Give him his due: Keir Starmer still knows how to surprise us.
When faced with local and devolved election results that presented an existential threat, both to him as Prime Minister and to his party, he rose to the challenge and… appointed two relics of New Labour as advisers.
Don’t get me wrong, Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman are highly regarded in the party, one as a former chancellor and prime minister and the other as a long-serving (and long-suffering) deputy leader. But what on earth is the question to which they are the answer?
Starmer’s stale and ailing administration needs an injection of dynamism and hope, not the stodgy, heavily baggaged figures of the past.
As if reheating the New Labour project – in the form of Peter Mandelson – hasn’t gone badly enough for Starmer?
Call me cynical, but this looks like a poorly thought-out deflection strategy: ‘Hey everybody! Don’t look at those election results, look over here instead at this new shiny thing!’
So feeble and cack-handedly has this announcement been made, so irrelevant to the immediate needs of the Government are these new appointments, that it can only inflame the criticism that Labour MPs and ministers already aim at Starmer.
Despite their protestations, they all know what needs to be done. And yet so far only a handful of brave backbenchers have put their heads above the parapet to demand that Starmer steps down as Labour leader and Prime Minister.
It’s not an easy job, telling a PM that he needs to go, as I know this from experience. In 2009, I told Brown – now Starmer’s newly minted ‘Special Envoy on Global Finance’ – to his face, before an audience of fellow MPs, that if he didn’t resign then he would lose Labour the next general election. I did not prevail and was proved right: small consolation for the dismal purgatory of the opposition benches.
Keir Starmer welcomes new Special Envoy on Global Finance Gordon Brown to No10 today
Harriet Harman will be the Prime Minister’s adviser on women and girls
Starmer’s stale and ailing administration needs an injection of dynamism and hope, not the stodgy, heavily baggaged figures of the past, says Tom Harris
Yet today Labour’s would-be knife wielders shilly-shally, hesitating to strike the fatal blow. What are they waiting for? Two words: someone else. These brave tribunes of the people are too frit to act in case their own careers are damaged. They want someone else to go over the top first and only when the coast is clear and most of the dirty work is done will they follow them into no man’s land.
Of course, the big question is who should replace Starmer. When there is no obvious figurehead in the wings and while plenty of doubt exists that a new leader can significantly resurrect Labour’s dire poll ratings anyway, what would be the point of replacing Starmer at all?
Nonetheless, the contenders for the crown are compelling. One potential is Angela Rayner, who owes much of her status in the party to Jeremy Corbyn, who plucked her from obscurity for a Shadow Cabinet role when much of his frontbench resigned in protest at his leadership in 2016.
She has fallen upwards since but her dispute with HMRC is keeping her on the backbenches (for now). Yet as the darling of the Left, she would prove hopeless at reining in the restive Parliamentary Labour Party, which has made such a mockery of Starmer’s majority in the Commons.
Wes Streeting, however, could take the party by the scruff of the neck. He is, by a country mile, the most competent and able candidate likely to stand – a pragmatic health secretary, tough on the unions and honest about past mistakes, such as working for the trans rights charity Stonewall. He would broaden Labour’s appeal beyond its core soft-Left support, which is why party members will view him with deep suspicion.
The reputation of Andy Burnham among members has improved over time, mainly because he had the good sense to extricate himself from Parliament in 2017, and so avoided the internecine battles of the Corbyn era. Despite an uncertain level of support among Labour MPs, he remains a favourite to win any contest. There’s just one problem: the King in the North is trapped in his keep, surrounded by a scary moat of Reform turquoise.
Nigel Farage’s party has done well in Manchester, suggesting that any by-election in the region, in which the city’s current mayor would hope to be a candidate to secure his seat in Parliament, could blow up in his face.
The only way Labour can stem the flow of support to Reform is for its next leader to get real on immigration, to reduce it to pre-1997 levels and – even more importantly – stem the flow of asylum seekers now targeting our southern shores.
Neither Streeting, Burnham nor Rayner would relish that job. The path of least resistance in the Labour Party is always the preferred one: tell members what they want to hear, not what they need to hear.
If that path is chosen this time, then replacing Keir Starmer, while necessary, will turn out to be a colossal waste of time and energy, and it will then be up to the electorate to cast its judgment.
Tom Harris is the former Labour MP for Glasgow South
