If it be now (at the Liverpool conference) then ’tis not to come. But if it be not now (this leadership crisis) yet it will come. “The readiness is all.” Easy for you to say, Mr Shakespeare.
Keir Starmer arrives in a great northern city with his depleted Downing Street team, against the background of an opinion poll showing Reform smashing Labour, if there were an election today – 311 seats to Labour’s 144, and easily within touch of forming a government with a rump of bewildered Tories. It’s only a YouGov poll, the government will say. But this threat is also intimate and personal. It suggests the end of the parliamentary career of most of the key figures in the current cabinet, and every MP, every CLP chair, walking round the Liverpool Docklands will have checked what it means on their patch.
But this is not, by the way, just about MPs: across the country Labour mayors and Labour councils feel they are facing the abyss as well. As a measure of party feeling, all the signs are that Lucy Powell is far ahead of Bridget Phillipson in the deputy leadership race. That will be, inevitably, part of the Liverpool story. Which takes us to the elephant in the conference hall. Here is the problem with Andy Burnham. It isn’t his ambition, or what he says about the bond markets, or the jealousy and resentment of Westminster MPs, or even the difficulty of leaving the Manchester mayoralty behind. The problem with Burnham is that in his demeanour and language he embodies what Labour, in its heart, would most like to be – the party’s sense of its best self.
It’s his outspoken belief in the public sector, in progressive taxation and the certainty of a better tomorrow. It’s his buoyancy and optimism. It’s his rootedness. Ease. Self-confidence. When did the party lose all that good stuff? No longer pulling his punches, for Labour MPs feeling ground down and desperate at Westminster, he’s the political equivalent of a brimming flask of fresh water in a pitiless desert. Trouble is, the desert represents the hard job of trying to win over and hold millions of voters with views which are very far from Labour’s soul, and whose views are buttressed by American conservative algorithms. They are the people scared of high taxation and higher interest rates, profoundly angry about the failure to control the borders and much likelier to fly a union flag than a Palestinian one.
Starmer’s two pre-conference announcements – on digital ID cards for British workers to end the migration pull factor highlighted by, among others recently, President Macron of France; and the fund of money to cheer up neglected communities – both show that he and Morgan McSweeney remain focused on such voters. These initiatives are welcome but they offer thin gruel for a party losing confidence in itself. For reasons I’ve described earlier this week, a full-blown leadership contest now is fraught with difficulty and huge political risk for the country.
My belief is that having made his pitch, Burnham will go no further for now. He won’t fight for an imminent by election. He won’t declare that he wants to topple Starmer. But he won’t back down either. Thus, in the short term, things will simmer down. But only in the short term. Starmer’s speech will, I assume, give the conference some of what it needs – a clear indication on the two-child benefit cap, perhaps something about taking water companies into public control, and a fiery denunciation of ethnic nationalism.
The Prime Minister must be dazed by the hurricane of conflicting advice coming his way. He must be fed up to the back teeth with all the journalistic finger-wagging that he must now make “the speech of his life.” But the truth is, this one does really matter. It would be good to hear from this most London of politicians a generous acknowledgement that Labour and Britain would be nothing like as strong without Liverpool and, yes indeed, Manchester. It was the slaughter of north-west ministers in the reshuffle that was one of the issues, putting Burnham over the brink; increasingly, the feud has a geographical side.
Those who want to bring down the Prime Minister are beginning with his chief of staff McSweeney. The decision of the electoral commission not to pursue the Labour Together case is an important early conference win for the leadership. But Starmer’s opponents in the party know very well that if they are able to get McSweeney out before they strike, their chances are far higher. Who leaked that unhelpful letter from the lawyer Lord Gerald Shamash to the press? The bitter factionalism Labour experienced earlier in the century is coming back to haunt the party now. To put it plainly, there are scores still waiting to be settled. Everything connects. This is what I mean by the danger of civil war in Liverpool. Starmer has had his successes, notably on foreign affairs but he has not proved to be an inspiring national leader.
All is not yet lost. Despite the opinion polling described earlier on, Reform has made recent mistakes, on its massive deportation plan for legal migrants, and going along with Trumpian medical nonsense and scare stories. “They’re coming for our swans” is not a compelling slogan for national power. With the mis-steps by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s “Your Party”, and polling evidence that many leftish voters would return to Labour to stop Nigel Farage, the possibility of Starmer winning a better result in three years’ time must be quite high.
His problem, of course, is that he may well not have that long. If Burnham taps the brake-pedal now, it will only be to wait until next spring’s elections in Wales, Scotland, London and provincial England. With careful management and a little luck, Team Starmer can get through Liverpool without another political disaster. But the pressure continues to build up and won’t stop, before and after the Budget and then into next year. There are still profound questions about political leadership ahead; if they are answered in Liverpool, it would be a delight… but also, let’s be honest, a surprise.
[Further reading: Labour vs the left]
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