“I’m not even angry any more,” said one exhausted Labour MP last week. “I’m just in despair.” Another, pondering front pages dominated by No 10’s briefing against a supposed coup led by health secretary Wes Streeting, said “fuck” more than a dozen times during a two-minute conversation. Then, “for fuck’s sake” became such a common phrase from Labour MPs and staffers in the wake of the budget U-turn that it almost looked like an officially briefed line to take.
Welcome to the Labour Party, 16 months on from its landslide election victory. Hope and enthusiasm are in short supply, maybe even invisible. No one thinks Keir Starmer can win the next general election. Instead, it is the prospect of a leadership election that is concentrating minds.
Even with the bar set as low as it is, the last few days have been terrible for Starmer’s Downing Street operation. No 10 managed to start a war with its own health secretary, only to put up the white flag within 24 hours. It U-turned on the budget before the speech had even been delivered. And it tried to move on the narrative with yet another harsh immigration crackdown – a tactic that has been tried and failed perhaps a dozen times already, one that is highly unlikely to shift red wall Reform votes back to Labour and one that will only increase a steady drift of leftist Labour votes to the Greens, Lib Dems and even Your Party.
The last week has reinforced what was already widely believed – that No 10 is out of control under the unpopular chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, that messaging remains a disaster area, that policy has veered wildly off course to the right and that the prime minister has retreated into a bunker mentality, unwilling to recognise just how badly things have gone wrong.
The bizarre thing about McSweeney’s decision to call out an apparent coup last week, several MPs suggest, is that they were unaware a coup was even happening, and suspect that in reality it wasn’t.
Yes, some will candidly admit, they want Starmer gone. Yes, they will move against him if they have to.
But most realise that the party is going to face horrendous losses in May’s elections – to councils across England, the Welsh Senedd and the Scottish parliament – and don’t want a new leader to be tarnished with those. They see little reason to act before then, even if Rachel Reeves’s tax-raising budget on November 26 adds to the deepening gloom.
But after the supposed coup became news, any move by any minister will now inevitably be interpreted as a pitch for the leadership. On Sunday, Angela Rayner gave the Mirror her first interview since her resignation. The very same day, the Telegraph’s front-page splash headlined it “Rayner plots against Starmer”. Whatever remnants of stability the government had now seem to be gone.
Even as things began to disintegrate early this year, Starmer’s great advantage in holding on as leader was the lack of obvious contenders for leadership. Streeting is well-regarded as a media performer, but has a tough brief in the NHS, is to the right of most of the parliamentary party, and is vanishingly unlikely to hold his seat at the next election.
Rayner’s chances were marred when she was forced to resign amid scandal. Andy Burnham was widely felt to have fumbled his attempt to position himself as the successor during party conference – and would need to become an MP first to actually run. Bridget Phillipson’s viability has been damaged by her failed run for deputy.
But now, with Labour’s ratings as bad as they are, MPs are increasingly willing to overlook shortcomings. Streeting might be able to move seats, they say – and the left might be able to ignore their policy disagreements with him. Maybe Rayner might not be all that damaged after all.
Other possibilities are being mooted: the idea of an Ed Miliband leadership return was a joke a few months ago, but now it’s being seriously considered in some quarters. Burnham has a public advocate once again, in the form of Clive Lewis, who has become the first MP to openly suggest that Starmer should go.
Despite having a tricky seat to defend, Shabana Mahmood, author of this year’s hardline immigration plan, also has her supporters. These are said to include McSweeney himself, if Starmer goes.
Yet Mahmood’s plan, yet another effort to take on Reform by adopting the kind of hard policy Nigel Farage himself champions, illustrates the crisis at the heart of Labour. It says that refugees will be unable to apply for settled status (or British citizenship) until they have been in the UK for 20 years. At any point before then, they could lose their right to remain in the country if the government declares their home country safe.
The idea behind the reforms is to make the UK a less attractive destination for refugees – but as critics have noted, it directly contradicts the goal of integrating migrants into UK culture. If you might be kicked out of the country at any point for 20 years, why bother to learn the language, culture and customs? How can you have a sense of belonging somewhere that tells you that you don’t belong?
The notion, supported by McSweeney, that this kind of stuff will win back voters lost to Reform seems like wishful thinking. The people who now say they will vote for Farage’s party have a visceral loathing of Starmer and Labour. They are not going to be swayed by Reform lite – they will go for the original full-fat version, which will always be able to promise something harsher than a Labour government can deliver.
