A world without Keir Starmer

Is it time to change the Labour leader?

The situation is dire. Labour is currently on a blood-curdling 17% in the latest YouGov voting intention tracker. Last week, a by-election saw the party crash out of Caerphilly for the first time in a century, with just 11% of the vote. Keir Starmer is now the UK’s most unpopular prime minister on record. The latest Ipsos poll found 79% of voters are unsatisfied by him compared to just 13% satisfied.

In the face of this kind of horror, the most obvious answer is to change the leader. Do a Tory. Quick bit of political murder off to the side, grab someone who looks vaguely acceptable, shove them onto the stage, hope it works out for the best. It worked for the Conservatives in 1992 and 2019.

People used to whisper about a Labour leadership challenge after the May local elections, which will likely be terrible for the party. Now they speak much more bullishly about doing it before then. The idea is gaining traction.

I am very sceptical of it. I think there’s something quite mad about replacing a leader who only just secured a historic majority. But this piece is an attempt to give the idea a fair hearing and see what it reveals about Labour’s problems.

My basic question is this: What is the problem you are trying to solve? In some cases, getting rid of Starmer provides a genuine solution. In others, it really doesn’t. And in some, the results are finely balanced.

The circumstances

In many cases, I suspect that people want to solve the problem of the circumstances by changing the figure who leads them. This is irrational, but irrationality has never prevented an idea becoming popular in Westminster.

Changing Starmer would not actually fix any of the problems which are tearing this administration apart. Economic growth would still be stagnant. The fiscal rules would still be necessary. Spending cuts would still be agonising. Inflation would still be too high. And public services would still be wrecked by years of Conservative mismanagement.

All of these things are real. People keep on acting like they’re not real, or can be ignored, or may be solved by one magic trick. But they are, they can’t and they won’t.

Imagine Labour did get a new leader. What would they do about these things? Well they’d probably do what Starmer and Rachel Reeves have been doing. They would stick to a clear set of fiscal rules to prevent the sporadic outbursts of bond market anxiety - or they wouldn’t, in which case we’d be even more fucked. They would then try to moderately reform those rules to allow borrowing to invest, which is precisely what Reeves did in her first Budget. They would drive funds towards things like Net Zero, which provide training and work while offering the chance of long term energy security. They would provide worker’s rights in a gig economy to boost demand. And they would introduce planning reform. These are all sensible things to do for growth. These are precisely the things the government has done.

They haven’t worked - not yet - for a variety of reasons, including international conditions and fundamental deficiencies in the British economy. They may never do - the AI bubble might burst and pull us all under. Or the economy may improve in a cyclical manner regardless of them. But the point really is this: what would a new leader do differently? I suspect the answer is nothing, because Starmer and Reeves have done the right things. Changing the leader would simply insert a fresh new face to be mutilated by the existing conditions.

The drift

There is an aimlessness to this government. The malaise feels that much worse because there is no sense of purpose. The blame for this can, without caveat, be laid with Starmer.

I once used to believe that Starmer had strong convictions, which were visible across his career. This is a guy who did pro-bono work getting people off the death penalty. He was someone who had spoken meaningfully about dignity, in work and society. He could clearly articulate the danger of populism and how to defeat it.

Maybe that’s still true. I dunno. It didn’t feel true in August, it did feel true in September, and it hasn’t felt true in October. After a while you stop caring. What’s certainly true is that the prime minister has not communicated his beliefs. This is a major problem for his relationship with the public. They have no idea what he is all about. The government has not communicated a vision.

But perhaps more importantly, it is a disaster internally - for ministers and civil servants. British government works by moulding itself around whoever is at the top. Downing Street is designed in a primitive emperor-like structure around this idea. Day-to-day policy priorities are established by the emphasis of the prime minister. The package of legislation in the King’s Speech is put together by reference to their vision and priorities. When there is an absence there, work cannot be delegated, judgements cannot be assumed, the agenda of government loses shape.

The sense of emptiness around Starmer has become a real problem. It is probably the criticism I hear mentioned most often by people in or around government. It is a quality which touches on both the external and internal problems this administration faces. This is the strongest argument for why you would change leader.

The strategy

Starmer’s anxiety around his lack of political awareness led him to outsource his brain to Morgan McSweeney. Initially this figure was confined to election planning. Then he became chief of staff, and at that point the administration seemed to lose all sense of substance whatsoever. It was the defining mistake, from which all other errors follow.

McSweeney’s instincts are morally disastrous. Under his tutelage, the party has literally got itself into a position where it does not know if racism is good or bad. This would be unforgivable even if it was electorally effective, but it is actually electorally disastrous. As John Springford wrote this week, mainstream parties who try to ape the extremist right fail, because they alienate their natural supporters while failing to attract their opponents.

