Starmer’s Epic Fail May Have Saved His Political Skin… For Now
For months, conventional wisdom has held that British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is done, done, insert your metaphor here.
He’s long finished, it was said, and has only been held back by his Labor party so far to take responsibility for their inevitable defeat in the “mid-term” elections, so as not to sully the shiny new leader with an air of failure. Now that the job is done, he should leave with haste so that his replacement can save the Labor Party and lead Britain towards a socialist utopia.
It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. In his blind way, the Prime Minister adamantly refuses to leave of his own free will, and the few party members who might act against him appear to have blinked at the crucial moment. Is it possible that Sir Keir Starmer failed so badly that he also pulled the rug out from under the conspirators?
There was a time when Britain had only two serious political parties, and to win elections they had to form a “big tent” or a “big church”. For Labor, this meant welcoming everyone from quasi-communist subversives to disaffected former coal miners to college-educated city dwellers with classroom-honed theories of social justice. They didn’t always get along, but they sometimes won elections.
But these parties under the big tents have fallen ill; the fever has set in. This also happened to the Conservatives with Brexit. Within the Labor Party, the New Labor project led by Tony Blair in the 1990s completely captured the party and remade it in its own image: the soft left urban theorists had won. They still took with them the more overtly left-wing parts of the party, but this was accompanied by real resentment that the party was abandoning its socialist and working-class roots.
The pendulum swung the other way in the 2010s, when the old left, led by Jeremy Corbyn, took over the party. The country was unimpressed and turned down his offer come election time, and the new leadership – student radical meets unhealthy Middle East obsession – had a real problem with anti-Semitism. Inevitably, the pendulum swung back.
Enter Sir Keir Starmer. Much ink has been spilled over the deeply questionable inner circle that accompanied him, and as newsworthy as they continue to be, this is not the place, but crucially, one of the obvious driving forces in Starmer’s early days, before winning the 2024 general election and becoming Prime Minister, was the desire to purge the party.
No more swinging the pendulum without any opposition. The Corbynite faction was definitively excluded and remains in the wilderness, going from failed upstart party to failed upstart. The big tent is dead.
So that brings us to the present day. After the purge, there is not much depth within the Labor Party. Many of his MPs are new to the game and owe their handsome salaries to Sir Keir personally. Indeed, there are so few credible candidates for Parliament that Labor rebels must look beyond Westminster.
Enter Andy Burnham, the “King in the North” (a polite way of saying the mayor of Manchester, Britain’s de facto second city).
Labor supporters believe it is popular, has a proven track record, will resonate with the public, and will meet voters’ desire for a truly left-wing policy. It’s up to you to decide if that’s actually where most Brits are right now or if it’s just a solution. Nonetheless, there appears to be consensus within the party that Burnham is the man for the job.
But in Britain, you can’t even imagine being party leader and prime minister without also being an MP. And therein lies the problem: Burnham has already tried to oppose Starmer once before, and – of course – the Prime Minister controls the party and simply blocked Burnham from standing as a Labor candidate. He has this power.
Labor supporters now think it is time for Burnham to try again, and Starmer, in his weakened state, would not dare stand in his way a second time. Maybe that’s true. All Burnham needs is a sitting Labor MP with a “safe seat” – a constituency so bulletproof you could put a rosette on the metaphorical pig and see it sent to Westminster – willing to step aside to give him a chance.
The problem is that Labor has behaved so apocalyptically in this week’s election that it appears there isn’t a single safe seat left in the country. Nigel Farage’s reform gutted the party, seizing ward after ward, full councils, Welsh seats, in areas which had been unquestionably Labor for over a century.
All of a sudden, Andy Burnham, trying to make a jump to Parliament, risks giving up his pleasant job for nothing. Not to mention the very real possibility that if he sought a post at Westminster, Burnham’s successor would lose Manchester to a Reform rival in the ensuing mayoral by-election.
So the plot continues. Claims, briefings and insider opinions attempt to rival nitrogen for the title of most abundant component of our atmosphere. Today the papers are full of Westminster figures calling on Sir Keir to go. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. But for now it seems Sir Keir has managed to save his skin by making the Labor Party so toxic that no one dares take a shot at him.
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