Last night’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, which was addressed by the Prime Minister, was expected to be a postmortem on the Gorton and Denton by-election. Then world events intervened and the PM spent a large chunk of the meeting talking about Britain’s role in the war and reassuring MPs that this would not be Iraq 2.0.
But what he did say about the by-election was salient. “I believe, and continue to believe, that there is a mainstream majority in this country who neither want Nigel Farage or Zack Polanski as their prime minister,” he told parliamentary colleagues.
It was the latest stage in Starmer’s evolving position towards the Greens as the party becomes a greater threat to Labour’s left flank.
A week ago, in the run up to polling day in Gorton and Denton, the PM said Green votes were wasted ones that would split the left and let Reform in.
On Friday morning, having won the by-election with 41 per cent of the vote, the Greens became purveyors of “divisive, sectarian politics”. As such, the party is comparable to George Galloway’s Respect and Workers Party ventures, as he wrote in email to the PLP (which he distanced himself from last night).
On Friday evening, the Greens were the new Lib Dems: a significant force in politics, yes, but one that has “never been able to come close to winning nationally”, Starmer wrote in an email to party members.
As of last night, according to the PM, Polanski is in with as much a shot of becoming the next prime minister as Nigel Farage. (That assessment is backed up by a poll this morning from YouGov, commissioned by Sky News and the Times, which sees the Greens in second place, behind Reform.)
Starmer is looking for a line that sticks and in doing so he is slowly getting out of his “fruitcake and loony” phase, the equivalent of when David Cameron dismissed Ukip in those flippant terms before developing a strategy to address the electoral threat it posed to the Conservatives from the right.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: When Donald Trump bombs, Keir Starmer obeys]
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