This warning has been issued to the administration over and over again and they didn’t pay it the slightest bit of attention. Now the situation has played out exactly as people suggested: graveyard polling, extinction-event byelection results. The grim inevitability of political death.

Labour cannot win the next election if it is about immigration. This is the basic reality. It once understood this. It would try to kill culture war issues rather than inflame them. Now, it has decided that it must constantly keep immigration stories in the grid, even when there are none to be found. It is a kind of madness. They are Colonel Kurtz in the jungle, surrounded by corpses, convinced they’re a god.

This does not mean that a new Labour leader must only speak liberal-left platitudes. We’re not in a false binary. It simply suggests that you adopt a middle of the road immigration policy which resonates with the public position - fairness and control - and then you stick to it, criticising those who veer away from it in either direction as limp-wrist liberals (like me) or racial extremists. Instead, Labour chases the populist dog every week. Literally every week, it comes up with some ghastly new idea - punishment accommodation in military barracks, forced voluntary work, doubled waiting times. And each time, it alienates more natural supporters while doing nothing to attract its natural opponents. It defines the British political conversation in a manner which it can never win.

While it fixates on voters it will never attract, it loses the broad coalition which put it in power. The relentless obsession with immigration has two debilitating effects. First, it distracts the government from the things it should be doing to win the next election. And second, it worsens the conditions which prevent the government from winning the next election.

Labour will win the next election if inflation is under control, growth has returned and public services have improved. That last point is absolutely key, because it allows you to win even if taxes have gone up a bit. But fixing public services is hard, long-term, thankless work - countless stock-take meetings towards deliverable goals involving multiple departments. The daily firefighting crisis of a backfooted administration reacting to the latest story on X.com or GB News does not help you achieve this goal. You’ll wake up in four years realising you’ve wasted your time in power. Spaffed it. The chance of a lifetime.

More importantly, the anti-immigrant agenda damages growth. That is the most obscene thing about it. It means that the chief of staff’s focus is on actively undermining the conditions which would allow the government to succeed. This government, like the last, is now trying to discourage people to come work in the NHS and social care. It has failed to try and attract the pool of global talent locked out of the US by Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policy. It is prepared to let UK universities, a national success story, wither and die, partly as a result of anxiety around foreign students. Its mission to reduce numbers simply means we will have less productivity, less demand and less innovation - all the things which a healthy well designed immigration system provides.

The immigration numbers are already going down. The government has received no recognition for this, because the debate is utterly removed from objective reality. They will continue to go down. The government will still get no credit. It won’t win a single vote. But the damage that this reduction will do to our economy and public services will be severe. And the government will be punished for that.

The strategy the government is pursuing is wrong and self-harming. Starmer is responsible for this, because he selected his team and authorised it. But it is not a direct result of him. Rather it is the result of his selection of McSweeney to a role for which he is plainly ill-suited.

The communication

Even if the prime minister had a very clear set of beliefs and the chief of staff had a viable electoral strategy, it wouldn’t make any difference because they lack a functioning communication operation with which to broadcast them.

What is this government for? No-one knows. No-one could tell you in one sentence. This is a failure of the most elemental kind. David Cameron and George Osborne wanted to reduce the deficit. Boris Johnson wanted to Get Brexit Done. It was all arrant nonsense of course - total bullshit - but at least we all understood the storyline. That simply hasn’t happened here. There is no coherent narrative at all.

This time last month, Starmer told us that Nigel Farage’s mass deportation programme was racist. He stressed that he would have a tough immigration policy but hold the line against those who veered into extremism. Fine, great - let’s do that then.

Then last week shadow Home Office minister Katie Lam demanded the deportation of legal immigrants to create a “culturally coherent” Britain. That’s basic racism. ‘Culturally coherent’ is barely a euphemism. And yet the government failed to comment for 24 hours, until we finally got an equivocal statement about immigrants having to “give more than they take”.

What’s the deal here? Did Starmer not mean what he said at conference? Or did he mean it and fail to implement it? Or is the operation in No.10 fighting back against it and refusing to jump on instances like this? Or are they just incompetent?

This is not an acceptable communication policy. It is not performing at even a basic level of professionalism. Responses to key vulnerabilities in the opposition’s position should be out there in minutes, not days. You’re not fucking Gladstone. We’re not debating the fucking gold standard. Do your job as if you live in an era where the telephone has been invented.

You see this failure across the policy landscape. On benefits reform, Labour tried to sell an obviously economic policy as a moral mission, thereby managing to come across as cynical and shifty. The public didn’t like it. Labour MPs didn’t like it. They ended up handing the leadership its own arse to it on a tray. On ID cards, Starmer and his ministers have oscillated, almost daily, between claiming it is an anti-immigration project and a state modernisation project. They are still unable to articulate what the problem is that it is trying to solve. As if to summarise everything that is wrong with their approach to communication, they launched this plan with a piece in the Telegraph, behind a paywall. They’re not even fighting the last war, but the one before the one before that. They must have filed the piece with them by fax.

This failure extends to the things which the government has done well. On Monday, the Renters Rights Act became law. This is a genuinely good bit of legislation, which protects people from no-fault evictions. No-one knows it exists. On Tuesday, the government went into a stand-off with the Lords to defend the employment rights bill, which provides protection on zero-hours contracts and unfair dismissal. It’s a good bit of law. No-one knows it exists. On Wednesday, climate change secretary Ed Miliband announced that the government was going “all in” on clean energy and unveiled an impressive new climate action plan. No-one knows it exists. In fact, whenever No.10 ‘sources’ comment on Miliband, by far the government’s most effective minister, it is to disparage him because trying to save the earth is apparently some kind of pinko shit.

It’s a communications shitshow. An abysmal failure. And it’s no use saying the press are hostile - of course they are. You’re a Labour government. Governing as Labour is playing on hard mode. A successful Labour communication strategy is defined by the fact that it overcomes these challenges.

Again, this is Starmer’s fault. He decided on the operation and who is involved in it. But it is not his direct culpability. It can be fixed without changing him.

To be or not to be

Changing a leader carries considerable political risk.

Starmer is a proven election winner - he is a Labour leader who can secure public support without alienating small-C conservative constituencies. Shrug that off if you like, but most Labour leaders in history have failed to satisfy that test. If you’ve got one who has demonstrated an ability to win an election, you should think pretty damn hard before getting rid of him.

Holding a leadership election when the country is beset by problems and just after you got a massive majority at a general election looks self-indulgent and unserious. Voters are likely to think: you’re the fucking government. Govern. That is what we have tasked you with doing.

And even if that process did play out, who exactly is the great shining knight across the water who we imagine would magically solve all these problems? Angela Rayner? Yvette Cooper? Wes Streeting? Shabana Mahmood? I don’t want to disparage them. They’re all impressive in their own way. But none of them strike me as a massive improvement. There is no-one who is so obviously transformative that it justifies taking such a risk.

Swapping out Starmer would almost certainly provide a leader with more coherent vision. But it would not change the circumstances the government finds itself in. And it is not necessary if we simply want an improvement in Downing Street strategy and communications.

And that is really the key point. It is possible to address the obvious weaknesses in the administration without taking the extreme and risky decision to change leader. How? You push for a change in the Downing Street operation. You try to get rid of McSweeney.

This seems the most proportionate and rational response to the malaise the government finds itself in. It goes for the root of the problem while minimising jeopardy. It makes more sense that sleepwalking to ever great electoral disaster, but is more judicious than simply detonating the whole thing from orbit. It is, by some distance, the most sensible demand we can make.

Odds and sods

This week’s newsletter is available as what I laughingly call a podcast on Substack, Spotify, or at the top of the page.

This week’s i newspaper column was on Tommy Robinson, Elon Musk, Kemi Badenoch and the hatred engine, which sputters into life every time these dead-eyed ghouls manage to find a crime they can attach their festering political mission to.

This week’s episode of Origin Story was part three of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, in which we get into the business end of things. All moral standards have now collapsed. All sane political values are crushed in the dirt. The dictatorship of the proletariat becomes the dictatorship of one man and his enemies are fed into the murder machine. It’s a dark terrifying tale of one of the bleakest periods in human history. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said: “Arrests rolled through the streets and apartment houses like an epidemic. They passed on the infection of inevitable arrest by a handshake, a breath, a chance meeting on the street.” Hopefully, it’ll haunt you. Origin Story is available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s Halloween, so I suppose the culture pick better be a horror film. The best one I saw this week was The Monkey. We’re in an era when horror is the single most exciting genre in cinema. Nothing else even comes close to the same level of daring and experimentation, social and political commentary. So it is with a sense of pride that I tell you that this film has no themes, no subtext, and no symbolism. It has no cultural resonance whatsoever. It has no political meaning. It’s just about a toy monkey that fucks people up really badly. But the thing is that sometimes you just want to sit down and watch a toy monkey do horrible things to people. Is this a masterpiece? No. But it does exactly what it says on the tin and does it very well.

Right, that’s your lot lads, fuck off.