While the Conservatives revel in regicide, the Labour Party is generally deemed to be too loyal to its leaders. Often to its cost.
Over the past decade, three Conservative prime ministers have been forced from office by their own colleagues. In contrast, in the post-war period, no Labour leader has been ejected. Tony Blair did step down in 2007, but by that time he had been leader for 13 years and prime minister for 10 of them. He himself admitted people “get tired of the same face” after a decade. “It’s long enough,” he conceded.
Certainly, no one was talking about getting rid of Tony Blair after just one year in office. On the first anniversary of his premiership, in 1998, Blair’s approval rating was an astonishing 72%. And his party had a 29-point lead over the Tories. The mood in the parliamentary party was understandably euphoric. Reading West MP Martin Slater said, “Tony Blair has told us we must not gloat, but we can’t let [the anniversary of the election] go uncelebrated”.
There was little gloating going on last week in Westminster — at least not among Labour MPs — as Keir Starmer marked his one-year anniversary with an approval rating of 23%. For a prime minister who kicked off at 60%, this is cataclysmic. It’s unlikely his leadership will end in quietly dignified retirement.
One year in, seven-in-10 voters think the Labour government is at least as chaotic as its Conservative predecessor. The welfare debacle didn’t disabuse them of this notion, as Starmer’s complete lack of authority was exposed. And we’ve never watched a Chancellor weeping beside their PM at PMQs before.
The Prime Minister dismissed the welfare rebels as “noises off”, but these noises are now turning into talk of a leadership challenge. As ever, the usual suspects have put their head above the parapet. John McDonnell, whom Keir Starmer kicked out of the party last year for opposing the two-child benefit cap, immediately popped up to call outright for the Labour movement to “take back control” of the party. But, behind the scenes, speculation over Starmer’s future is mounting. Last week, he was asked by Kemi Badenoch whether Rachel Reeves would be Chancellor by the next election. But perhaps the more pertinent question is: will he be Prime Minister?
It’s not as easy as it used to be to topple a Labour leader. Until 1981, the leader was elected annually by the Parliamentary Labour Party. It would take just two MPs — a proposer and a seconder — to force a leadership election. In spite of the technical ease in forcing a leadership challenge, they almost never happened. In the post-war period, just one leader — Hugh Gaitskell — was challenged, and he saw off his opponents with ease.
The stability of the party leadership was partly due to Labour leaders understanding the fragility of their own position, and the fractious nature of their party. They had come up through the Labour movement, and they knew that the party was really a coalition of diverse interests and perspectives. They had to work hard to ensure that they could sustain wide support. Cabinets and Shadow Cabinets included members from across the wide spectrum of the political Left. As Harold Wilson remarked, he came from the Left of the party, but he recognised that it also needed a Right-wing to fly.
Even after the rules were changed in the Eighties to transfer part of the decision to party conference and then again in the Nineties to ordinary members, leaders recognised that they were holding together a coalition. They needed to show love — or at least respect — to the different elements of the party. Otherwise, resentment would grow into something potentially explosive. That is why even Tony Blair made a point of meeting with members of the Left-wing socialist Campaign Group when he was party leader.
Keir Starmer, though, has a different approach. He has adopted perhaps the most presidential style of any Labour leader. All authority flows down from the leader, not up from the party. Labour has never quite had a leader like him, one so aloof from the party’s internal apparatus, contemptuous of its pluralism, and singularly unpopular with the public.
After first using the votes of the Left and soft Left to elect him leader in 2020, Starmer then turned his back on them and handed control of the party to the Right, the old Blairite wing now itching for revenge after what they regarded as the ignominy of the five-year Corbyn leadership.
With Starmer’s blessing, the Right took control of the National Executive Committee, and were exceptionally successful in controlling parliamentary selections, with a disregard for internal party democracy unseen even in the heyday of New Labour. Potential candidates deemed to be Corbyn-curious were sifted out, even if it cost Labour seats, as it clearly did in Islington North and Chingford. Left-wing incumbents were deselected. Some Right-leaning NEC members then parachuted themselves into safe seats ahead of the election. Then, after the election, Starmer expelled remaining Left-wing MPs within weeks of taking office.
This “presidential” governing style isn’t without risks. As Juan Linz laid out in his seminal essay, “Perils of Presidentialism”, such systems tended to be less stable than a parliamentary one because they entail a “winner takes all” politics, or, to put it more bluntly, a “loser gets nothing” dynamic — something which ultimately encourages revolution.
Starmer, more than any other Labour leader, has taken this “winner takes all” approach to his leadership. He set out to bury all the remnants of the ancien régime both in policy and personality, abandoning the old manifesto’s promises and expelling his predecessor from the party. Worse, Starmer had no mandate to conduct this purge. He wasn’t elected leader to hammer the Left: on the contrary, he had promised continuity with the policies of the Corbyn years, but then spent his time as leader repudiating them.
Initially, this didn’t seem to matter. Once the Conservatives ditched Boris Johnson in a staggering act of political self-harm, Labour’s poll lead was unassailable. Starmer’s leadership, insipid and uninspiring as it was, became self-justified merely by dint of the fact that Labour was winning. But now Labour is in the mid-20s in the polls, Reform is in first place and Nigel Farage is on the verge of measuring up the curtains in No. 10. Most Labour MPs could be wiped out. The debacle of the 2019 result, so trumpeted by the Right of the party as evidence of the Left’s electoral toxicity, could seem like a happy memory.
Now, the carrot of strong poll numbers and the stick of fierce discipline have rotted away. Backbench MPs no longer see Starmer as a vote winner. And after U-turns on winter fuel, grooming gangs, and disability benefits, he clearly doesn’t frighten them either.
“Backbench MPs no longer see Starmer as a vote winner.”
But Starmer has made it harder for them to get rid of him. As leader of the opposition, he quietly made a couple of modifications to the rules of succession. There is no vote of confidence, like there is with the Tories. Instead, an MP merely needs to put up a challenge. Starmer, though, raised the threshold for nominations from 10% to 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He has also limited the franchise to party members and members in affiliated trade unions. Non-members who were given a vote under Ed Miliband, on condition of paying a nominal fee, have been taken out of the process. Additionally, the Labour rule book now specifies that challenges are permissible only “prior to the annual session of Party conference”.
These rule changes may be beneficial to Starmer, but they are by no means bulletproof. It seems likely to me that if Starmer is forced to defend his leadership before ordinary party members, he is toast. As someone who speaks to many fellow party members from across Labour, it’s hard to find cheerleaders for the PM.
As a result, the Left of the party hates him, and the soft Left — where the bulk of the membership is — feel deeply disappointed. Those on the Right of the party have regarded Starmer as a useful vehicle for their path to power, but they have never seen him as one of their own. There are, simply put, no Starmerites in Labour.
All it might take to remove Starmer, then, is one Labour MP to gather nominations from 20% of their colleagues. And every wing of the party has a reason to want him gone.
From the Right, the motives are a mix of ambition (Starmer was useful for them; they have no core loyalty to him; he is now dispensable) and self-preservation (he’s dragging the party down and threatening its electoral prospects). From the soft Left, the reasons are a combination of ambition, self-preservation, and policy disappointment. From the Left (such as it is), it is hatred for his betrayal. The question is, who would dare make the first move?
Moving too early isn’t without risk. If a Cabinet minister tried and failed to unseat Starmer, there would be repercussions: banishment, surely, to the backbenches.
Yet for some ambitious MPs, there are good reasons to move early. Wes Streeting is one of the Cabinet’s most effective communicators. He is the darling of the party “Blairites” and is clearly very ambitious. Moreover, he holds his Ilford North seat with a tiny majority and might lose it at the next election. It could be now or never. He equally hamstrung, though, by this association with the “Blairites”, which puts him ideologically out-of-step with the membership. They have rejected Right-leaning candidates in every leadership election for the past decade.
But, if Streeting managed to force a challenge, the element of surprise might enhance his chances in a members’ ballot. Fortune favours the brave. And such is the level of despair currently that even Left-wing members have told me they’d vote for Streeting if it meant getting rid of Starmer.
Then there’s the quietly ambitious Angela Rayner, sitting demurely on the other side of the PM as his Chancellor wept. She is in a unique position as Deputy Leader, because if she tried and failed to remove Starmer, he still could not strip her of her position. He would probably sack her from the Cabinet in the case of a botched coup, but freed from the constraints of collective responsibility, Rayner on the backbenches could be a very dangerous thing for the Starmer premiership. She could be the voice of authentic Labour for which the membership is so clearly hungry.
Historically, there have been candidates in similar cases who were willing to sacrifice themselves as the “stalking horse”: candidates with no chance of winning, but announce their candidacy simply to kick off proceedings. The idea is that this MP would bounce other, more plausible candidates, into challenging Starmer. Are things so bad someone would be willing to fire the gun? Might an éminence grise like Ed Miliband, for example, or a vocal backbencher, be tempted? The risk of this approach, of course, is that it could produce the opposite effect, whereby the frontbench rallies behind their Prime Minister in his hour of need.
But how brave is this Labour cohort? How much more are they willing to take? British history is littered with the names of individuals who probably could have taken on their leaders but missed their chance. Michael Portillo regrets not standing against John Major in his 1995 “back me or sack me” challenge. David Miliband could probably have become prime minister in 2009, had he announced he was challenging Gordon Brown for the leadership. The lesson is don’t wait for the perfect moment, as it might never come. The first test of leadership is showing you have the guts to seek it in the first place.
