Keir Starmer Won’t Survive This

Over the weekend I spoke with Jonathan Rutherford, a long-serving Labor adviser, who was briefly invited into government last year. He was desperate at the divide between the party’s London-based leadership and voters who live in the country’s older, post-industrialised centers – a divide that Starmer’s rather inert leadership has only widened. “We live in an elite class that is, in cultural and political terms, totally different from the people it claims to represent,” Rutherford told me. “Go up towards the north. It is hated” he said of Starmer. “In a way it’s sort of deeply unfair to him. He is viscerally hated and I don’t think he understands it. I don’t think the people at No. 10 understand it well.

The question is whether replacing Starmer at this point will actually help or make things even worse. On Monday morning, the Prime Minister gave a speech aimed at showing that he understood the gravity of his situation and that his government must now be bolder. Minutes before he took the stage, I spoke with a colleague who worked with Starmer and endured Labor’s ups and downs for decades.

This peer reminded me why the Party had elected him in the first place: as an antidote to the soap opera of the Conservative Party, which was in power at the time, and as a way out of Labour’s infighting under Jeremy Corbyn. “We voted for a man in a suit who wasn’t Boris Johnson or Liz Truss,” the peer said. “There was never a deep love for him within the Party, but there was absolutely an awareness that this man could do it.” While Labour’s former troubles were mostly ideological and internecine, the peer was struck by the external nature of the challenges it now faces – namely Britain’s fiscal reality and the superficiality and fragility of its public support. “Under Corbyn, the problem was within the Labor Party, so we knew what to do,” said this colleague. “It was very hard work, but it was within the Labor Party. This problem is not within the Labor Party. This problem is much bigger.”

Starmer’s speech – even the idea that a speech could still change people’s perceptions at this stage – summed up everything about him. It was sincere but modest. He highlighted the danger posed by Britain’s adversaries abroad and by Farage’s popularity at home. “It hurts,” Starmer said. “Not just because Labor has done poorly, but also because if we don’t get it right our country will be heading down a very dark path.” He was in his shirtsleeves, strangely enthusiastic, still in campaign mode, even though the polls had closed four days earlier. Starmer promised narrative and emotion. “Stories beat spreadsheets,” he said. “People need hope.” And then, because he’s Starmer, he announced a list of policies – the government would nationalize a steelworks, continue negotiations with the EU and actually step up work “in apprenticeships, in technical excellence colleges, in special educational needs” – that sounded like he was reading from a spreadsheet.

He was most convincing when talking about the damage that would be caused by yet another change of prime minister – Starmer is the sixth in the last decade – and all the uncertainty it would bring. “We tested him to destruction with the last government, and he inflicted enormous damage on this country,” Starmer said. “Labor will never be forgiven if we repeat this.” And yet, in a few hours, this is what dozens of his colleagues were trying to orchestrate. “A lot of people tell me they don’t want chaos,” the Labor MP told me. “And I understand that. However, their numbers are far fewer than the number of people who rejected Labor this time. So there will have to be a change.”