If contempt is the single biggest predictor of a relationship doomed to fail – to borrow from American marriage psychologists – then Keir Starmer is in trouble. Behind the Prime Minister’s back in the Parliamentary Labour Party, there is now widespread mockery, sarcasm, name-calling and the darkest of gallows humour. As one despairing MP put it to me, if this is a marriage, the two sides have reached the “staying together for the kids” stage.
Labour MPs are worn down by 16 months of unpopular policies and unforced errors, from winter fuel to the welfare debacle. Many are resigned to serving just a single term in parliament. Some are nervous and embarrassed to admit they are Labour MPs when out socially. A good conference speech in Liverpool without much follow-through has changed little.
Instead, even the smallest of frustrations send MPs apoplectic. Starmer’s decision to travel all the way to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Brazil on 6 November only to decline to pay in to the conference’s flagship deforestation fund has been greeted with despair, a classic Starmerite fudge that managed to please nobody. “We are haemorrhaging votes to the Greens. The least we could do is just plant some fucking trees,” a frustrated MP put it, failing to be won over by the gesture of climate commitment that his attendance was supposed to represent. Others in the party insist it was a sensible decision not to spend money to protect the Amazon weeks before likely tax hikes. Still, if this was the case, why attend at all?
Either way, tension over climate is just another example of how directionless people in the party feel. The big, vital questions about who they are and what they stand for remain unanswered, in the view of many MPs, ministers and aides. Is their dividing line with Reform that Farage’s party is racist, or are they still moving to the right on migration to ward him off? Is it growth at all costs, or are other considerations equally important? Is becoming a clean-energy superpower genuinely one of the government’s five defining missions, or a campaign device now in the bin?
I remember the unmistakable feeling in parliament when Boris Johnson’s MPs became openly contemptuous of him in their private conversations with journalists. It was at this moment that cabinet ministers began jostling for the leadership under the prime minister’s nose. It was also at this time that conversations about whether, how and when to replace him became commonplace. (That was, incidentally, the last time I was at the New Statesman. Hello again – I am very happy to be back.) It took many months before Johnson was ousted. But once the genie was out of the bottle, it never went back in. When I considered how I should begin as the New Statesman’s political editor, it became clear to me that the only possible place to start was here. We are in a moment like that again – the shift in mood has happened, and conversations about whether or how to replace Starmer have begun. Everything that happens in the coming weeks and months will be underpinned by this reality, as the government does all it can to weather the inevitable storm of the Budget, in which it will seek to impose new tax rises on the country from a position of almost unparalleled unpopularity.
In parliament, many MPs have slowly reached the conclusion that No 10 doesn’t much like or respect them. Now, they say the feeling’s mutual. Some refer derisively to the newly reshuffled whips office as “the Politburo” and “the Friends and Family Unit”, because, while liked on a personal level, many of the new whips have family links to senior figures in No 10. Some MPs have completely stopped telling their whips how they really feel, putting on a front of loyalty. Instead, they tell the New Statesman.
And while previously the people around the Prime Minister might have been the focus of criticism, it’s now strikingly personal to Starmer himself. As one aide puts it: “He doesn’t understand politics or the Labour Party, he doesn’t have a vision, he’s a terrible communicator. We’ve always known these things about him, but we put up with it when we were doing OK against the Tories.” With the party hitting its lowest ever poll rating with YouGov on 28 October, coming fourth at just 17 per cent, many in Starmer’s party are no longer willing to overlook the flaws they perceive in their leader.
Behind the sarcasm and gallows humour, there is genuine despair. Labour governments do not come about very often, only entering from opposition three times in the last century. As one MP put it, starkly: “He’s squandering the opportunity of a generation. We might not be in power again for decades.”
For as long as Starmer has been Labour leader, there have been times when he has simply not wanted to know. In opposition, one shadow cabinet minister was astonished to discover he didn’t want to hear about an important, sensitive issue they believed only he as leader could take on. Instead, he rebuffed them with the reply: “Speak to Morgan [McSweeney] about it.”
“Speak to Rachel,” came the reply years later, too, when a cabinet minister tried to ask Starmer about what would go on to be the first and original disaster of his government: scrapping the winter fuel payment for some pensioners. He refused advice from officials on that policy before it was implemented, according to one person involved.
“Obviously, Keir doesn’t have much time,” is a frequent refrain of Starmer’s advisers. How a leader manages their diary is a crucial and far from straightforward question, and some of Starmer’s predecessors (Gordon Brown, Rishi Sunak) fell foul of a tendency to be too in the weeds on policy. Starmer has the opposite instinct, bringing his approach from his time as director of public prosecutions – leading an organisation of thousands of staff – to governing. “Keir doesn’t want to know,” one aide put it. “It’s how he led organisations in the past.” But, a cabinet minister notes, “There are some things you have to grip yourself. He doesn’t.”
When I put this to a senior No 10 figure, they insist Starmer has a tight grasp on everything that’s going on, and an impressive ability to understand the myriad of problems the country is facing. “If the British prime minister didn’t delegate, the country would fall to its knees,” they argue.
Cabinet ministers complain Starmer doesn’t want to be involved in conflict, or adjudicate disagreements between officials. Even when No 10 tried (and failed) to reshuffle Ed Miliband out of his energy brief, aides were reluctant to bother their leader when Miliband refused to move.
Starmer’s preference is for his ministers and advisers to reach a “house view” before bringing him decisions for sign-off. Some insiders argue that set-up has worked to the advantage of influential advisers, often allowing them to steer the Prime Minister towards their own preferences and away from what they believe would have been his choice – a more progressive choice, maybe – had he been equipped with all of the information. Bluntly, they say the decision-making process can end up “infantilising” the premier. But ultimately, they agree Starmer has been complicit in creating that system himself.
After the welfare debacle, Starmer had a flash of awareness that the system wasn’t working. “I was heavily focused on what was happening with Nato and the Middle East,” he told the Sunday Times, explaining how he lost sight of the brewing welfare revolt until he returned from the G7 summit. Privately, he told aides he wanted to be given more policy detail, and earlier.
The solution could, or should, have been the reorganisation of No 10. The revamped policy unit now has a flatter structure, “designed to give more people direct access to the Prime Minister so he hears a range of views”, a senior No 10 official says. But has anything changed? The Prime Minister’s preference for officials to reach consensus before going to him remains.
And another innovation may have only reinforced Starmer’s distance from the decisions of his own government. In the No 10 reorganisation, Darren Jones was brought over from the Treasury to serve in the newly created role of chief secretary to the Prime Minister, as a right-hand man who would drive change from the centre of government and ensure delivery on the Prime Minister’s priorities.
McSweeney likes having Jones around. He generally enjoys having a politician to work closely with and bounce ideas off, as he did with the then national campaign coordinator, Shabana Mahmood, on campaigns between 2021 and 2023, and with Pat McFadden ahead of the general election. Another insider notes that there is already a politician in No 10 that the chief of staff could – and should – have that relationship with.
Meanwhile, other senior figures are quietly reaching a conclusion they dare not tell Starmer: things are not working with Jones. Only eight weeks in, some have concluded he is not going to be able to deliver on their great hopes. “No one would have been able to do that job – the centre is too hard to reform,” one insider observes. Others say Jones’s arrival means decisions are being made more quickly, providing the timely direction from an elected politician that has sometimes been lacking in No 10.
There are personality clashes too. “He’s got his own mind and he’s a details guy around lots of people who aren’t details people,” one aide says. “He’s leaving people looking exposed.” (A source close to Jones emphasises this is not his view of his colleagues, but better use of data and tech is driving faster decision-making.) “I think they underestimated how nakedly ambitious Darren is,” another says. After so much churn, however – losing a chief of staff in Sue Gray, three communications chiefs in Matthew Doyle, James Lyons and Steph Driver, a principal private secretary in Nin Pandit, one of Starmer’s closest allies in Paul Ovenden and at least seven people from the policy unit – there is a reluctance to tell Starmer this view. No 10 will have to live with the new order of things.
