Even though they were held last Thursday, the local, Scottish and Welsh elections seem an age ago. Their reverberations are shaking the very foundations of British politics, and also undermining the future of the prime minister.
Mid term elections are always difficult for an incumbent government, so in that sense these were no different. But they really were. This was arguably the worst set of elections for a government ever. They lost just under 1500 seats, which admittedly was fewer than the 1850 some pollsters were predicting, but awful nonetheless. Combine that with coming third in Wales and a very poor second in Scotland, and the loss of several councils and mayoralties to the Greens and it is obvious that it cannot be business as usual. Something has to change. But what?
Keir Starmer is not a politician of the normal sort. He doesn’t have any ideological grounding. He doesn’t really know his own party. When he talks about it, there’s no passion of the sort you’d get from Neil Kinnock. That’s a real problem.
What is also a problem is that he doesn’t seem to have anyone left in Number 10 who can write him a decent speech or point out the obvious. For anyone to think that bringing back Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman was the first measure you should take to reenforce a message of change is just risible.
The speech this morning was more of the same. It had echoes of Harold Wilson’s famous proclamation back in the late 1960s when he was facing cabinet plotting. “I know what’s going on. I’m going on!” To say over the weekend that he wanted to be in Downing Street for ten years, was not just tin-eared, but had echoes of Margaret Thatcher’s equally tin-eared comment in 1989 of “going on and on and on”.
He mouthed the words of taking responsibility for the election results, but then offered more of the same. He said he would renationalise British Steel, which prompts the natural question: why did you not do that earlier, when you could have saved Port Talbot? He banged on again at Britain’s place is at the heart of Europe, yet could not articulate how that can possibly happen without crossing his red lines on the Single Market and Customs Union. He droned on about offering young people more opportunities in Europe, fully aware that his Europe Minister, Nick Thomas-Symonds, has failed to negotiate such a deal through no fault of his own. The demands the EU is making render it impossible.
This obsession with Europe isn’t surprising, but all over the country, Labour lost thousands of votes to Reform UK. OK, promoting closer ties with the EU may go down well with Green or LibDem voters, but it’s Reform UK that poses the biggest challenge to Labour. And yet again Starmer dismissed Reform as bigoted racists, and by doing so implicitly smeared those who voted for them. Another example of his tin earedness.
So what happens now? Catherine West’s challenge is unlikely to provoke an immediate leadership election. Angela Rayner can’t challenge until her tax affairs are resolved with HMRC. Andy Burnham has yet to find a seat where he could fight what would be a very tasty by-election. Ed Miliband protests he has no interest in becoming leader. And then there’s Wes Streeting. Many believe that he is best placed to replace Starmer, but that window may well close if he doesn’t act now. But if he does, there is no guarantee he would prevail, and a failed move could signal the end of his career. What to do…
So given the lack of a clear alternative, Starmer may live to fight another day, but he knows that he’s only ever one crisis away from further leadership speculation. The next crisis may well come very soon possibly next week, when the next batch of Mandelson documents are released.
I’ve spent the last couple of hours texting Labour MPs. Not all of them, but a fairly chunky representative sample. I’ve asked them whether the prime minister did enough in his speech to convince them and their colleagues that he should stay.
I will be talking about their replies on my LBC show at 7pm this evening.
Going back to the election results, I have found it amusing to read the delusional comments from some people who try to minimise the scale of the victory for Reform UK. Ah, they say, their vote share was down on last year, ignoring the fact that they gained more seats than any party ever has in a single local election in the past. They came from nothing to reach second place in Wales, and joint second in Scotland. Their vote share was down on last year because of the demographics of the seats that were up for grabs. The Left have always underestimated the appeal of Reform, and failed to even try to understand it. So long as that remains the case, they will never be able to combat Farage’s appeal. It was the same with Boris Johnson.
The LibDems and the Greens did roughly as well as expected, while the Conservatives did better than expected in London and one or two parts of the south, and they didn’t lose quite as many seats as many pundits had predicted. But in East Anglia, they were more or less wiped out, with Reform sweeping the board in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. Kemi Badenoch may be polling well personally, but there are few signs that the popularity of her party is moving quickly enough in the right direction. Her challenge now is to ensure that by this time next year, the Conservative Party vote share is markedly up on its current showing of 17-20 per cent.