Is this it? If Catherine West does not withdraw her threat to trigger a leadership election on Monday, by informing the NEC of her intentions and emailing every Labour MP to seek their support for a challenge to Keir Starmer, then events will gain a momentum of their own thanks to the relentless logic of the Labour party rule book. The floor will be thrown open to all comers to put their names forward and seek, like West, the 81 nominations required to proceed to a members ballot for the party leadership.
It would take a remarkable degree of consensus within this battered and divided PLP for no-one to take up the opportunity. Could all 403 Labour MPs, West and her band of 10 or so supporters excepted, really maintain a conspiracy of silence by withholding the necessary 81 nominations and putting forward no other candidates?
The most pertinent question at the time of writing is whether West will really follow through with this. On Saturday evening she had taken a position as formidably stubborn as the Prime Minister: while she told the NS that she would not back down under any circumstances except the public announcement of a challenge by a more senior figure, the PM was telling The Observer that he expects to win the next election and serve a full second term as PM.
But after having slept on it, West seems to have softened her position as of Sunday morning. In a BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg, she even suggested that the Prime Minister’s speech on Monday morning, in which he will lay out a government reset, could sway her back to loyalty. “I will hear what the Prime Minister’s got to say tomorrow. If I am still dissatisfied I will put my email to the Parliamentary Labour Party asking for names,” she said.
It raises the question of why she did not wait until after the speech, as Number 10 asked her to after she informed the chief whip and the party chair of her intentions on Saturday. West, who identifies as a “lone wolf”, says she was motivated by anger and frustration at Thursday’s election results, in which one of her best friends lost her council seat.
The next question is, who benefits? While West locates herself on the centre or soft left of the Labour party, she did not pre-warn ideological fellow-travellers of her intentions and has been unapologetic about blindsiding the obvious leadership contenders from the left such as Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham (whose hopes of becoming Prime Minister may have been destroyed by her unexpected gambit because he will not have time to find a parliamentary seat).
Various parts of the Labour left are now urging West to step down. Senior figures in the Socialist Campaign Group have disavowed her, a leading Tribune member told me “she has fired the starting gun at her own foot” and wants her to step down and the Burnham camp is asking her to withdraw.
Her position on Saturday was that, essentially, all camps are being too-clever-by-half in their attempts to fix a date and time of a leadership election that is most advantageous to their cause. Instead she has called for an open democratic contest as soon as possible, something which large parts of the Labour party have basically become allergic to since, successively, the “accidental” election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2015 followed by the “false pretences” election of Keir Starmer as leader in 2020, when he ran on a ten-point pledge Left programme and then dropped every bit of it after he had won. She is essentially practicing a form of radical naivete and it is totally bewildering to her more politically calculating colleagues.
The person who stands to benefit most from West’s gambit is Wes Streeting. As NS political editor Ailbhe Rea reported in January, while Streeting has sworn he is not plotting against Starmer, he has been “planning” for a situation in which a contest becomes inevitable. If West begins the process of a contest on Monday, we may have arrived at that eventuality.
If we needed any further evidence that Streeting’s natural supporters are ready to get rid of the Prime Minister, it was provided this morning by the intervention of former minister Josh Simons, who called for Starmer to go in an article for The Times.
Streeting is not due to do any public events until Thursday, when the latest NHS waiting list data drops and provides a metric by which to measure his performance as Health Secretary. Any sign of that changing will indicate that he believes this is his moment.
In the past weeks and months, he has steadily neutralised the arguments against him standing. They said he was too close to Peter Mandelson, so he unilaterally released his WhatsApps with the disgraced ambassador to kill the story. They he wouldn’t even be able to keep his own seat at the next election, so he did his darndest to make sure his local council in Redbridge got one of the best Labour results in the country on Thursday (read my piece here on why his seat might now be safer than we thought).
The other objection might be that Streeting is excessively ambitious, that his lack of loyalty in triggering a challenge to Starmer would put off Labour members. Thanks to West, that problem may be solved too. In the words of another challenger who made it to the top, if Streeting joins the scramble that West starts on Monday, he will simply be catching the ball as it comes loose from the back of the scrum.
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