Starmer, meanwhile, is getting to grips with a building full of new faces, including a mostly new policy unit, many of whom don’t know him personally, or the Labour Party, for that matter. The wider reorganisation of No 10 saw more departures than had been expected, and Starmer has lost many of his longest-serving fellow travellers in recent weeks.
If this new Downing Street machine was intended to give ministers a clearer direction from the centre, elsewhere in government, the reorganisation appears to have had the opposite effect. “You don’t know who to talk to any more. If anything, the steer is less clear than it used to be,” a government source says. “We’re getting no clear political direction and the whole operation appears to be in stasis.”
Those who have recently left are facing a reckoning with what their colleagues still in the building may not know. They are hearing mutinous MPs, the derisive tone of other aides, the plotting and the end-of-days conversations. As one recent departee puts it: “There is a bunker mentality. You don’t realise when you’re in there how bad it is. None of them realise how unpopular we are.” One Labour grandee was in No 10 recently for a meeting. He left in bewilderment, telling senior colleagues: “Those people are in denial.” Of course, No 10 can see the same polling as everyone else – and more, with their own private polling. Their diagnosis privately (and we’ve heard this from Starmer publicly too) is that the government hasn’t delivered change fast enough, the public is rightly frustrated and Labour will remain unpopular until change is delivered.
The Prime Minister certainly isn’t existing in “blissful ignorance”, a senior No 10 figure says. He knows the political situation is difficult, which is why there is increased engagement with MPs – breakfasts, lunches, one-on-one meetings and a concerted effort to explain the economic situation to the parliamentary party ahead of the Budget. Ministers below cabinet level and backbenchers have been brought in for time with the boss. A senior No 10 source says Starmer would fight any leadership challenge against him.
After that unmistakable moment when Johnson’s support in parliament began to falter, the Conservative Parliamentary Party entered a new phase: for months, leadership contenders were considered, and discounted, one by one. I remember “Rishi has shown he’s not up to it” and “We don’t want to give in to the media baying for blood.” Many MPs, remaining unhappy and contemptuous, agreed it would be a disaster to remove a sitting prime minister.
In today’s Labour Party, there is constant, fevered discussion about the prospect of a leadership challenge in May (after the local, Scottish and Welsh elections) or in the aftermath of the Budget, about the possible contenders and the exact mechanism by which it would be done.
Despite the despondency, many MPs are confused, unconvinced a change of leader would make a difference or unsure of who they would back in a leadership contest. Some are looking to the cabinet, expecting it would take several ministers close to Starmer to tell him to stand down if it came to it. Cabinet ministers, meanwhile, are looking back at the Parliamentary Labour Party. Under the Labour rules, only 80 MPs would need to nominate a challenger – fewer than signed the letter to protest against the welfare cuts. But would anyone dare? Opinions differ on whether MPs would be persuaded to nominate for a contest, rather than a coronation, and whether any serious contender would mount a challenge in that way. Despite all the chatter, the stasis could continue as everyone waits for someone else to make a move.
Some are adamant that can’t happen. “I don’t think a Labour leader who leads us to come third in Wales would deserve to stay as prime minister,” one aide says. Others argue that if Labour got rid of a prime minister, the public would stop listening and the party would almost certainly lose the next election. That warning against being “messy Tories” is a persuasive one. A senior Starmer ally notes that the UK is seen internationally as a stable government with a large majority – which is important economically. They warn against rocking the boat on that.
And somewhere in all of the mutinous talk, one insider says everyone has forgotten something: if anyone else became prime minister, they would be under immediate pressure to go to the country. Gordon Brown, Theresa May and Rishi Sunak all struggled without their own mandates, and became obliged to call an election that they then lost (or in May’s case, she saw her majority slashed and her party was obliged to turn to the DUP for support in parliament).
“We don’t do regicide,” is the mantra many of the same people despairing at the government’s performance repeat. But when it came to it, after weathering partygate and months of internal strife, it just took one final gust of wind, in the form of the Chris Pincher scandal, for the cabinet and MPs finally to act against Johnson. As he concluded: “When the herd moves, it moves.”
[Further reading: The Starmer-McSweeney tendency is sinking Labour]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear