Sir Keir Starmer’s grip on Labour is beginning to slip but here’s why he will survive until the next election - Ismail Mulla
The one characteristic that came to define Sir Keir Starmer’s time as the Leader of the Opposition was that he would offer stability. He had taken control of a Labour party that had been riven with infighting. His iron-fisted approach to message discipline convinced the electorate to back Labour at the 2024 General Election.
This was only heightened by the chaos that was the Tory party. Infighting got out of control. Leadership races came and went, and dragged on for an interminable time. The economy, already on the ropes, was torched by an incompetent PM with an ill-judged budget.
Whatever we think of the current Labour administration, there was daylight between Starmer’s Labour and the chaos that the Conservatives had to offer in 2024.
However, that discipline that the PM so prided himself on is ebbing away and fast. And the worrying thing for Starmer is that it is within his inner circle that indiscipline is becoming more and more evident.
The constant briefings against would-be contenders to Starmer’s crown as leader of the Labour party is not only tiresome but also silly. The Yorkshire Post described it as having a “whiff of student politics about it”. I’d say it down right stinks.
The latest target for briefings was Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Now Streeting is known to be ambitious. However, politics is full of ambitious figures. It’s how the party leader manages the ambitions of individuals with the delivery of collective policy that is important.
There would be some sympathy for Starmer and his inner circle if Streeting had made a pitch for the leadership. But as far as I am aware, the Health Secretary hadn’t really made any moves. Certainly not in the way Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, had managed to make himself the star of the show at the Labour Party Conference earlier this year.
Instead, those behind the briefings have been made to look silly. Streeting dealt with his media rounds deftly last week as he came out and came out of the whole row much better for it. The Health Secretary point-blank denined that he was plotting a coup and even called on the PM to sack those behind the briefings.
Streeting went further by saying the briefers had been "watching too much Celebrity Traitors".
A day later he said: “I don’t think voters give two monkeys about what on earth is going on in the sort of Westminster village soap opera.
“What they do care about is, if they’re on an NHS waiting list, are we getting them down?”
If anything, Streeting has only been able to display his own leadership credentials by being so incisive in this row.
Another target in the briefing war was Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. I have to admit that I had a chuckle when I saw the suggestion that he was among those jostling to replace Starmer. I can’t believe that Miliband would ever contemplate taking on the top job in Labour again. Judging by his own words, neither can he.
“I had the best inoculation technique against wanting to be leader of the Labour Party, because I was leader of the Labour Party between 2010 and 2015,” Miliband said.
Whatever you think of his policies, and I know he’s not very popular in parts of the region, that response has to be applauded.
So where does this all leave Starmer and Labour? If the briefings continue then people will rightly draw comparisons with the infighting that came to characterise the last Tory government.
Unless the Chancellor’s upcoming Budget sets the economy ablaze again, or some other extraordinary event takes place, I expect Starmer to see out this Parliament at the very least. Labour can ill-afford to flip-flop between leaders. That’s what did for the Tories.
But the sooner Starmer gets a grip of the briefings the better it will be for him and his party. And frankly for the country as well.
At a time when the focus should be on the upcoming Budget, where it is looking increasingly likely that manifesto promises will be shredded, it is ridiculous that advisers would engage in this sort of playground tittle tattle.
The PM is understood to have gathered his senior Downing Street team for a meeting, where he reiterated that briefings against Cabinet ministers were unacceptable. But it is now becoming a pattern. A pattern that is, worse still, becoming an unwanted distraction. Heads should start to roll, if Starmer wants to show that he’s the one in charge.
As it stands, he risks losing the one thing that he’s prided himself on as leader, which is discipline.