Keir Starmer puts his fists up

The Prime Minister wants to fight, but who believes he can win?

Describing Keir Starmer’s state of mind to me in recent days, a No 10 insider draws a comparison with another Labour prime ministerial moment: Gordon Brown’s 2009 interview with Adam Boulton. A frustrated Brown says he wants to talk about the recession, the need for “an entire new model for our economy”. Boulton, Sky’s then political editor, asks if he will stand down ahead of the next election. “Adam, have you not realised?” Brown says, exasperated. “We’re into a new world. The financial system can never be the same again.” He tears off his earpiece and leaves the second the interview ends, his anger on camera. “I think that’s exactly how Keir feels,” the No 10 insider says.

Starmer has always disdained the machinations of Westminster, but he has felt this even more in recent days. Publicly, he emphasises the importance of scrutiny, but privately he is experiencing something akin to whiplash, and is dividing his time between the processology of the Mandelson saga and planning for the fallout of the war in Iran. “The economic shock is going to be so significant” but public discourse is barely reflecting it, a Downing Street insider says. Meetings have been cancelled, plans torn up and attention divided to accommodate the furore around the firing of Olly Robbins, which is eating up more and more of the political agenda just days away from the crucial elections across England, Scotland and Wales on 7 May.

Starmer is fighting for his political life, and all the more bitterly because he feels the stakes of the Iran crisis so acutely. He has often found Westminster petty and ridiculous; now, he is despairing at a political culture that appears to suggest he should leave office just as the country is about to weather a serious economic storm.

Yet for plenty of Starmer’s colleagues, something snapped when he fired Olly Robbins, the civil servant who concealed from the Prime Minister vetting concerns around Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador because he was following the process; who didn’t stop the PM from doing something he had already announced to the world he was determined to do. Starmer’s decision – rash, politically disastrous, ethically dubious – has changed the minds of several cabinet ministers, who now say they have “given up” after months of grumbling determination to “make Keir work”. They are indulging in questions about whether Starmer could be forced to outline a timeline for an “orderly transition” after this month’s elections.

Yet Starmer “will not go quietly”, as one friend says. He sees these questions as “fantasy politics”, in the words of another No 10 insider; it’s “exactly the stuff he hates” – speculation about reshuffles, pacts and leadership coups. And he is right that it might be no more than fantasy: many cabinet ministers are still supportive of the Prime Minister; Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham’s camps are more divided than some briefings would suggest; some Labour MPs and ministers worry that if they triggered a leadership contest and a bond market panic that sent interest rates soaring, the party would never be forgiven by the public.

So while the “fantasy politics” and plotting continues, waiting to become reality, Starmer has made it clear that he will fight on. It is no coincidence that Starmer and Darren Jones, the PM’s chief secretary, have both intensified the rhetoric on the Iran fallout in an attempt to inject what they see as some much-needed truth into the political discourse. Starmer has gone further than ever before, suggesting the public might want to consider holidaying in the UK and changing their spending habits, while Jones has warned that the economic impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will persist for at least eight months after it is reopened.

At Chequers on 24 April, Starmer and his aides cooked up a plan for a fightback beyond the May elections. They already anticipate that those results from across the country will feel like a “slap in the face”, but they are determined to leverage the outcome, alongside the consequences of Iran, as a moment to announce bolder change and a clearer policy platform via the King’s Speech and other interventions. “The elections are going to show that people are fed up with the status quo,” one Downing Street insider says. “We will tell them we agree. We will set out a plan to come back stronger out of this crisis, with a new economic and political settlement.” Labour will set out plans to go further on homegrown energy, and make space for opportunities in the chaos – for instance, having businesses that had been considering moving to the Middle East stay in the UK. There will not be a “substantial” reshuffle, one Downing Street insider says, and emphasises the political risk of dislodging people to make way for new entrants at a fragile moment for the PM.

And that’s precisely the point. Starmer is determined to stay on beyond the election, but many around him now question whether that’s viable. For some time, loyal cabinet ministers and No 10 insiders have suggested that if nothing turned around for Starmer, he would likely resign about a year before a general election to make way for someone new. But now he is showing no hint of a willingness to step down even if things don’t improve. One ally says Starmer’s insistence to the Sunday Times that he would fight the next general election looked “quite nuts”.

The Prime Minister is in no mood to listen. Like Gordon Brown, he is despairing of all this Westminster chatter. He plans to set out his stall and fight.

[Further reading: Labour faces a local election wipeout in England]