Labour mayors are stealing the limelight at Labour conference. As Sir Keir Starmer continues to struggle with staffing issues, policy positions and a prevailing surge in support for Reform UK, new polling for Sky News has revealed that six in ten Labour members would back Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham to be leader, with fewer than half of that proportion backing Starmer. When it comes to the deputy leadership position, No. 10’s favourite pick – Bridget Phillipson – also comes in second place with the membership, as more than a third would prefer ex-cabinet minister Lucy Powell.
Burnham is significantly ahead of elected Labour MPs among the membership. He was the top pick of 54 per cent of members to be the next party leader, with Angela Rayner – one-time deputy prime minister before she resigned over her tax affairs – a distant spot behind him, with just 10 per cent backing the Ashton-under-Lyne MP. Wes Streeting is third, on 7 per cent, despite his punchy rebuttal to Donald Trump’s paracetamol and autism claims last week. Labour veterans Ed Miliband and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper are tied on 6 per cent.
Sadiq Khan has been enjoying the spotlight of late too. One politician in particular has taken an interest in him, with Donald Trump fuming last week that Khan is a ‘terrible, terrible mayor’. The President (incorrectly) claimed the Labour politician is planning a move to impose sharia law in the capital. ‘I’m slightly concerned he might send me an invoice,’ Khan laughed during an event at Labour’s Liverpool conference this afternoon. ‘I’ve been living rent-free in the head of President Trump. I hope I’ve got squatter’s rights.’
But it’s not all sunshines and rainbows for Khan – who insists that ‘it’s a badge of pride that bad people hate London’. The Labour mayor wasn’t shy about admitting how poorly his party is being received by voters at present, as the polls consistently show Reform UK outdoing Labour. He compared his party’s situation to a football match: ‘If this is a game of football, what I’d say is it’s a 90 minute game. We’ve played almost 20 minutes and we’re two nil down and we’ve got to make sure that we use the rest of the time in this game – three and a half years – to turn it around.’
Despite the analogies, it is the act of storytelling that Labour is falling so very far behind on. As one audience member piped up during Khan’s interview: ‘Reform is winning that competition.’ Indeed Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s announcement this afternoon that Labour will toughen its stance on immigration – on indefinite leave to remain, on English fluency and on the backgrounds of those wanting to relocate to the UK – comes a week after Farage revealed that Reform policy will be to scrap indefinite leave to remain altogether (a move Keir Starmer dubbed ‘racist’ on Sunday) and make foreign nationals ineligible to claim benefits. Reform UK may have misjudged the public mood on the former point – and there is an opportunity for Labour to take a firm but fairer stance on the issue. But it doesn’t change the fact that, once again, Reform got there first.
This Labour conference may not feel quite as flat as last year but, as James Heale pointed out on today’s Coffee House Shots, it has provided a short break from reality for many of the party’s politicians. Labour politicians are conscious about the omnipresent threat of Reform and every main speech so far has contained a Farage-bashing element. Not that the Reform leader is alone there: the Greater Manchester mayor has also found himself in the firing line – despite insisting today that he would have to be ‘wrenched’ out of Manchester.
However the fact that Burnham is generally assumed to have overplayed his hand last week has, rather bizarrely, perhaps made this conference an easier one to endure for Starmer. While even his own ministers are highly sceptical of the PM’s decision-making abilities and the direction of government, regicide is not – currently – a favoured position within the party. The challenge will be trying to inject some energy into a clearly deflated parliamentary party and membership ahead of Welsh, Scottish and local elections in just under eight months. The countdown is on…
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