Against a backdrop of catastrophic briefings and an upcoming Budget doom, contenders are vying to challenge Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership – but none of them have any idea how they would do things differently, says Eliot Wilson
Last week was not a good one for the Prime Minister. With the latest opinion poll showing Labour and the Conservatives essentially neck-and-neck, and Reform UK still comfortably ahead, the government’s fortunes have very clearly collapsed in the 16 months since its landslide election victory. Sir Keir Starmer is already established as the most unpopular premier on record, and half of those surveyed think he should quit.
Amid stacked-up barrels of electoral gunpowder, someone in Downing Street started playing with matches. “Sources” briefed the media that Starmer would fight any challenge to his leadership and warned that the Health and Social Care Secretary, Wes Streeting, was actively plotting against his leader. Starmer denies authorising any briefing against his own cabinet: if he is telling the truth, then the best that can be said is that he has lost control of his own officials and advisers in Number 10 and they feel they are at liberty to freelance in a savagely partisan way.
The briefing was so catastrophically ill-judged because it came out of a cloudless sky. Streeting is certainly ambitious, and undoubtedly has Prime Ministerial designs: why should he not? But he is also 20 years younger than Starmer, and has little reason to act hastily. It is a cliché of Westminster but nevertheless largely true that openly seeking to unseat an incumbent Prime Minister almost never leads to inheriting the crown: a more emollient figure tends to emerge once the knifework has been done, and even Boris Johnson needed two attempts to wedge himself into Downing Street.
The sudden aggressive defiance left Starmer looking like a man jolted awake on a night bus who unexpectedly asserts that he will fight anyone. But the damage is worse than that, because by bringing the subject of the leadership into the open, Downing Street has freed backbenchers and even some ministers to discuss it. An already-febrile and anxious Parliamentary Labour Party is now not just gauging Streeting’s potential chances of success; it is weighing his candidacy against those of home secretary Shabana Mahmood, darling of the membership Ed Miliband, steady and unshowy defence secretary John Healey and even – no, seriously – Louise Haigh, the defenestrated transport secretary.
Erratic
In one sense this is understandable, as the government’s current direction, if one can call it that, is erratic at best. Having tried to march his troops to the top of the hill marked “welfare reform” earlier in the year, the Prime Minister was forced to make an ignominious retreat. Now he and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, face yet another “black hole” in the public finances of perhaps £30bn, and attempts to blame the previous government, Brexit, the war in Ukraine and conceivably the repeal of the Corn Laws are wearing thin. Delivering her second Budget later this month, Reeves will have to start taking responsibility for the consequences of her own policies.
As if leadership speculation were not enough, Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, then entered stage left to announce that the government was re-examining its refusal of the claims of Women Against State Pensions Inequality. The Waspi campaigners were outraged last December when they were told they had received adequate warning of the change to the pension age for women, and the government sacrificed considerable political capital to ride out the ensuing storm. Nevertheless the issue had, it seemed, been settled until McFadden suddenly breathed new life into it – and compensation could cost over £10bn.
The Parliamentary Labour Party has inoculated itself against reality. It seems that any significant cuts in expenditure are unacceptable, but it also demands new spending commitments like Waspi compensation and the abolition of the two-child benefit cap. Yet as Reeves rolls the pitch for a likely increase in the basic rate of income tax, breaching a clear manifesto pledge, that too is denounced as potentially disastrous. What course of action does the PLP want?
No matter how many names are mentioned as alternatives to Starmer, there is a striking silence on what economic policies any of them would pursue and how those would differ from Starmer’s approach. This is not an argument over fiscal and spending priorities but a full-blown psychodrama. Labour swept to power over an exhausted Conservative Party and assumed it could simply “be better”. It is now discovering that little or no economic growth combined with the highest government expenditure since Attlee’s post-War premiership require a more sophisticated approach than that.
Sir Keir Starmer is accused of lacking vision and failing to communicate a coherent plan. It is a charge which contains much truth, but he is not alone. Hard decisions have to be made, and the only answer Labour backbenchers seem to have is pure Hemingway: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Unseating the Prime Minister will not make any real difference if there is no change in policy, and it is hard to see anyone with a realistic Plan B.