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Westminster time is counted in scandals, resignations, rebellions, U-turns and leadership crises. All the things that aren’t good government age a regime. Keir Starmer has presided over a lot of woes in 18 months, making a young government look old.
The premature decrepitude is more advanced, and more disturbing to Labour MPs, because it feels like continuity from the turbulent Tory regime that came before. The policies and personnel are different, but to the casual passing voter the sound of screaming and breaking crockery around Downing Street is familiar as a sign of a political problem family in residence.
All the more so when it is Peter Mandelson’s name being howled in despair, conjuring memories of ministerial misdeeds from a bygone era. Starmer has only been an MP since 2015, but he looks broken under the cumulative weight of a decades-old incumbency.
That explains the depths of the prime minister’s unpopularity. Even Labour MPs who are infuriated by all the errors of judgment – not least the calamitous choice of Mandelson as ambassador to Washington – think Starmer is a decent man with an honourable sense of civic duty. He is not a crook or a sleazebag. They understand public disappointment, but are stunned by how venomously it is expressed on the doorstep; the hatred.
The problem isn’t only that change was promised and is being delivered too slowly. That is Starmer’s preferred diagnosis because it suggests he could still turn things around. But he is reviled by too many voters as the archetypal status-quo politician – the incarnation of everything people hoped they were disposing of at the last election.
There is no coming back from that. MPs have been saying as much in private for weeks. Anas Sarwar, the party’s leader in Scotland, became the most senior figure to go public on Monday, calling for the prime minister to stand down. The effect was to rally a defensive circle around Starmer. Supportive cabinet statements were issued. He was warmly received at a meeting of the parliamentary party. The shards of smashed crockery were swept under a committee room rug.
Most English Labour MPs agree with Sarwar’s analysis. They know their leader is a liability and unlikely to undergo some late-career metamorphosis into a beloved, visionary political commander. The only difference is proximity of electoral reckoning.
Scottish Labour minds are focused on the Holyrood ballot in May and the increasingly remote chance of ending 19 years of Scottish National party rule. Sarwar’s campaign may not be saved by cutting the cord that lashes him to a zombie regime in Downing Street, but it has to be worth a try. Labour MPs at Westminster will come to the same view in due course, when their own seats are at stake.
Some have reached that conclusion already and are exasperated by what they see as cowardice and denial in their colleagues. If the leader is taking them on a downward spiral towards defeat, they argue, every day without change lengthens the climb back towards victory.
The rebuttal, and the view that has prevailed for now, is that change for its own sake replaces one problem with many others. Binning a prime minister so soon after winning an election would eliminate any doubt in voters’ minds that Labour is chaotic, incompetent, absurd. A contest may aggravate factional divisions instead of healing them. The winner would face the same intractable policy dilemmas that have defeated Starmer. The fiscal straitjacket tailored for the 2024 election manifesto would still apply, as would the political hazard involved in ripping it up.
MPs who raise those reservations rarely believe that Starmer should lead them into the next general election. More often, they mean that a contest right now doesn’t suit their preferred replacement.
Supporters of Andy Burnham have yet to devise a new route back into parliament for the Greater Manchester mayor after his candidacy for the Gorton and Denton byelection was blocked.
Wes Streeting was best placed to benefit from Burnham’s exclusion, but that was before the Mandelson scandal blew up. The health secretary says tales of his supposed tutelage under the disgraced grandee are smears. He has published WhatsApp correspondence to prove that there is nothing sinister in the relationship. But even if the contamination is mild, any association with the most toxic name in British politics is reason for a Streeting campaign to wait until the radioactive cloud blows over.
Angela Rayner can’t move against Starmer while her tax affairs are still under investigation. If that business ends messily for the former deputy prime minister and Burnham is still out of the picture, their combined supporters would struggle to agree on a “stop Streeting” candidate.
The best-organised contenders don’t have a clear shot and so hold fire. That sends Labour’s speculative eye roaming ever wider. It scans the cabinet table – Ed Miliband, Shabana Mahmood, John Healey, Yvette Cooper – without a surge of inspiration. Then, with rising desperation and a soft spot for a hard man, it flirts with Al Carns, a capable-looking former Royal Marines commando and junior defence minister. But he only entered parliament in 2024. No one who gives serious thought to what the job of prime minister involves thinks it can be nailed with beginner’s luck.
The number of names swirling around is an expression of panic in paralysis. It can be true that Starmer is incapable of getting Labour out of trouble and also that the process of replacing him makes the trouble worse. It is dangerous to have a contest in the absence of an obvious successor to unite the party and restore its standing in the country. It is also hard to judge if a candidate comes close to passing that test when there isn’t a vacancy.
As long as Starmer stays in office, the fantasy of an ideal replacement is still available. His departure triggers a cascade of hard questions. Why did he fail? When did he fail? Where was the wrong turn on a road that took the party back into government after 14 years in opposition? Which policies should be preserved? On what basis?
Those inquiries poke at delicate scar tissue on Labour’s deepest wounds – the gouging defeats and bloody compromises required to return to power. They raise all the hard questions that the party chose not to ask itself in 2020 because it was demoralised, exhausted from factional feuding and fed up with losing. Starmer’s offer then was deferral of existential pain by application of intellectual anaesthesia. He is serving a similar function now. Labour MPs feel the bitter angst inexorably rising, but stick with a broken leader because they can’t get another quick fix.
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Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Monday 30 April, ahead of May elections join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat is Labour from both the Green party and Reform and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader of the Labour party
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