The rumour mill of Labour’s undeclared leadership race is in overdrive. More and more mutter that change at the top is required because voters have made up their minds that Keir Starmer is a dud. The Prime Minister declaring in a Daily Mirror interview that he’ll fight the next general election suggests he has heard it too – a determination to go on and on that isn’t usually aired until a PM is two terms in and the speculation is whether they’ll attempt a third. One new whisper is that a senior whip is considering resigning so they can act as a stalking horse, trying to gather the required 81 nominations to officially trigger a leadership challenge for stronger candidates. Punchy Shabana Mahmood’s hammering of asylum seekers reinforces why, should the gates of Downing Street be stormed, no unopposed coronation of Wes Streeting is likely. Talk in his camp has turned to how to strengthen his support in his constituency, since the Health Secretary only has a fragile 528-vote majority in Ilford North – and opposition parties would be willing to throw the kitchen sink to defeat a sitting prime minister there. The solution muted by one of his supporters is for Streeting to switch to neighbouring Ilford South, while the current MP, Jas Athwal, is offered a peerage in the Lords in exchange for giving up his safer 6,894 majority. It would be less a “chicken run” than a hop to the next-door perch.
Christmas starts earlier every year, and in the first half of November a number of Labour MPs with votes in a potential leadership battle received hand-written cards from ambitious cabinet minister Peter Kyle. A veteran backbencher who said he’d never spoken to the Business Secretary, or before featured on his Christmas list, wondered aloud why he’d suddenly received one this year with a scribbled solicitous message. No need to pen a letter to Santa to ask for an answer.
Everyone knows the Ming-vase strategy: the political approach that involves minimal policy announcements, small, targeted messaging and extreme caution. It is something this Labour government was keen to perfect before entering office. One disgruntled Labour backbencher, however, told the NS that a better description for this government’s operations would be a “reverse” Ming-vase strategy. “They carried the vase so carefully until the election,” the MP said, “and then turned around and immediately smashed it to bits”. Anybody got a tube of Gorilla Glue?
The latest conspiracy theory seeking to explain No 10’s fatal briefing is that a vengeful Mandelson sold the initiative to protégé Morgan McSweeney knowing it would backfire to destroy Starmer who fired him as Our Man in Washington. The Celebrity Traitors was no match for the fevered imaginations of Labour folk attempting to make sense of the mother of all spinning out of control operations.
Right now the hottest play in town is The Line of Beauty, a stage adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel about the hedonistic excess of the 1980s. It follows an Oxford graduate living in the Notting Hill mansion of a Tory MP and his family. One scene has the protagonist dancing with Margaret Thatcher in her heyday. So it was no surprise to hear that George Osborne – former Tory chancellor and denizen of a £10m Notting Hill pad – had travelled to the Almeida in Islington to see the play. (He disagreed with the New Statesman’s review: “It was a good play!” Osborne told us.) These days, Notting Hell Tory-land is stranger than fiction: the sacked US ambassador Peter Mandelson was snapped taking a leak outside Osborne’s house after stopping by for a glass of wine. The penny never dropped that a photographer was watching.
Flying largely under the radar during the Starmtroopers’ failed kneecapping of Streeting was the Department of Health and Social Care hiring one of their Secretary of State’s old university muckers for a communications three-month review including, presumably, promotion of Wes himself. Former Sunday Mirror and Sunday People editor Gemma Aldridge also happens to be a trained bibliotherapist, prescribing books to help troubled souls. Streeting has Great Expectations whereas No 10’s a Bleak House with a PM fallen on Hard Times.
Piers Corbyn is a weather forecaster, conspiracy theorist and brother of the Your Party co-founder Jeremy Corbyn. The pair were spotted on a meet-up in Portcullis House. Corbyn junior (Jeremy) was seen hurrying his elder brother from security, and straight to his office. At least they didn’t bump into Zarah Sultana.
Eco-populist Zack Polanski (née Liberal Democrat justifier of austerity) is 33 years old – one year younger than New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani. Your Party grandfather Corbyn is 76. “One is young and fresh, the other old and tired,” mused a Labour left-winger who served in Jezza’s shadow cabinets. Sultana, however, is only 32. Her abandoned Labour comrades openly wonder whether Your Party would do better under her tutelage or whether she could follow Blackburn’s Adnan Hussain and quit… then join Polanski’s Greens. Watch this space.
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes