Taking his quip at Prime Minister’s Questions at face value, Sir Keir Starmer would rather be in the lovely seaside resort of Rhyl than Westminster right now.
“That’s a very appealing invitation just at the moment,” Sir Keir joked, when Clwyd North MP Gill German asked if the PM wanted to join her on a visit to the Welsh town. At least there he would be less likely to encounter questions about why “unauthorised” briefings that the prime minister will face a leadership challenge in the aftermath of a difficult Budget in a fortnight’s time appear to have come from inside No 10 itself.
Presumably, the bizarre idea was to deter any such activity by making it clear that the prime minister would not go quietly and would fight to keep his job. In colloquial terms, the prime minister’s team, if not the man himself, is declaring “come on then, if you think you’re hard enough”.
The name of Wes Streeting was – apparently – put forward to journalists just before a landmark speech by the health secretary on NHS reform and progress in cutting waiting lists. The goal, we understand, is to “flush out” Mr Streeting and elicit a denial of his ambitions.
Inevitably, this denial was provided by Mr Streeting, without anyone quite believing it meant anything anyway. He even slipped his own little gags about not being “on manoeuvres”, “juvenile briefings” and his own status as a “faithful” – a reference both to the BBC’s hit show The Traitors and his own trustworthiness – into his appearance at a health conference. At any rate, he doesn’t look intimidated, and clearly no briefing from No 10 is capable of breaking Mr Streeting’s vaulting ambitions.
Make no mistake, Downing Street putting Wes Streeting’s name “out there” at such a critical moment feels like an extraordinarily maladroit thing to do – at best “too clever by half”.
This should be a moment when the substance of the Labour government is being proudly proclaimed to the public, who demanded change and voted it in to do exactly that only 16 months ago. Yet this entirely unnecessary leadership speculation, prompted by Sir Keir’s own team, only served to distract from what Mr Streeting wanted to say, which is of vital interest to the public. The impression is that the centre of government is more at home in plotting and playing at tactical games than in the grind of “delivery”.
The timing of the briefings was also extremely helpful to the leader of the opposition. Kemi Badenoch seems at last to be settling into her role rather better, and the renewed bout of leadership speculation – which had been dormant since his successful party conference speech – made life more difficult for the prime minister than it need have been. Hence his wistful thoughts about a break from it all in north Wales. It was perhaps telling that Sir Keir chose not to take up Ms Badenoch’s invitation to express his confidence in his chief aide in No 10, Morgan McSweeney.
However real the threat to Sir Keir’s leadership may or may not be, these briefings have been spectacularly counterproductive – merely adding to the current “chaos of sleaze and division”, to quote the terms in which that Labour used to deride the last Conservative administration.
If, as is still more likely than not, Sir Keir survives to fight the next general election, he will do so leading a party that is all the weaker for being so publicly divided – the worst of all worlds.
There is no point, however, in pretending that Labour MPs are anything but deeply concerned at the unplumbed depths of their popularity, the potential loss of yet more seats in Scotland, Wales and local councils next year, and the ultimate disaster of a Reform UK government led by Nigel Farage after the next general election.
Changing the party leader, some think, would alter that – but does anyone, outside the embryonic campaign teams no doubt being assembled, really believe it? A change of leader might quite conceivably make things far worse if Labour takes a lurch leftwards – and while the presentation of the government’s strategy has been woeful, what really matters to the electorate isn’t rhetorical skills or a smooth media persona but, to coin another phrase, delivery, delivery, delivery.
Making Mr Streeting or Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband, Angela Rayner, Shabana Mahmood or Lucy Powell prime minister wouldn’t transform Labour’s poll ratings and catapult them ahead of Reform. It wouldn’t create a single job, pay one solitary extra pound off the national debt, or build a single extra home, or close a so-called asylum hotel.
The social and economic realities of the UK would be entirely unaltered by a change at No 10, and still less by a botched leadership coup. The outlook for Labour may be bleak, but the public, rightly, will not forgive the Labour government if it descends into such self-indulgence.
