Sir Keir Starmer’s university friends still speak fondly of seeing the Smiths play live with the boy who, even then, they imagined as a future leader of the Labour Party. So it is fitting that Morrissey should offer us the perfect summary of his current predicament. “Panic on the streets of London. Panic on the streets of Birmingham. I wonder to myself ... could life ever be sane again?” The month that might have been Starmer’s victory lap has instead been overshadowed by war in Israel and unhappiness at home.
We know how Starmer got here: an infelicitously phrased answer in an LBC interview, the belated clarification, the complaints from the shadow cabinet, the anger of Muslim voters in seats safe for decades, the clamour for a ceasefire and the eventual shift behind US calls for a humanitarian pause to violence.
All of which has of course been difficult for a Labour leadership whose control of its own party looked immune to challenge. But for now it is wrong to conclude that it has blown Starmer off course for Downing Street.
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Deborah Mattinson, Labour’s director of strategy, reminded the shadow cabinet of this temporarily neglected truth on Tuesday. Their meeting concluded with a presentation that showed just how well October began. Party conferences are seldom noticed by ordinary voters. But Labour’s trip to Liverpool was. Focus groups recalled the leader’s speech with untypical enthusiasm. Not only that but shadow ministers were told it gave Starmer the fillip in his personal ratings that eluded Rishi Sunak. This is the context we ought to remember if we want to analyse what has gone wrong for the Labour leadership this week.
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And so we should. For all of this is best understood not as a row within the opposition but a dress rehearsal for the unforeseen shocks a Starmer government will soon have to contend with, as all governments do. Though his advisers have never pretended that their leader is immune to political gravity, it has been a while since it has exerted such force on a party that has been busy accustoming itself to success. Labour’s top brass now have time before a general election to dust themselves off and learn four hard lessons, lest they are forced to do so on the job.
Lesson one: individual MPs matter. Even, as John Major put it, the dispossessed, never-possessed and the bastards. Every successful leader is at one time or another accused of high-handed autocracy. Backbenchers don’t like it when they are ignored. In the main the sensibilities of Labour MPs are conventional and conservative but when it comes to party management their preferred model would probably be the editorial collective of Spare Rib. But that is not licence to neglect them, and they are feeling neglected.
Such grumbles are not necessarily new and wounded pride is an occupational hazard of a career in politics. Until now, however, these anxieties have been sublimated into their dreams of a return to government and reluctance to do anything that might jeopardise it.
That changed this week. It is a measure of the fury some MPs are facing in their constituencies that even those in safe seats fear they are vulnerable. One shadow cabinet minister in a dependably Labour city is telling colleagues that he would lose if a general election were held tomorrow. Those fears have driven the agitation that that has put Starmer on the defensive. Support for the leader is broader than it is deep. He rose quickly, unmoored from any faction. His people have always been his advisers. Upon his election in 2020 one shadow minister who had come to know Starmer well in the Corbyn years complained to me that he saw MPs as his paralegals.
He is listening closely to them now. But in government they will want and need to feel like more than lobby fodder. Witness the junior shadow ministers who have veered from agreed policy in the Commons chamber. When the shadow minister Florence Eshalomi did so earlier this week, she had her words “corrected” in Hansard. That is no substitute for collective responsibility.
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When Sue Gray arrived as Starmer’s chief of staff, some feared that she would behave as a permanent secretary of a Whitehall department would. Instead, she is wondering aloud why so few elected politicians are in key meetings.
Lesson two: all of the above also applies to the shadow cabinet. Prescient, private warnings about the party’s standing last week from Shabana Mahmood, the shadow justice secretary, and Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, were all the more powerful as a result of their fealty to his leadership. This week it was Hilary Benn, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, who spoke at length about the need for Labour’s position to take into account the scale of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. These are not politicians given to hyperbole, panic or disloyalty. Between them they helped to shift a dial that once looked beyond their reach.
Lesson three: the left ain’t dead yet. Discontent over the conflict is by no means confined to the enfeebled fringe of the parliamentary Labour Party but it is true that they have made much of the running. It is their persistence and enduring organisational infrastructure within the Labour Party that helped force this row off social media and into the mainstream. They are isolated no more and remain a deceptively vibrant presence at the top of the unions too. Their MPs are treading carefully.
Corbynites heartened by this underdog story may be dispirited to learn that one of their leaders has been sharing his speeches on the conflict with party officials before delivery, lest he too loses the whip. But what that really tells us is how they will act should Labour win a narrow majority and face a choice between the Socialist Campaign Group and Liberal Democrats. They will negotiate smartly — and hard.
Lesson four: what Starmer says matters more than anything. This is not the first news cycle to have been driven by words that might have been chosen more carefully, and were thus liable to be misrepresented. See also: EU relations and migration. Some of his aides are now pondering how he might better communicate them. They suggest, as the Smiths did, that he should hang the DJ. One idea under discussion is a Starmer podcast. That is the format in which he communicates his politics and private passions with the relaxed confidence that sometimes escapes him under hostile media questioning. We may never hear it: others in his office tell me they cannot imagine anything worse. But in government, words that now only move MPs to sign early day motions will move troops and markets.
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These tests won’t change the identity of our next prime minister. That’s still Keir Starmer. They will, however, determine just how stable his government can be in its difficult first year. The opposite of the complacency his team has wisely disavowed is panic. They cannot afford to let it spread to the streets of Westminster.
