Last week, my colleague Ailbhe Rea asked one of the most important questions in the current Labour turmoil: what does the Prime Minister think? She noted that while so many people in Labour were busy making plans for what comes after Keir Starmer, he himself is in no mood to give up the position he has worked so hard to attain, and which he believes he has an electoral mandate to keep.
Over the weekend, the Prime Minister sat down with Josh Glancy of the Sunday Times for an interview in which he said exactly that. He said he was determined to serve a full term and fight the next election as Labour leader, that there was a silent majority in the Parliamentary Labour Party who supported his continuing leadership despite criticism from his more vocal critics and that he was frustrated by journalists obsessing over the Mandelson affair while we face major economic fallout from the war in Iran. As further evidence of his determination to survive, the whips are planning to fight tooth and nail in the Commons this week to stop a cross-party Privileges Committee inquiry into the Prime Minister’s behaviour over Mandelson.
The immediate effect of the PM’s intervention is to blow up the “orderly transition theory” that was doing the rounds last week. This was the notion that the PM would soon decide it’s time to step down and set out a plan for a transition of power to a new Labour leader without the need for a messy and divisive leadership challenge. Proponents likened this to the 2006-07 handover between Tony Blair and his obvious successor Gordon Brown. Any such arrangement would have stood particularly to benefit Andy Burnham because it would have given him time to get a parliamentary seat and put himself forward as that “obvious successor”. Some Labour figures were telling journalists last week that if the PM were to be judged by his successor he would prefer to transfer power peacefully to Burnham than either Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting or Ed Miliband, the other senior figures regularly spoken of as possible replacements for Starmer.
But if the PM remains as unpersuadable as he sounded in that weekend interview, it’s time for the plotters to go back to the drawing board.
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[Further reading: Is Andy Burnham actually the answer?]
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Subscribe here to commentI’m having a hard time gauging the sincerity of the government on this. It’s always in a politician’s best interest to say they won’t go, saying that you’ll leave if you’re pushed hard enough just gives your critics a good reason to push harder. Liz Truss stood in front of MPs and said “I’m a fighter, not a quitter” literally the day before she quit.
So yes, Starmer and his team are briefing hard against the notion that he would step down, but does that have much bearing on what they’ll actually do?
Starmer repeatedly makes a big point of being highly competitive and having to win, just, it seems for the sake of winning rather than in order to be able to get things done. He tells us that he has won every fight he has been in, and that whenever someone has told him that something is beyond him he has proven them wrong.
Does he expect us to react like a Wimbledon crowd cheering the underdog to win? I don’t. But he doesn’t sound like someone who will step away easily.
He’s said to play dirty football; I’ve no reliable evidence on that, though he often also tells us that he’s ruthless.