There was a moment, Wednesday night, when it looked like it was actually going to happen. It’s Militime! people posted, as news went around that, in the absence of any other soft left candidate, the Energy Secretary would be willing to stand to block a Wes Streeting premiership.
Sure, Miliband brings baggage – a light history of political fratricide, a load of tabloid nonsense about tumble dryers and bacon sandwiches, an awkward manner on camera that belies his presence and (no, really) charisma. And yes, the fact he led his party to defeat in 2015 would create an opportunity for the worst people in Britain to make howling demands for an immediate general election.
On the other hand, though, those people were obviously going to do that anyway, and Miliband has clearly learned from that failure. He’s been one of Labour’s most effective ministers, he came in with an actual plan and having spent five years in the full glare of the limelight it seems unlikely there were any skeletons left to come out. And surely the most dramatically satisfying ending to a decade of chaos would be if the guy who lost the last election before the world went mad were to come back and somehow end up fixing it all. He’s like Chekhov’s Labour leader, waiting in the wings for the right moment to go off! They’ll call it “the Ed Miliband golden age”, I started chuckling to myself. They’ll say International Rescue got the wrong brother!
But no. On Thursday morning the Guardian reported that HMRC had finally resolved the matter of Angela Rayner’s tax affairs, that while she’d had to settle a £40,000 bill no penalty for wrongdoing had been incurred, and now she was free to enter the fray. The former deputy PM is widely considered one of the top-tier candidates, and also wants it a lot more than Miliband does, and so that was the end of that. The great scriptwriter in the sky, it turns out, is cribbing less from Russian theatre than from The Thick of It. Chaos reigned once again – and not even the good kind, with Ed Miliband.
One of the main functions of political commentary is to explain what is actually happening. This column, alas, will be doing no such thing, because I haven’t the faintest idea. I’ve not checked the news in three paragraphs, and thus have no idea who’s in the race, or even if there is a race, and by the time you actually read this anything could have happened. Perhaps Tony Blair will be back. Perhaps Al Carns will be Prime Minister. Perhaps there’ll be a Labour poll bounce! No, not that one, let’s keep it realistic.
The most realistic outcome at this point feels like zugzwang: a term from chess meaning that whatever one player does next can only make their position worse. It is extremely hard to see how Starmer can remain in post: if he still had any authority left after last week’s election results, he lost it when nearly 100 MPs called for him to go. The polling, his personal ratings, the stasis that stems from his well-documented inability to make crucial decisions – everything suggests he has to go.
And yet, Keir Starmer does not go. Keir Starmer would prefer not to, and every other major candidate comes with entire carriages of baggage of their own. The most likely challenger from his right remains, at time of writing if not reading, Wes Streeting, whose close ties to Lord Mandelson are unlikely to be a problem only thanks to his equally embarrassing polling among the party members that would have to elect him. The most likely challenger from the left, last I checked, remains Rayner, on the apparent assumption that a famously rational and forgiving electorate is more likely to be swayed by vindication from HMRC than by a press that will inevitably continue hysterically screaming “scandal” anyway.
The most likely challenger from the north, of course, is Andy Burnham. The mayor of Greater Manchester would be well placed to come through as a compromise candidate – he genuinely has enthusiastic supporters from both wings of the party – but still suffers the slight impediment of not having a seat. Those close to him have claimed this is not an insurmountable barrier; but after multiple news cycles in which we are told X is considering standing down, only for X to follow up with (I paraphrase) “am I bollocks”, one does start to wonder.
Perhaps it won’t be any of them. Perhaps it’ll be someone else. (Oooh, Al Carns is in!) Perhaps it will even be Keir Starmer: party rules mean that the existing leader automatically remains on the ballot, and the combination of an anti-Streeting left, an anti-Rayner right and a ranked voting system mean that Starmer remains hilariously well-placed to come through the middle. Spending several weeks in the middle of an economic and geopolitical crisis systematically outlining the reasons why every possible Labour prime minister would actually suck at the job, only to then change literally nothing, would surely be the ultimate Labour Party outcome. It’s 2026. What else can we expect?
Oh, Wes Streeting has resigned! Well. Here we go. Good luck, everybody. God I wish we’d chosen chaos with Ed Miliband.
[Further reading: Wes Streeting resigns with excoriating letter to Starmer]
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