The story dominating the news for much of this week has been the possibility of a man who is not an MP, and who still has no obvious route into parliament, somehow finding a way there—and then displacing the prime minister. This should be inconceivable only 14 months after Keir Starmer won a majority of 172. The fact it is being taken even half-seriously can be put down to a charge made in just one of the near-7,000 words in Andy Burnham’s set-piece interview in the New Statesman: “factional.”
For the last four years, Starmer and his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney have asserted a total, yet brittle, command over the Labour party. It suddenly feels like this could snap.
The task of exorcising the ghost of Jeremy Corbyn was treated not as an event, or even a phase, but rather a perpetual process that must never relent. Starmer used to identify with Harold Wilson, another pragmatist who initially rose up the ranks by positioning himself as more radical than he turned out to be. But Starmer has shown none of Wilson’s concern with holding the party together, across factions, on the basis that it needed both a left and a right wing to succeed. Instead, while the Starmer machine has shown a degree of wary respect for trade union interests, it has grabbed every available opportunity to marginalise the more idealistic parts of the party.
Before the election, the Labour leadership took a lopsided attitude to fiscal matters. All prudence was thrown out of the window when Starmer made his rash vow not to “reach for the tax lever”. But there was a deeply cautious approach to the arithmetic when it came to the impoverishing two-child benefit limit. The policy lurched from being a fixable source of the “vast social injustice in our country” to something that we’re “not changing”.
The Hamas atrocity of 7th October 2023 and the Israeli war crimes that followed it seemed to be used by the leadership, at least in part, with a view to settling sectarian scores. Mass resignations by Muslim and left-wing members over Labour’s policy on Gaza were welcomed as, in the words of one internal source, “shaking off the fleas.” More generally, there was tight central command and control over local candidate selections. The arbitrary and last-minute barring of Faiza Shaheen, an expert on inequality who’d been set to run in the corner of east London where she had deep, and working-class, roots, is a case in point. She had previously, in the mostly hopeless election of 2019, come within an inch of dispatching the incumbent Tory, Iain Duncan Smith.
In 2024 the new official Labour candidate and Shaheen, now running independently, split the party’s potential vote in half, allowing Duncan Smith to sneak through the middle. This could have prompted the leadership to think about building a broader tent. For a more reflective party machine this strange general election, which saw Labour haemorrhage an awful lot of support during the campaign to end up on a miserable 34 per cent of the ballot, might have been another. But seeing as the lost voters were concentrated in then safe Labour cities, this turned out not to matter in the distribution of MPs. The party’s ruling clique preferred not to think about the palpably loveless quality of its landslide. Instead, it absorbed the quantity of seats it had (often narrowly) won. This was regarded as vindication for everything the party’s chiefs had been doing.
And so the sectarian spirit did not relax in office. It intensified. Just compare the approaches to personnel management adopted towards the left-leaning former transport secretary Louise Haigh and the playboy prince of the Labour right, Peter Mandelson. Haigh was forced out after a decade-old conditional discharge that she had received at the magistrates’ court—in relation to a dodgy story about a work mobile phone—mysteriously found its way into the press. Starmer had long had this information filed away because, Haigh insisted, she had given it to him on being appointed. Mandelson, by contrast, was not given a formal security vetting before starting as US ambassador. This was despite it being known that he had a potentially—and as it has now transpired, actually—explosive friendship with the super-rich, late American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
There has been extreme intolerance towards dissent on the left, including withdrawal of the whip for MPs who have defied the government to support policies that are popular with Labour members. This approach was in marked contrast with Tony Blair, who never sought to expel the awkward squad of his own day. Instead, Blair had the confidence to confront it with arguments—such as over the abolition of the old Clause IV, which committed the party to nationalisation of industry.
By the summer, there were signs that the iron grip was no longer working as it had been. Rebels on policy went from being dismissed as “noises off” to becoming, as their ranks swelled, guardians of “Labour values,” to being individually picked off for suspension. On immigration, Starmer’s “islands of strangers” speech went from being given, to being publicly regretted in the Observer, to being reasserted in the Sun. It was against this bewildering background that the repeatedly convicted criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (or as he calls himself, Tommy Robinson) led his giant national-chauvinist rally in London. Ministers initially seemed paralysed, understandably unclear whether the line to take was to condemn division or instead to indulge talk of “legitimate grievances”.
Remaining loyalists to No 10 are not without arguments. They cite the protracted chaos that dogged and doomed the Conservatives during the second half of the last parliament as a warning against regicide. They point out, quite rightly, that the public finances are in dire straits that can only be navigated by tough choices. They have seized on, albeit with a slightly slanted interpretation, Burnham’s words about needing to get beyond being “in hock” to the bond markets as evidence that he is not serious about confronting such nasty decisions. Starmer loyalists might even try to suggest that Burnham’s prospectus of business-friendly, municipal socialism is little more than a fantasy version of Starmerism without the cold reality of budget constraints. They might, perhaps, point to rail nationalisation and devolution as things the government is “getting on with” while the man from Manchester merely talks.
But here’s the rub as Labour assembles in Liverpool for its annual conference: many party members, and a large slice of the people who would normally vote Labour, feel that this is a Labour government that dislikes them and disdains their dreams of a fairer society. And it is its heavy-handed and narrowing political management that has driven many of them to a point where the breezy charms of an affable mayor far away from Westminster feel so hard to resist.
