Keir Starmer will try to save his political career this morning by giving a speech in which he will admit mistakes and say “incremental change won’t cut it”. The most immediate consequence of the speech will be whether it makes Catherine West – the backbencher threatening to launch a leadership challenge this morning – think twice.
West has said she might step down her plot if Starmer shows sufficient rhetorical fire in his belly. But that will be quite a difficult metric for outside observers to judge – and so we will have to wait and see how West responds to the speech. As she told me in an interview at the weekend, her decision to challenge Starmer was done on the fly – she had not read the party rules on launching a contest before announcing) and motivated by a visceral reaction to the results in which one of her best friends lost their safe Labour council seat in North London.
West, who identifies with the centre or soft left of the party, has come under pressure to step down from her “lone wolf” challenge by various parts of the left because it is thought that a rushed leadership contest will only benefit a challenger from the right of the party, like Wes Streeting (Andy Burnham is still out of parliament, Angela Rayner is still dogged by a tax scandal and would prefer Burnham to run for the top job, and in six months no one on the left of the PLP seems to have been able to come up with another viable candidate).
Rayner made a careful intervention yesterday in which she criticised the Prime Minister’s leadership, set out a programme of radical left-wing things the government could do and called for Burnham to be let back into the Commons. She did not directly challenge the Prime Minister, but I’m told she is still leaving open the option of standing in a leadership contest if Burnham is still out of parliament and there is no other left candidate to stop Streeting.
Starmer’s fate now hangs on two areas where his skills have been sorely lacking: delivering rousing speeches and winning round a disgruntled backbencher.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: Labour faces “civil war” to replace Starmer]
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