia.
A fine idea as it goes, except it doesn’t seem to be happening. In his blinkered way, the Prime Minister absolutely refuses to go of his own free will, and those few in the party who could move against him seem to have blinked at the crucial moment. Is it possible that Sir Keir Starmer has failed so hard that he pulled the rug out from under the feet of the plotters, too?
There was a time when Britain had only two serious political parties, and to win elections, they had to be ‘big tent’ or ‘broad church’. For Labour, this meant being home to everyone from quasi-communist subversives to disgruntled former coal miners to university-educated urbanites with classroom-honed theories of social justice. They didn’t always get along, but they sometimes won elections.
But these big-tent parties got sick; the fever took hold. It happened to the Conservatives, too, with Brexit. In Labour, the New Labour project under Tony Blair in the 1990s utterly captured the party and remade it in its own image: the soft-left urban theorists had won. They still carried the more openly left-wing parts of the party with them, but this came with real resentment about the party leaving its socialist, working-class roots.
The pendulum swung the other way in the 2010s, when the old left, led by Jeremy Corbyn, took the party back. The country wasn’t impressed and turned their offering down at election time, and the new — student radical meets unhealthy Middle East obsession — direction had a real problem with antisemitism. Inevitably, the pendulum swung back.
Enter Sir Keir Starmer. Much ink has been spilt about the deeply questionable inner circle that came with him, and as newsworthy as they continue to be, this isn’t the place, but crucially, one of the obvious driving forces of the early Starmer days, before winning the 2024 General Election and becoming Prime Minister, was the push to purge the party.
No more pendulum swinging with all opposition removed. The Corbynite faction was definitely out and remains in the wilderness, bumping from failed upstart party to failed upstart. The big tent died.
So that brings us up to the present day. Post-purge, there isn’t a lot of depth in the Labour Party. Many of its Members of Parliament are new to the game and owe their handsome remuneration packages to Sir Keir personally. Indeed, there are so few credible candidates inside Parliament, Labour rebels have to look beyond Westminster.
Enter Andy Burnham, the “King in the North” (a polite way of saying the Mayor of Manchester, Britain’s de facto second city).
Labour insiders think he’s popular, has a proven track record, will resonate with the public, and will address voters’ yearning for proper left-wing politics. You make up your own mind if that’s really where most Britons’ heads are right now or if that’s pure cope. But nevertheless, there seems to be a consensus in the party that Burnham’s the man for the job.
But in Britain, you can’t even think of being party leader and Prime Minister without also being a Member of Parliament. And herein lies the rub: Burnham has already tried to move against Starmer once before, and — of course — the Prime Minister controls the party and simply blocked Burnham from standing as a Labour candidate. He has that power.
Labour insiders now think it’s time for Burnham to try again, and Starmer, in his weakened state, wouldn’t dare block his way a second time. Maybe that’s right. All Burnham needs is a sitting Labour MP with a ‘safe seat’ — an electoral district so bulletproof you could put a rosette on the metaphorical pig and see it sent to Westminster — willing to stand down to give him a run.
The problem is, Labour performed so apocalyptically badly at this week’s elections, it looks like there isn’t a single safe seat left in the country. Nigel Farage’s Reform has disembowelled the party, taking ward after ward, full councils, Welsh seats, in areas that have been unassailably Labour for over a century.
All of a sudden, Andy Burnham, attempting a leapfrog to Parliament, risks surrendering his agreeable job for nothing. Not to mention the very real possibility that if he were to seek a gig in Westminster, Burnham’s successor may lose Manchester to a Reform rival in the ensuing mayoral by-election.
So the plotting goes on. The claims, briefings, and insider takes are trying to rival nitrogen for the title of the most abundant component of our atmosphere. Today, the newspapers are thick with Westminster figures calling on Sir Keir to go. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. But for the time being, it seems Sir Keir has succeeded in saving his skin by making the Labour Party so toxic nobody dares take a shot at him.