One might reasonably quibble about some things UK prime minister Keir Starmer has or has not done in office, especially the things that he said he would or would not do before acquiring it. But if there is one thing that Starmer absolutely promised his watch would be blessedly free of, it is what is occurring right now: internecine psychodrama over the leadership of the governing party.
Starmer’s pitch to voters ahead of the general election of 2024 was, in essence: seriously, you’ll hardly know I’m there, you can just sort of have me on in the background. The country will be competently and above all quietly run, and you can all go about your days without worrying you’ve missed – or had your pension gutted by – the latest instalment of the interminable Westminster soap opera. Voters exhausted by a near decade of Brexit-related commotion among Conservative governments that had chewed up and spat out five prime ministers in the previous eight years duly delivered Starmer and his Labour Party the kind of landslide that would, in previous and less febrile eras, have set a prime minister up for a decade in power.
Instead, after not quite two years in Downing Street, Starmer finds himself attempting to quell mutiny in his own ranks. Last week’s local elections were more or less the massacre that had been widely anticipated, with Labour losing nearly 1,500 councillors, as well as 38 councils – and Wales, the politics of which Labour has long been accustomed to dominating.
It was known that Starmer and Labour were unpopular: everyone understood that the 2024 election was not a hearty endorsement of them but a vigorous, vindictive kicking of the other mob. But the local elections made it clear how unpopular and how real the threat is from the Greens and Reform UK, angry insurgents to Labour’s left and right. Leaders of political parties have certainly been ejected for less. It’s a common refrain felt in the halls of power from Paris to Berlin too.
But it does not necessarily follow that handing Starmer a silver salver bearing a revolver and a tumbler of whisky and suggesting that he take a walk in the woods would improve matters in Britain. In France, rattling through five prime ministers in the past two years has done little to placate populist seething. In Germany, unloading a chancellor in a similar position to Starmer – new to the job, already unpopular – would surely only concede further ground to the professionally furious fringes.
Aside from anything else, it is not like Labour boasts an obvious successor to Starmer or even a terrifically plausible one. All the bookmakers’ favourites appear dauntingly weighted. Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, is popular with the party but less so with the public and was compelled to resign from the cabinet for underpaying taxes on a property purchase. Wes Streeting, secretary of state for health, is reportedly disliked within the party and in the 2024 election went a whisker from losing his seat to a pro-Palestine independent. Andy Burnham, the (relatively) well-liked mayor of Greater Manchester, doesn’t even have a seat in Parliament, until or unless a convenient by-election can be orchestrated.
But there’s another argument beyond the lack of credible alternatives for leaving the incumbent where he is. It is to observe the wisdom attributed to a previous prime minister, Lord Salisbury: “Change? Aren’t things bad enough as they are?” Governing a country at the best of times is difficult. Reviving one that has had 14 years wasted by the previous bunch was always going to be bigger than a two-year task.
Starmer has, indisputably, been vague and indecisive: one rebel MP, Jess Phillips, was painfully correct when she resigned her ministerial post, sighing that “the desire not to have an argument means we rarely make an argument”. He is an uninspiring communicator and has made bizarre unforced errors – helping himself to free suits, as if he cannot afford his own, and appointing to the UK’s embassy in Washington a man widely known to be hopelessly compromised.
But if Starmer can hang on to his job – and as of this writing that’s what he says he intends to do – he now knows for certain that he has little left to lose. He should start governing accordingly.
Andrew Mueller is Monocle’s contributing editor and the host of ‘The Foreign Desk’.
