Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
An unsustainable situation can be sustained for quite a long time. John Major, Gordon Brown and Theresa May all governed the UK for years after the apparent collapse of their authority. On balance, it is better that Sir Keir Starmer does the same.
“On balance”, because there is no good outcome here. Starmer can only survive by pleasing the many Labour MPs to his left. If he falls, the likeliest successor will come from that same quarter. Either way, Britain is about to get a government it did not and would not vote for. When the likes of Ed Miliband tell Starmer to implement “change”, that is Labour-speak for “policies we couldn’t persuade the country to support in 2015”. Or indeed 2017 or 2019.
So why, if there is to be a mandate-less turn to the left anyway, should Starmer stay?
First, he has at least shown some aptitude for foreign affairs (outside of the occasional ambassadorial appointment). Don’t assume that his successor as prime minister would be able to continue his ongoing diplomatic project: a rapprochement of sorts with Europe and China without alienating the US. The world is not tranquil enough right now to risk finding out.
The other reason to keep Starmer is that a new prime minister would come under immediate pressure to call a general election. If one takes place, a country that has not known much calm for a decade would be disrupted again. Even if it doesn’t, that prime minister would be paralysed by a lack of mandate.
Now a word about the principal alternative to Starmer. From time to time, a political party convinces itself that it has a real “character” on its books. Any evidence that voters are less charmed is tuned out. A Conservative example is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the cartoon blue blood who so amused the wider electorate that he lost his seat. Angela Rayner is Labour’s character. The personal ratings of the former deputy prime minister, who resigned over a property tax, are comparably bad to those of Jeremy Corbyn. Still the notion persists that voters would love her straight-talking woman-of-the-people shtick.
Other alternatives to Starmer include an electoral reject from over a decade ago (Miliband) and the changeling Andy Burnham. In all three cases, the scariest thing is their analysis of the government’s plight.
You have to have access to a special plane of consciousness to believe that Labour is unpopular because it is not leftwing enough. This is a government that removed a child benefit cap that a majority of voters wanted to remain in place (including most Labour voters). It increased taxes on “working people”, having said that economic growth would obviate the need for such measures. It increased regulation on employers and — those other class enemies — landlords. A large plurality of Brits now believe that taxation and spending are too high.
Labour is disliked in large part because it has governed to the left of the prospectus on which it was elected. Anyone who believes the direct opposite is too eccentric of mind to hold the highest office.
And so it must be Starmer. Better a semi-reluctant leftward turn than an enthusiastic one. None of this is to exonerate him. The Tories took six years in office to begin disintegrating. His government has done it in about 18 months, and even that is an overgenerous estimate. In truth, it never recovered from that first Budget.
Besides the incompetence, there is the question of Starmer’s fibre. Before he let a chief of staff called Morgan McSweeney twist in the wind, he let a chief of staff called Sue Gray twist in the wind. He gave up on welfare reform because of protests that would register 4.5 at most on a Richter scale of political dissent. (The government died with that capitulation, I think.) It should be a big thing to suggest that a prime minister is a moral coward. Notice how little fuss there is when the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch does just that. People know.
Still, if Britain should have learned anything from the past decade, it is to scrutinise the idea of “change” more seriously. The faults of EU membership never amounted to a case for leaving. The odiousness of the post-2016 Conservatives was never a good reason to give Labour a landslide. Here is a third opportunity to learn the lesson. The failure of Starmer is not an argument for a new leader.
Part of me thinks a Rayner or Burnham putsch is historically necessary: that only when an avowedly leftwing government is tried and tested to destruction will Britain accept that it must reform its unaffordable state. But that is a columnist’s fancy. Countries must prioritise the practicalities, such as having the least bad available prime minister at any given time.
When asked to re-elect a Labour government to a full second term, the British have always said no, except under Tony Blair. As rash as it is to predict an election that could be three and a half years away, Labour should start to contemplate a scale of defeat on an unrecoverable scale. It is already inviting trouble by straying some way from its 2024 mandate. It is now shaping up to do even more of what no one voted for, egged on by “soft left” MPs who would be out of their depth in a champagne coupe. In suggesting that Starmer should remain in charge of all this, it is hard to know if one is doing him a favour or volunteering him for hell.