More immediately, Mahmood and Starmer could hardly have picked a worse time to announce a policy most MPs and activists will surely hate. Several have already publicly declared their opposition, and many more are saying in private they won’t support the more extreme measures of the bill. The pair could end up in the worst of all worlds, having alienated their own base with draconian measures they cannot even see through.
Meanwhile, traditional Labour voters on the centre left hear that under Mahmood’s plan, asylum seekers could have jewellery and other valuables taken from them to pay for their processing costs, and feel deep revulsion. Zack Polanski, Ed Davey, even Jeremy Corbyn now look more and more tempting.
The entire rightward drift feels like a central strategic error, one that MPs believe will lose left wing and liberal voters in 2029 in the same way that Corbyn lost red wall voters in 2019. “We need to pick a lane,” said one.
The budget U-turn on raising income tax is a different kind of headache. Labour MPs have been divided on whether or not the government should raise tax. Some felt that the government’s only hope was to raise enough revenue to make sure it could actually fix public services – and guarantee it wouldn’t need to hike taxes again this parliament – and breaking its manifesto promises was the only way to do that. Others, including new deputy leader Lucy Powell, thought raising income tax was political suicide.
However, MPs in both camps despaired at the U-turn after weeks of heavy briefing and pitch-rolling that income tax would be hiked. Reeves gave a public speech making the case for tax hikes, and multiple journalists were brought in alongside that for a background briefing which included details of the Resolution Foundation plan to raise £6bn by hiking income tax and cutting national insurance.
Backtracking at this late stage means the government risks all the unpopularity of raising taxes, but with none of the actual revenue – the worst of both worlds. It also means the Treasury is still vulnerable to any economic shocks, and might have to raise yet more taxes next year if growth is slower than expected.
Oddly, though, it is the war with Streeting that had MPs despairing the most – not because it was the most important of the three, but because it showed up how No 10 has alienated almost everyone outside the building so quickly. A Sunday Times report on an angry phone call between McSweeney and Streeting included one telling detail: the two men had already fallen out, and had not spoken for at least two months before that call. It begs the question: How can a Labour government successfully address the NHS backlog and fix its services when the leader’s inner circle and the health secretary are barely on speaking terms?
No 10 has an unparalleled record of waging war on its own side and itself. Even before Starmer’s operation entered government, several staffers in his office were told to look for other jobs as they wouldn’t be brought into No 10 – leading to divisive briefing and a toxic atmosphere in the run-up to the election.
There was the war against Sue Gray, followed by the removal of transport secretary Louise Haigh, and then the dismissal of Powell from the cabinet after she warned Starmer he would lose a Commons vote if he stuck with a plan to push through £5bn of welfare cuts. Almost all of Labour’s whipping operation was replaced in the wake of that farce, too.
Similar chaos has continued unabated within Downing Street itself, with almost every senior adviser other than McSweeney replaced over the course of 2025. One senior Labour insider said that while No 10 is often described as toxic, “the word doesn’t even come close to describing how awful it really is in there”.
One Labour MP, a former loyalist who had started speaking out against the government, described being brought in to Downing Street to be assured things had changed and would be better now, after the woes of the summer.
He was given a four-point list as to why things would be better now: First, Amy Richards, Yvette Cooper’s former chief of staff, was now No 10’s political director. Second, there was a new comms team, in the form of former Sun editor David Dinsmore and Blair-era PR man, and Portland Communications founder, Tim Allan.
Third, there was a new whips office. And fourth, MPs would now get more notice when ministers were visiting their constituencies, because No 10 had put a team on that.
The deeply unimpressed MP said he left the meeting certain that Starmer’s days as prime minister were numbered.
The people inside No 10 do not trust the cabinet, Labour backbenchers, or even one another. They have alienated almost every base of power upon which a government relies. Much of their media briefing seems aimed at alienating the liberal urban voters who are Labour’s core vote in the 21st century.
Starmer himself has further alienated himself by seeming oblivious to the fact. Last week, he repeated claims that he “will not tolerate” negative briefing from his team – but didn’t sack anyone or take any other concrete action. This only further enraged his already-livid MPs, one of whom said he was “sick of hearing him say that” when it is clear “that he does actually tolerate it”.
The feeling that No 10 has lost the support of everyone outside its walls now seems unfixable. The mood within Labour is dark and despairing. It would take very little for it to tip over into open mutiny.
