In the past week a number of senior Labour figures who aren’t happy with their party trailing Reform in the polls have found themselves rebranded in the press as “potential leadership challengers”.
First among them is Andy Burnham, or an imagined version of Burnham in which he occupies a parliamentary seat. But there are others including – if you ask more paranoid Labour MPs – Ed Miliband. “On manoeuvres,” the New Statesman has heard (not least because he is much closer to deputy leadership candidate Lucy Powell, his former deputy chief of staff, than is Andy Burnham, for whom the papers claim she is acting as a stalking horse).
In an atmosphere of growing hysteria, it is worth considering how a leadership challenge instigated by the parliamentary Labour party would, or indeed probably wouldn’t, work.
Amid the collapsing scenery of the last government, parliamentarians and journalists got very accustomed to annual bouts of breathless speculation on the subject. Westminster has not fully adjusted to the new reality of the Labour Party being in government (to the extent that some political correspondents have received calls from the dimmer news editors asking them how many “letters” have been submitted).
First off, a simple fact. The software version of the Conservative Party that existed from 1998 to 2024 was uniquely conducive to leadership challenges.
There was a straightforward process set up to fell a sitting leader, and prime minister, without either declaring publicly any intention to do so or presenting an alternative candidate.
Labour is not and has never been set up in such a way. Proper leadership challenges require a publicly declared candidate to gather publicly declared support.
The mechanism for doing so has got steadily trickier over the past half century. There was a time when the leader had to stand for re-election annually while in opposition. This was largely a democratic formality. But in periods of factional dispute and/or deep opposition, the mechanism was exercised. Hugh Gaitskell faced two successive challenges in 1960 and 1961 from left-wingers who rankled at his positions on public ownership and nuclear weapons. Both failed.
Annual re-election is a distant memory. Now a challenge must be initiated by a declared candidate who can gather the support of fellow MPs. The threshold for a challenge was doubled in 2021 from 10 per cent to 20 per cent of the PLP, so 80 MPs in the current parliament.
A confidence vote without a designated challenger can be arranged, but it has no constitutional force. That is why Jeremy Corbyn was able to cling on in 2016 after a ballot in which 172-40 of the parliamentary party said they had no confidence in his leadership.
It is also why, ten years earlier, missives from Labour MPs telling Tony Blair he needed to go could damage but not remove him. From 2008 to 2010 Gordon Brown was constantly harried by the prospect of challenges that never gathered enough momentum to transition from press speculation to political reality.
The Tory no confidence letters allow for many options to replace the incumbent leader. Under Labour’s formal mechanism to trigger a challenge, all the rebels need to agree on one replacement.
Furthermore, Labour has no endogenous method for backroom expulsion – though this could be done through the organs of government, like senior Cabinet ministers informing the prime minister that they no longer have confidence in his leadership and forcing a resignation without a declared challenger.
Any prospective challenger would need to enter their name with full faith that fourscore of their parliamentary colleagues would go over the top with them. That would be one hell of a conspiracy, and likely to blow up in the face of its organiser.
What are the odds
Even under the Tories’ regicide-friendly system, where letters from 15 per cent of MPs could trigger a confidence vote, only one leader was directly removed in this way (Iain Duncan Smith in 2003).
While Theresa May and Boris Johnson both faced confidence votes, they won by unconvincing margins and later resigned because their authority was shot.
Liz Truss similarly resigned when it was clear she had lost the confidence of the party in a parliamentary vote on fracking, even though she could not face a formal challenge within the first year of her tenure under party rules. This is perhaps the most plausible analogue for the end of Starmer: if rebellion in the PLP reached such a fever pitch that the government could not win votes and the prime minister could not go on.
Last October the rules changed to increase the Tory no-confidence threshold from 15 per cent to one third of the parliamentary party.
Unfortunately for Kemi Badenoch, she has made such a poor impression that the increased threshold probably won’t stop her facing a leadership challenge when the annual leadership probation period expires in November.
It is worth keeping perspective on this: a Conservative leadership challenge in the next few months remains much more likely than a Labour leadership challenge, regardless of the hysterics you might read in the papers.
[See also: Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana clash over Your Party’s membership launch]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment