Germany was an interesting, if highly stressful, place from which to follow the meltdown into which Labour was plunged after the dreadful May 7 election results.
Interesting because of the distance it afforded, by being remote from the 24/7 British blah factory, and instead a country whose media was far more interested in its own government’s problems, which are considerable, closely followed by the German Catholic Church’s biennial congress, all things Trump, and the war in Ukraine.
Stressful because, well, I always get stressed when Labour are in difficulties. I always have, but this time the stress was exacerbated by the fact that the trip to Germany had been meticulously planned by Fiona, as a present to me.
I am not an easy person to buy presents for, I am not a natural tourist, but I do like Germany, and I love swimming in cold water, so the trip was a belated Christmas/early birthday present – 69 next week, aaaargh – with Baltic Sea swimming the highlight.
Throughout our near half-century together, Fiona has endured many holidays that have been interrupted, wrecked, curtailed or cancelled as a result of Labour travails. This was the case when I was a journalist, more so in government, but even now, as a mere podcaster and columnist, the sort of turmoil we saw last week leads to me phoning and texting people constantly, being inundated with media calls from around the world, which I mainly ignore, thinking there must be something more I can do to calm the frenzy, sleeping badly, and worrying that these events might all be part of an inexorable journey towards prime minister Farage.
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Even after all the thinking and talking, stressing and fretting, and a couple of emergency podcasts with Rory Stewart, when Matt Kelly pinged me a message asking who I thought would be prime minister at Christmas, given how tired I was of the pinging phone – yes, yes, I know, I could have turned it off, but it might have been someone I was calling, calling me back – I sent back the single word “dunno”.
The truth is none of us know, which is why I worried from the moment this whole frenzy erupted that it was the worst possible way to decide whether Keir Starmer should stay or go, and if the latter, who should replace him, and that nobody really had a plan. I felt that if a leadership contest came about, it would likely be more by accident than design.
My endless phoning and being phoned led me to believe that none of the serious contenders had actually intended to make a move, until former minister Catherine West announced that she would mount a challenge if nobody else did.
And so, to use a phrase I absolutely loathe, but which does sum up the situation, we are where we are… Wes Streeting has resigned from the cabinet, Angela Rayner has been cleared of tax irregularities, Andy Burnham has found a parliamentary seat in which to fight a by-election, and Keir Starmer has yet to face a formal challenge to his leadership.
It is far from certain that Burnham will win in Makerfield, given how well Reform did there in the local elections, and how much of his ill-gotten gains Nigel Farage will throw at it. My hunch, though, is that Burnham will win.
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All things considered, my answer to Matt re who will be prime minister at Christmas, remains “dunno”. I think it will be either Andy Burnham or Keir Starmer and, if I had to put my life on it, probably Andy Burnham.
Back in my Daily Mirror days, every by-election was covered like a major national event. That trend has been reversed in recent years. The potential significance of Burnham’s attempts to win in Makerfield, allied to the sheer scale of UK political media these days, means it will certainly be the most covered by-election ever. I feel very stressed just thinking about it.
Yes, 69, and yes, aaaargh. My fitness fanaticism, cold-water swimming and refusal ever to contemplate “retirement” means I really don’t feel old, but I have to accept that 69 is much closer to the end than the beginning. If Andy Burnham does challenge Starmer and win, he will be the 11th Labour leader I have known, most of them extremely well, several as close friends.
I have known Andy since before he became an MP, when he was a researcher for Tessa Jowell, sadly no longer with us, and whose calm, humane approach to politics would have been very useful in recent days.
Amid my sleepless musings, I wondered what Tessa would make of it all. I think she would be shocked, and disheartened, by the speed with which Labour has gone from landslide win to leadership crisis.
She was hugely fond of Andy, and would not be surprised that he had followed a successful parliamentary and ministerial career to become a popular mayor in the north of England. As to whether she ever thought he had what it took to go all the way to the top, I think she would definitely have said that he had the personal skills, the passion, the empathy, the ability to make decisions, and a vision for what he wanted the country to be.
Where she might have had doubts, I suspect, would relate to the question, was he tough enough, ruthless enough, was there real steel behind the smile? I think recent days have given us the answer to that.
Our best swim, right at the top of the country, the cold water warmed by a sun low in the sky, was off the beach at Heiligendamm, the oldest seaside spa in Europe, in the former DDR. It was not far from Angela Merkel’s old constituency, and a huge portrait of the former chancellor hung in the lobby of the beachside hotel.
Further underlining my inability to escape politics, on inquiring about the portrait I learned that Tony Blair had been there too. And George W Bush. And Nicolas Sarkozy. And, er, Vladimir Putin. This was the scene of the 2007 G8 summit, I was told, from June 6-8, 2007. The date rang a bell. Wasn’t that around the time Tony resigned to make way for Gordon Brown? I checked. Indeed it was… June 27.
So, just three weeks later, Tony was the first of the Heiligendamm 8 to go. The rest followed in due course, except for Putin, still there and, on the day we enjoyed the Baltic waters, launching one of the deadliest attacks on Kyiv since the war in Ukraine began.
Was he always a monster, I mused as I looked at his smiling face on the G8 family photo, or were we all just too slow to see that he might be?
There was remarkably little in the German media about what was happening back home. Very much inside-page stuff, if at all, and on the TV news mid-bulletin, if at all. Chancellor Friedrich Merz was providing too many headlines of his own. A recent parliamentary defeat over plans to help out with energy bills has led to an avalanche of debate about whether his CDU/CSU-SDP coalition can survive, and whether there might even have to be fresh elections.
This just one year since Merz replaced Olaf Scholz. If Keir Starmer’s fall from landslide to leadership crisis has been dramatic, he is not alone. Indeed, Die Welt carried a poll showing that of the E3 leaders, when it comes to satisfaction ratings, Starmer is top of the tree, with 24% saying they are happy with him! French president Emmanuel Macron is on 23%, Merz on 22%. Politics, it seems, is about as tough as it gets these days.
