Keir Starmer is not a great Prime Minister. He is not even a good prime minister. The mess Labor is in right now is undeniably and in no small part thanks to him.
The list is long: allowing oneself to be persuaded to adopt a small (even small) counterproductive objective strategy in the run-up to the 2024 elections; his outspoken acceptance of free gifts from donors; his spectacularly ill-judged LBC interview on Gaza at Labour’s first annual post-election conference; his allowing Rachel Reeves to try means testing the winter fuel offset only to fall back on it when the going got tough, making him and his government look mean and weak; and his “foreigner island” speech and appointment of a Home Secretary apparently bent on alienating the government’s socially liberal backers in order to keep on board the “hero voters” who contributed far less to its 2024 victory than Blue Labor fans still insist on pretending.
And yet, and yet. Is replacing him now really the turnaround in Labour’s fortunes that many of his MPs, understandably bruised by the party’s disastrous election performance last week, are desperately seeking? Maybe not.
If we look at the political history of the three replacements of a sitting prime minister that actually helped turn the tide, they have one thing in common – namely that at the same time they freed the party in question (and yes, it was, in each case, the Conservative Party, which has always been the most ruthless about these things) from a deeply unpopular policy associated with a deeply unpopular cause.
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Harold Macmillan replacing Anthony Eden allowed the Conservatives to put Suez behind them. John Major replacing Margaret Thatcher allowed them to kill the poll tax. And Boris Johnson replacing Theresa May allowed them to “finish Brexit” after three years of a painful, polarizing and fruitless search for a deal that simultaneously pleased all her advocates as well as the EU.
Of course, these policies were not the only reason Conservative MPs rejected the prime ministers in question. They were largely motivated by the same fear of imminent electoral defeat that characterized some of the exchanges that did not work out (such as Home for Macmillan or Brown for Blair). But the fact that discarding them also meant discarding these policies also provided a catharsis and a rationale that could be sold to a skeptical public.
Before they act, then, Labor MPs should ask themselves whether they have an equivalent. What is it about what their government has done or intends to do that can only be removed by getting rid of Keir Starmer? If they cannot answer this question, they must be beaten.
In reality, there is only one thing that comes to mind – the government’s continued adherence to a Brexit that virtually every Labor MP and every Labor member, as well as a growing plurality of the public (and certainly those members of the public who might consider returning to Labour), think is deeply damaging, indeed borderline insane. But is there a contender out there who could replace Starmer with the guts to commit to turning him around?
In the absence of that, replacing Starmer – especially when the successor candidate apparently most favored by Labor MPs, its core voters and its likely voters is not available to stand in any contest – brings to mind the words of one of the party’s all-time icons, Nye Bevan, when he took on its one-sided nuclear spasm that you call disarming.
(Further reading: Labour’s myopic plotters need to step up)
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