Starmer’s rolling disaster is pushing Britain closer to the Faragist abyss

Labour people have a deep sense of buyer’s remorse about Keir Starmer, but what can they do? Can Labour change its leader? Is it time for new parties on the left? Can a fractured and fragmented left find common cause before the darkness engulfs us? Is it Starmer or the Faragist abyss?

The May 7 elections, if they are half as bad for Labour as they look, ought to be the end for Starmer. He has thrown away a golden legacy. He once looked like the adult in the room after the chaotic Tory years, and cemented that image by appointing as chief of staff a respected senior civil servant with real gravitas, Sue Grey.

Then he threw all that away by firing her, and replacing her with a grubby old Labour Party faction-fighter, Morgan McSweeney. He seems to have decided that the people he needed around him are the men and women who learned their politics at the feet of Peter Mandelson.

He allowed Mandelson to vet Labour’s election candidates, and thus needlessly threw away the seat of Chingford and Woodford Green, because Labour’s talented and charismatic candidate Faiza Shaheen did not meet Mandelson’s standards of ideological purity.

His cabinet selections were timid, conservative and indecisive. Of the three great offices of state, only one, his chancellor, is still the same person he appointed in July 2024. He fired a respected and successful diplomat as US ambassador to instal Mandelson. Though he once ran a public sector organisation, his relationship with the civil service is dreadful.

He had a brief respite. When Trump began flinging insults at him, the pressure eased. Most people (with the exception of the Daily Mail) instinctively support a British prime minister against a powerful foreign monster. But the Olly Robbins affair has shown how temporary the reprieve was.

Labour has lost its way, and the Denton and Gorton by-election proved it, for Hannah Spencer, the Green who trounced Labour, is just the sort of young woman politician whose natural home would once have been Labour – as is Faiza Shaheen.

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So if Labour loses anything approaching 2,000 council seats, there will be a clamour for change. But the relatively quick procedures by which the Conservatives got rid of two prime ministers – Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – are not available to Labour.

Labour has never ousted a sitting prime minister. On the two occasions when it changed its leader while in government, the sitting leader – Harold Wilson in 1976 and Tony Blair in 2007 – helped matters by resigning.

Labour’s procedures are the result of 125 years of constitutional change, a volatile membership, and the need to accommodate affiliated trade unions. They were further complicated after Starmer became leader by Labour’s national executive raising the number of nominations needed to challenge the leader from 10% of the party’s MPs to 20%.

This is a high bar to jump. Perhaps Angela Rayner or Wes Streeting could jump it. (Ed Miliband is unlikely to want to.) If anyone does, the large and unwieldy electorate will include party members, a large cohort of trade union members, and registered supporters. The campaign will be long, bitter, rancorous and deeply damaging.

One of Labour’s elder statesmen counsels against a leadership election, calling it “insane self-indulgence”. Yet he adds: “We are in terrible danger, not least because heavy defeats will so demoralise local parties that they will demobilise and severely weaken the party as a political force.”

MPs from all parts of Labour share the hope of veteran left winger John McDonnell: “Keir will need to put the interests of the party above his own career, as this isn’t just about losing the next election – we could be facing an existential threat to the party itself.”

However, nothing Starmer has done suggests he might resign, and McDonnell does not see him being forced out either, saying: “It’s likely he will stumble on.” If Andy Burnham finds his way back to Westminster, there may be a challenge. But it may be too late.

If Starmer cannot save Labour, and Labour cannot remove Starmer, the Greens will move into the political space Labour once occupied. But few people expect a majority Green government at the next election.

Can the left at least coordinate the tactical voting effort necessary to stop Reform? The signs are not propitious. The Labour strategy, if we are to judge by the Gorton and Denton by election, will be to amplify every scare story it hears about the Greens, just as the Tories used to do with Labour. This will suit Nigel Farage down to the ground.

The US would not have saddled itself with Trump if the Democrats had not descended into idiotic identity squabbles. Unless left wing politicians confront the common enemy effectively between now and 2029, Britain could easily get Farage.