2 hours ago
1
A chicken that loses its head can still, for a short period, run around and flap its wings: the illusion of life sustained by residual nerve impulses. After the downfall of Morgan McSweeney – our de-facto prime minister – this is the phase Britain’s government has now entered. Those who have worked closely with Keir Starmer emphasise his lack of politics, while his own aides privately boast that he is merely their frontman. McSweeney was the head, and the head has gone. There will be some flapping about in every direction. Starmer’s director of communications, Tim Allan has stepped down, the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, is calling for Starmer’s resignation and the question of whether and when he will go is still open. But this political project is all over.
This was not supposed to happen, at least according to conventional political wisdom. Before his collision with real power, Starmer was sold as competence incarnate: a figure committed to public service, presiding over a team of adults in the room who would spare us from the psychodramas of the Tory era. They had, we were told, discovered an electoral elixir. Ruling out significant tax rises on wealthy elites, attacking the welfare state and bashing migrants placed them in the fabled centre ground and would appeal to mainstream public opinion.
In short, Starmerism was destined to thrive in office. “Starmer instantly looks comfortable as prime minister,” cooed Philip Collins, his former speechwriter and now editor of Prospect magazine, after Labour’s election victory. “I always thought he would and this hard-to-define sense is part of the reason he is PM in the first place.” Instead, the Starmer premiership turned out to be the Fyre festival of British politics: lavishly hyped in advance, buoyed up by elite enthusiasm, and collapsing into fiasco almost as soon as it began.
Those of us on the left warned this project would disintegrate once it encountered reality. The obvious retort is that opponents always predict failure. But the point is not that we predicted Starmerism would implode: we predicted why.
When Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership in 2015, the party’s right faced a choice. They could admit that their ideas were exhausted, that the financial crash had shattered old certainties and demanded new answers. When Labour secured 40% of the vote in the 2017 general election, overturning the Tory majority on an unashamedly leftwing manifesto, it was fair for critics to say this still fell short. But it was also reasonable to conclude the platform that delivered the party’s biggest surge in vote share since 1945 was something to build on, even as the Brexit culture war overwhelmed it in the lead-up to 2019.
The party’s right chose a different path. McSweeney had run the leadership campaign of the Blairite torchbearer Liz Kendall in 2015, when she offered a political agenda similar to the eventual Starmerite offering. When Kendall secured 4.5% of the vote, McSweeney and his ilk concluded they could only retake the party through deceit. Starmer was the perfect candidate: a politician who wanted to be prime minister for its own sake, who served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and opportunistically sounded off against Brexit, and thus could rub the belly of the Labour membership.
It should have been obvious that this project was doomed when the leftwing policy pledges of Starmer’s successful leadership campaign – run by McSweeney – were so swiftly abandoned. As Paul Holden’s recent devastating book, The Fraud, meticulously documented, this strategy exposed that Starmerism was defined by deceit, cynicism and a desire for power for its own sake. And that it lacked any coherent policy vision of its own. McSweeney’s dominance symbolised the Faustian bargain that Starmer struck with Labour’s most reactionary forces in exchange for the leadership.
“Morgan wouldn’t breathe without consulting Mandelson first,” a former McSweeney associate reportedly confessed, and just days before his downfall as the US ambassador, the man dubbed the Prince of Darkness was in No 10 to help design Starmer’s reshuffle. Mandelson’s influence was not incidental. It was the inevitable consequence of a political vacuum being filled with Blairite retreads whose answers belong to another era.
That Starmer received more freebies than every Labour leader on record including Tony Blair, and that Mandelson established a deep friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, are symptoms of the same problem. This faction of Labour is mesmerised by wealth, proximity to power and elite approval. This is what doomed Starmerism – exactly as the left warned.
So what now? A third of Britain’s postwar prime ministers have occupied No 10 in the past decade, despite only one change of governing party. This instability has much to do with an unprecedented squeeze in living standards and a hollowed-out public realm, all of which has driven mass political disillusionment and anger. The basic truth is this. Our economic system fell apart in 2008. In the absence of a credible alternative, politics is defined by instability and an emboldened far right that thrives on the fiction that the key issue of our time is a zero-sum struggle between citizens and migrants.
At the last election, little attention was paid to Labour winning barely a third of the vote amid the lowest turnout in modern democratic history. Given the extraordinary unpopularity of the outgoing Tory government, the lack of popular enthusiasm should have been a warning. Instead, commentary fixated on vibes. Starmer looked prime ministerial. His politics were deemed respectable.
Had the left critique been taken seriously, none of this would be surprising. As the same pundits who once cheered Starmer on now tour the studios explaining his collapse, that truth is quietly buried. This was always a project rooted in cynicism and a desire to neutralise Labour as a threat to wealthy interests. It achieved its goal, and the very survival of the party may be the price.
Alas, McSweeney has not just left Labour facing disaster but the rest of us, too. Even if Reform UK falls short of victory in the next election, a pact with the increasingly extreme Tories could deliver us to rightwing authoritarianism. If Labour had sense, it would understand that a broken economic model is the root of Britain’s malaise. It would adopt a programme of progressive taxation to fund investment in broken services and struggling communities. It would end the failed privatisation experiment and deliver a mass public housebuilding programme.
To his credit, Andy Burnham is one Labour politician who gets this, but the hierarchy has blocked him leaving Greater Manchester. Even if he somehow found a path to the leadership, the large number of Starmerite Labour MPs would probably bar such an agenda. Angela Rayner, too, would likely have to strike an accommodation with the party’s right, and deliver Starmerism with a Stockport accent. So the party may as well install Mandelson’s favourite candidate, Wes Streeting, and double down on its failure, stripping away all remaining illusions anyone may have about what this Labour party is about.
The Greens are now the best bet to replace Labour in urban heartlands. One Labour MP – no past supporter of Corbyn – tells me that his wife plans to vote for them. A hung parliament with a large Green contingent could force a change in the voting system and offer a real chance of ending our failed economic model. In the wreckage that McSweeney has left us, it is our best hope.
-
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
