If a Labour prime minister leads his party into the worst set of elections possibly ever, should he be allowed to carry on? The answer is less obvious than it might appear.
For sure, a disaster is approaching this week. As the latest calculations from Professor Sir John Curtice and other psephological experts suggest, the Labour Party is likely to have one of the worst nights in its long electoral history, and no one is seriously doubting it. Whatever the eventual outcome in seats won and control in local councils, and the prospect of humiliation in the national elections in Scotland and Wales, if Labour’s share of the vote reflects its standing in the opinion polls, say 19 per cent, then this week will indeed be historic for the party. Even if the results are widely expected to be dire, there will be extreme peril for the Labour leader and the usual febrile mood that overcomes Westminster at such times. There is no shortage of speculation swirling around Sir Keir Starmer’s future at the moment, and it will reach tornado proportions of intensity by the weekend.
Yet there is still a case for Sir Keir. To adapt Labour’s own dreamy theme tune from previous confident campaigns, things could quite conceivably get (even) worse rather than better for the party under the most likely replacements for the prime minister. It doesn’t take such a great feat of imagination to see why a nightmare might follow such a fall.
In the first place, the decision on the premiership will rest with Labour Party members, just as it did with the Conservative Party’s small and unrepresentative grassroots in 2019, when they selected Boris Johnson, and in 2022, when, just as disastrously, they opted for Liz Truss. That is a lesson from history. Labour’s activist base may be commendably more progressive in outlook and liberally pro-European in their instincts, but they are no more blessed with wisdom or necessarily in touch with the wider electorate than their reactionary counterparts on the right.
At the moment, they are a “soft left” corpus, and would be likely to choose someone made in their own image: Ed Miliband, Angela Rayner or Andy Burnham. None, for one thing, would necessarily command the broadest support of the parliamentary party, nor, more crucially, that of the British people. It is hard to see any of them holding the international stage, which is the one thing Sir Keir has done and made the one correct big call: not to go to war. It is one thing in a parliamentary system for an elected prime minister to be replaced, preferably voluntarily, by a successor endorsed by MPs with a popular mandate, as happened for Labour when James Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson some 50 years ago. It is far less democratically sound for this to be done by a relatively tiny number of activists at odds with the electorate. It didn’t end well for the Conservatives, and it would not do so for Labour now.
As Prof Curtice reminds us, there is no clear successor to Sir Keir. There would be no smooth transition to a coronation, as when Gordon Brown quietly usurped Tony Blair in the 2007 palace coup. A leadership contest would necessarily be divisive and only serve to advertise Labour’s weakness and add to its disarray. Not all of the contenders would serve under various others if they won, and if they won, some would sack or demote their rivals. A balanced “dream ticket” is not going to emerge. Even if it were to, problems remain.
Taking them in turn, Mr Miliband has been viscerally rejected by the voters at a general election once before, when he was leader in 2015, and it's not obvious why this would change – and he has acknowledged he should be “inoculated” against ambition by now. His entirely justified commitment to net zero would be used against him by the Tories and Reform UK. Ms Rayner’s authenticity and sense of principle were fatally compromised by the public reaction to her tax affairs, and these have still not been resolved. Her failure to keep the tax laws and her propensity to ignore fiscal rules do not bode well. Mr Burnham isn’t even an MP, and, ironically, given Labour’s dismal poll ratings and the public’s distaste for unnecessary by-elections, he might struggle to return to the Commons, even for a constituency in his North West base, where Reform has proved a potent threat. Mr Burnham has been beaten before for the leadership, by Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, and, if sources near to Sir Keir are to be believed, he’d have to beat the incumbent prime minister himself this time round.
As for Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood, Al Carns or John Healey on the right of the party, the present mood of Labour opinion, especially outside parliament, simply rules them out. Their premierships will, for now, remain stubbornly hypothetical.
The net result of any Labour leadership contest would be that the new leader and prime minister would inherit a broken party and a ruptured government. This is true even if Sir Keir could be persuaded by, say, his cabinet to stand aside and not fight for his future. Certainly, some of the candidates would be better at presentation than Sir Keir, though they tend to be on the right; and others might be better at politics, but there is no evidence that any of them has the combination of experience, judgement, philosophy and policies that would transform the Labour government’s fortunes.
Labour’s leadership crisis really boils down to sheer (understandable) frustration and the seductive warm vibes that emanate from Mr Burnham and a panicky reaction to the Green “surge” – in reality, a classic midterm wishful protest vote for a party that cannot form the next government.
As the Tories found, swapping leaders can even do more harm than good, no matter how awful the situation may feel. He has had his share of mistakes and misjudgments, but, as Sir Keir himself has had to remind his critics, he has had to make tough but necessary decisions on the economy, on public spending and the “war on two fronts” in Ukraine and Iran. He is also at the European Political Community Conference in Armenia right now, fulfilling his promise to cement closer relations with Europe. He was elected for a full term, and there is much work still to be done. The general election is years away. At this comparatively early juncture in the life of the Starmer administration, this is not a moment for change.
