The Labour shift hastening Keir Starmer’s fall

Good morning. Labour MPs almost all agree that Keir Starmer cannot lead them into the next general election. But they disagree on when Starmer should be removed as leader, and who should replace him when the time comes.

The timing has come under pressure after Catherine West, Labour MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet and former minister, announced she would seek nominations to challenge Starmer unless the cabinet intervened to seek a replacement.

Given that Starmer’s position among MPs is terminal but there are divisions about when he should go, I am not going to speculate on when that might happen as frankly that feels like a good way to look foolish.

Instead, in today’s note, I want to discuss some of the political shifts that may well have accelerated Starmer’s final end and are in any case shaping the speed of his exit and who might replace him.

Left on red

Keir Starmer’s biggest asset for some time has been that a large number of Labour MPs think that if he were to stand down he would be replaced by Angela Rayner — seen as a high-risk alternative who might herself lose badly to Nigel Farage.

So mostly, when a Labour MP says they want an “orderly transition”, what they actually mean is “I would like time either for an as yet unnamed alternative to Rayner to emerge or for my preferred alternative, Andy Burnham, to get a parliamentary seat and make his way back to Westminster”.

Sometimes what it means is “I would like Rayner to be leader but not until her tax affairs are resolved, and I want the clock to run long enough for that issue to be settled”. She resigned from all three of her senior political positions in September after admitting she incorrectly paid a lower rate of stamp duty on the purchase of an £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex.

But one important shift over the past few weeks is that Rayner’s standing among the party’s soft left has diminished. Perhaps not permanently but there is a greater appetite for an alternative candidate on that wing of the party.

You can see that playing out in Catherine West’s challenge. Like Rayner, West is from the party’s soft left and 2015 parliamentary intake with strong connections to some of the party’s power brokers. The key difference is her base is the London Labour establishment not the Greater Manchester one. She had a glide path into the selection for her Haringey seat, with the field pre-cleared of heavyweight opposition. West lent a nomination to Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 but was one of the first to be sacked from his front bench in 2017 as she pursued ways to stop Brexit. In short, she’s a good indicator of where “middle opinion” in the Labour Party is moving.

West sat down for an interview with the New Statesman to explain her thinking, and the striking line was her belief that candidates would “emerge” during the process, including those from the 2024 intake. It signals an important movement in the parliamentary party’s centre of gravity away from “if we wait, someone will turn up” to “we have to create the conditions for someone to turn up”.

There are a number of reasons for that: although the scale of Labour losses weren’t as bad as some of the predictions, it was still considerable. No government has done as badly at this point in the parliament and gone on to win, which shows you the degree of change it would need to turn around its fortunes.

West’s challenge could fizzle out and Starmer could limp on to be replaced another day. But make no mistake, it has made Labour MPs stop and think about what an “orderly transition” might involve and the extreme unlikelihood that Starmer would ever facilitate that kind of thing. As such it has increased the chances that Starmer’s premiership could come to an end sooner rather than later.

In addition, there is a split between what the cabinet thinks is the best way forward — its members publicly insist that no change of leader is required — and the mood among the backbenches, which is more fractious. Frankly, the longer the cabinet dallies the more likely it is that the 2024 intake will decide that one of its own should lead them next.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to Peter Sandberg’s new record, Temporary Coexistence of Humans, while writing my column. It’s a really lovely bit of modern classical music.

If you are crying “please, no more football in the newsletter”, look away now.

This is because I was freshly reminded of how much I enjoyed Daisy Christodoulou’s book I Just Can’t Stop Thinking About VAR, a damning account of why video-assisted refereeing just does not work for association football.

I do not like VAR. I think it fits well with rigid sports with clearer stoppages, but football is ultimately a common law sport, invented in a common law country that rests on interpretation. Far from making the game fairer it has simply made it more stop-start and it further diminishes the match day experience.

Nonetheless, when West Ham’s goal against Arsenal was disallowed thanks to VAR I roared with delight. I felt a double twinge at my hypocrisy as Christodoulou is a West Ham fan. As the book could not be better suited to the interests of Inside Politics readers who do like football I thought I should recommend it today, as if you buy it this week you will doubtless help cheer up the author of a very good book.

Top stories today

• Last chance speech | As leadership rivals circle, Keir Starmer is preparing to give a crucial “last chance” speech. Angela Rayner dialled up the pressure on the prime minister, deploring a “toxic culture of cronyism” in the government and calling for leadership hopeful Andy Burnham to return to Westminster.

• ‘Splitting and fissuring’ | Reform UK has set its sights on national power, after finishing first in English local elections last week. Its plan for how it would govern the UK could depend on who is still in Nigel Farage’s top team by the time of the election, given his propensity for falling out with colleagues. 

• Pitch for pension money | The government plans to target £99bn of overseas pension investment into key UK projects by 2035. A new “Supers Unit”, led by the Office for Investment, aims to boost collaboration and streamline investment from Australian pension funds into growth sectors, including infrastructure, real estate and private markets.