Keir Starmer is stuck in a catch-22. If he is to avoid the threat of continual leadership challenges, the Prime Minister will need to deal with what every poll shows are the public’s three overriding concerns: the cost of living, rampant illegal immigration and the state of the NHS. But if serious progress is made in any of these areas, it is likely to turn the minister responsible into a viable leadership candidate. Let’s call it catch-25.
Rachel Reeves at the Treasury has a monumental task and is politically tied to the Starmer project, so she can be ruled out. Of the other two key issues, most progress has been made in reducing NHS waiting lists, the task of Wes Streeting. Which may explain why a senior Downing Street aide chose, on Tuesday evening, to launch a calculated briefing operation accusing the Health Secretary of plotting a coup. Such a challenge to the PM, they warned, was ‘reckless’, ‘dangerous’ and would spook the markets. Starmer will fight any plot, they declared.
‘It’s too soon for Rayner to come back and Miliband doesn’t want it, but he would love to pick the winner’
The reaction was so extreme that Labour MPs wonder if this is the start of Starmer’s death spiral. Streeting took to the airwaves to accuse Downing Street of ‘kneecapping’ him while he is ‘delivering the change we promised’. Enemies of Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, point the finger of blame at him.
Allies of Streeting admit that he has leadership ambitions and that he would seek the top job if Starmer fell under a bus. But they deny claims that he was preparing to march into No. 10 after the Budget and tell the PM ‘time’s up’ or that he has 50 frontbench colleagues ready to do the same. A ‘wesforleader.com’ website was registered at 7.15 p.m. on Tuesday, half an hour after the story broke. Streeting’s supporters attribute that to enemy ‘black ops’. ‘This is an attempt to smoke him out and rule him out,’ an aide to another cabinet minister concludes.
These anti-Streeting briefings have completely backfired. A senior Labour source notes: ‘They have achieved the impossible – they have made Wes popular with the backbenches.’ A whip count taken by someone with a good grasp of the parliamentary Labour party (PLP) ‘had Wes at fewer than 80 supporting MPs’ on Tuesday night ‘and then skyrocketing’ on Wednesday morning.
Such was the effect of these briefings that some believe Starmer’s senior aides had decided they would be better off with Streeting. In these circumstances it usually makes sense to recall the ‘first law’ of Steve Duprey, the former leader of the Republican party in New Hampshire: ‘Before concluding malevolence, always assume incompetence.’
Yet if the question of Starmer’s survival wasn’t already live, it is now. The public affairs company Flint Global told its clients last week that Ed Miliband, the most popular cabinet minister with Labour members, would become PM next year. On Monday evening, another well-connected Labour figure drinking in a Covent Garden cocktail bar predicted Starmer would be gone no later than June, and perhaps before Christmas. Angela Rayner, the ousted deputy leader, and Miliband would be ‘kingmakers’, he said: ‘It’s too soon for Angela to come back and Ed doesn’t want it, but he would love to pick the winner.’ Lucy Powell, who won the deputy leadership in opposition to No. 10, is also a key player. Who could emerge as leader? ‘There will be a deal between Wes, Shabana and others.’
The inclusion of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is significant. She is responsible for tackling the third major issue: illegal immigration. It is too soon for her to launch a serious leadership bid, since she would need a record to run on, but she has big plans to build one. That will become clear when the Home Secretary unveils her Asylum Policy Statement. This was planned for Monday, but amid the turmoil in No. 10 it remains unclear whether it will go ahead.
Senior sources have confirmed that she plans to scrap permanent refugee status, a policy pioneered by the social democrat Danish government (still a member of the ECHR). Currently around 40 per cent of UK asylum claimants succeed and are given refugee status, which they keep for ever. Mahmood will order that it becomes temporary and subject to regular review. ‘The moment your home country is safe to return to, you will be removed,’ a source close to the Home Secretary said. ‘We have to send a message. We need some leftie lawyers to be dropping their marmalade. No doubt we will have some fights in the courts ahead of us – and we relish that.’
This is uncomfortable for Labour MPs, but Mahmood believes it is necessary to prevent a Reform government. ‘Voters have lost confidence in the state to act as a force for good – or a force for anything at all,’ one ally explains. ‘This is now her chance to prove that, via force of will, the country can be governed, and the borders can be secured. This is the last chance for a decent, mainstream politics.’ To querulous MPs she says: ‘If you don’t like this, you won’t like what follows me.’ If she gets it right, she will be an even more significant player in the leadership sweepstakes.
Right now, the person likely to follow Starmer is someone to the left of him, or at least cosplaying someone to the left of him. Ousting the Prime Minister will be difficult. While Tory MPs can anonymously demand a vote of no-confidence and their numbers can build over time, 80 Labour MPs would have to break cover at once and back a named successor. The party has little history of effective regicide.
But the mood on Labour’s backbenches is apoplectic. ‘Chris Ward and Jenny Chapman were the only, and I mean only, two people defending the PM amid PLP discussions,’ a senior figure said as news of the briefing broke. ‘The intention was to shore up the PM’s position; the result is that the PM is weaker. The intention was to reassure the markets and the markets will be freaking out.’ Patrick Maguire, author of Get In, the book on Starmer’s rise, notes that when questions arise about a sequel: ‘The title most often suggested by Labour sources is Fuck Off.’
The more Downing Street does to try to save Starmer, the more they draw attention to the fact that his premiership has come to resemble a slow-motion homage to Liz Truss. And that is another catch-25.
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