The prime minister has more to fear from ‘kingmakers’ in his cabinet than from Thursday’s election results, writes John Rentoul.
How bad do the election results on Thursday have to be to force Keir Starmer out of Downing Street?
The short answer is that it doesn’t matter how bad they are, because Labour’s unpopularity is not the only thing that will bring down the prime minister. The more important question for Labour MPs is: can they be sure that a new prime minister would be better? The answer to that is currently No, and as long as that remains the case, Starmer is likely to stay on.
Labour will undoubtedly do badly on Thursday. It could lose 2,000 of the 2,500 council seats it is defending in England. It could come fifth in share of the vote. It may even be beaten by Reform in the Scottish parliament elections, and it will lose control of the Welsh Senedd, probably losing to Reform there as well.
And yet, as long as Angela Rayner is the likely winner of a Labour leadership contest, I think Labour MPs will huff and they will puff but they will hold back from blowing the house down. The most recent poll of party members, by Survation for Labour List in February, suggested that Rayner would defeat Wes Streeting by 60 per cent to 40 per cent in the final run-off. That is hardly conclusive, but if you think, as most Labour MPs do, that Rayner would be worse than Starmer, it is not a risk you want to take.
MPs know that, however much their members may like her, she is unpopular with the wider electorate. An Opinium poll today finds that voters oppose her return as a minister by two to one, let alone her return to government as prime minister. As David Maddox, our political editor, reports, one Labour MP behind the “Anyone But Ange” campaign said: “I am really worried Angela will be our Liz Truss.”
Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, is more popular with the public. Indeed, he is the current holder of the coveted title of “the only politician in Britain with a net positive approval rating” (previous holders include Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak). And he is even more popular with Labour members. But he is not available and not likely to be for some time, despite his insistence to The Guardian that he has a “credible plan” to get back into parliament “within weeks”. I suspect that this is like my credible plan to run a sub-two-hour marathon.
My personal view is that the Burnham who scores well in opinion polls is “a figment of somebody else’s imagination”, in Elvis Costello’s words. But my view does not matter at this stage, because many Labour MPs do think that he is The Answer. What does matter, however, is that Labour’s national executive will continue to block him as a by-election candidate – not just because it is still the Keir Starmer Self-Preservation Society, but because it does not want a by-election for the Greater Manchester mayoralty, which Reform could win. Burnham claims to have lined up someone “impressive” to replace him as mayor, but even if it is Liam Gallagher, I think the answer is still No.
Much of the reporting of the next Labour leadership election has got ahead of itself, therefore. Burnham and Streeting both have the support they need among MPs to be candidates, but only Streeting is eligible, and he cannot be sure of winning among party members. The result is deadlock.
Meanwhile, one group of MPs does not get the media coverage it deserves. There is a group of cabinet ministers that a well-placed source calls “the kingmakers”, who are likely to play a leading role in the endgame of Starmer’s premiership. They are ministers who are not likely to be leadership candidates, but who are likely to be part of a successor’s cabinet and who could “help to swing MPs behind a contender if they chose to back them”.
They include David Lammy, “deputy prime minister, a prominent London MP, who is not seen as factional and who has a tendency to back winners” – he was one of Starmer’s leadership campaign vice-chairs; Pat McFadden, work and pensions secretary, a “safe pair of hands, pragmatic, level-headed, respected and shrewd”; Jonathan Reynolds, who “knows the Parliamentary Labour Party well” as chief whip; and Alan Campbell, leader of the Commons, who “knows the parliamentary party well too, as former chief whip, and is respected without being factional”.
These four might be the equivalent of the Conservatives’ “men in grey suits”, with the seniority and heft to shore up Starmer if that is what they judge to be in the country and the party’s interest, but to help to manage the succession to someone else when the deadlock starts to shift. I would have thought that, as kingmakers, this group is unlikely to want to ease the elevation of the king in the north, and would be more likely to back Streeting if the party members can be persuaded of his virtues.
But I think they are unlikely to act in haste, and no matter how bad the elections are for Labour on Thursday, they will be arguing, as Steve Reed, the housing secretary, did today, that it would be “madness” to try to “take out” the prime minister after less than two years in office.
