Starmer 1.0 is over. But that doesn’t mean it’s forgotten. The Labour party is currently undergoing some form of post-traumatic therapy in which it relitigates the mistakes – and everyone is now happy to publicly use that word – of those first 18 months.
The means-testing of winter fuel payments. Refusing to lift the two-child benefit cap and kneecapping Labour MPs who disagreed (then U-turning). Trying to cut disability benefits to make up the sums add up before the March OBR forecast, branding it as “welfare reform” and once again kneecapping people who disagreed (then U-turning). Farmers (same story). The hiring of Sue Gray. The hiring of Matthew Doyle. The hiring of Peter Mandelson. And now, it turns out, the hiring of Chris Wormald, the Cabinet Secretary.
Perhaps some of it can be forgotten, but what I find in conversations with Labour politicians is there are some things that can’t be forgiven. Like the September reshuffle, triggered by the resignation of Angela Rayner. It was described to me in spittle-flecked tones by one senior Labour figure this week as “a disgrace and a disaster”.
It wasn’t just the purging of soft left junior ministers and the promotion of perceived friends of the governing “clique” that offended. All of the power bases in the government outside of Number 10 were subjected to aerial bombardment. A number of junior ministers were made to straddle cross-departmental briefs in what was perceived as an attempt to deprive their secretaries of state of loyal followers. In the ruins of the reshuffle, one sacked minister told me that Starmer would now have all the power, and would therefore take all the responsibility when it went wrong. Which was just about right (rest in peace, Morgan McSweeney).
Can it be rectified? As my colleague George Eaton has written this week, a soft left reshuffle is what could save Starmer now. One former minister said to me, tongue-in-cheek, that they were waiting by the phone. They may be waiting for a while yet. This politically weak prime minister will have to be careful about who he pisses off by moving them out of government (remember Lucy Powell, unceremoniously sacked from Cabinet only to be returned to political Cabinet as Labour’s deputy leader?).
One of Labour’s household names told me this week that Starmer should reorientate his politics and his personnel, with the Mandelson affair demonstrating that too many senior Labour women are being left on the backbenches when they should be serving as ministers (a critique you can read more about in our political editor Ailbhe Rea’s politics column this week).
Angela Rayner, of course, is the first that springs to mind, and the general clamouring for her return from Wes Streeting to the soft left will be almost impossible to resist. But think also of the other eminently promotable senior Labour women who are not in government. Emily Thornberry (snubbed on day one), Anneliese Dodds (resigned on principle after her international development brief was bulldozed by the defence spending pledge), Vicky Foxcroft (resigned on principle over welfare cuts the government later U-turned on), Catherine McKinnell (inexplicably sacked in the reshuffle), Louise Haigh (resigned after a minor scandal) etc. Others in junior positions – serving as PPSs and the like despite having done time in opposition – want to see what they consider a proper recognition of their talents.
The practical effect of such changes will be that a weak PM who is over a barrel will be forced to change his approach to government based on the wishes of the majority of his MPs. It has been described to me by one backbencher as a fight to purge the government of the influence of “Blue Labour”. This may just be chasing shadows. The group is widely misunderstood and its influence overrated. But when people in the PLP talk about Blue Labour what they mean is: a party whose vibes are too right-wing because of the influence of a small group at the top who do not represent us.
The Jim Ratcliffe response this week was one sign of the change afoot, when the PM used social media to almost immediately condemn as “offensive and wrong” the Manchester United co-owner’s “colonisation” comments. One of the broadly held criticisms of the government from Labour MPs, across factional lines, was its entirely sluggish response to the summer of anti-migrant agitation and rising racial antagonism. There were lefties who thought the government should tear down the flags, there were Blarities who wanted the emergency creation of a “National Community Cohesion Strategy”. None were satisfied with what Number 10 provided: silence at the top, followed by a speech in late September in which the PM finally did as his MPs wanted and called out racism.
The expectation was always that, if McSweeney fell, we would finally have a “Let Keir be Keir” government: a return to the pre-Hartlepool days of the ten pledges and taking the knee, perhaps. While it’s a doctrine that will carry his name, the Prime Minister will not be its main author.
[Further reading: Morgan McSweeney’s political obituary]
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