Keir Starmer’s team can smell the presence of the political grim reaper. Every Friday, the prime minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, runs a 30-minute call for Labour staffers called “forward look”. Among other things, the session runs through the big events of the previous week, as well as what is likely to come up in the days ahead. For a long time, the call extensively featured the latest polling: for example, what voters thought about Labour’s policies, as well as the popularity of the party’s leading lights. But as the figures went from dire to catastrophic, the polling was quietly dropped from the call.
What hasn’t gone awol from the agenda are council byelection results. Since the July general election, Labour has lost 22 seats. Attentive staffers on the call note that the picture is bleaker than the headline figures suggest, because even where Labour has retained seats, the party’s share of the vote is invariably plummeting by a fifth. Nigel Farage’s Reform party is surging, with the Greens posing a growing threat on Labour’s left flank.
After just five months in office, Starmer has the worst net satisfaction of any prime minister – minus 34 – in the history of Ipsos polling, which goes all the way back to the 1970s. He is polling 12 points lower than the doomed Rishi Sunak was at the same point in his tenure. Labour is now polling in the mid-20s, both the Tories and Reform nipping at its heels. There is now a national conversation which seriously entertains the prospect of Farage as prime minister. All this less than half a year after the most calamitous government in British democratic history was routed.
Why has it gone so hideously wrong? Starmer’s natural allies are in private despair. There is no shortage of explanations being offered. The ousted former chief of staff Sue Gray has been accused of failing to prepare Labour’s top team for government, deferring decisions on policy. Cabinet ministers have ended up doing their own thing, overseeing powerful fiefdoms, over which Starmer seems to have little leverage. The prime minister himself appears to prefer jetting around the world, playing the role of would-be statesman. He has handed all economic responsibility to his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who has set up her own formidable separate operation at No 11, with Matt Pound – the former national organiser for Labour First, a faction whose speciality is attacking the left – as her political secretary.
Anyone who has ever worked with Starmer arrives at the same diagnosis: he lacks politics. One senior Labour figure told me that when the party lost the Hartlepool byelection in May 2021, the Labour leader had a major crisis of self-confidence. That led him to outsource his political operation to what former Labour MP and Tony Blair adviser Jon Cruddas called “the most rightwing, illiberal faction in the party” – the Labour right. New Labour’s founders were substantial figures: their heirs are often one-dimensional hacks who learned their trade in the grimmest recesses of student politics.
When Starmer’s leadership is officially classified as “in crisis”, a moment which is fast approaching, this faction will not be short of excuses. They will blame Starmer for not being a “true believer”, and argue for a Blairite tub-thumper, such as the health secretary, Wes Streeting, instead. Ask them why their prince over the water nearly lost his seat to 23-year-old British-Palestinian prodigy Leanne Mohamad in July’s general election, and be met with an expression screaming “does not compute”. Only political pressure from the right is deemed legitimate.
But Starmer should not be their fall guy. Here is the basic truth: the Labour right ran out of ideas long ago. For the permanently crisis-stricken Britain that emerged after the 2008 financial crisis, they have no solutions. This is why Corbynism emerged in the first place. They then had years in political exile to come up with something, anything – a concrete vision for a Britain long defined by low growth, stagnating living standards and poor productivity. But they didn’t. And when they were gift-wrapped an election victory by a Tory party that had dived into the abyss, they marched into power and quickly defined themselves by kicking pensioners and taking freebies from rich donors.
The only ministers with actual ideas belong to the so-called “soft left”. One was Louise Haigh, departed transport secretary, after a long-dormant saga involving missing work phones from a decade ago was conveniently resurrected, leading to her resignation. From her “bus revolution” to public ownership of rail – expect the latter to be diluted – Haigh at least had verve. Then there’s Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, who is despised by Starmer’s Blairite cabal, with Streeting launching pointed attacks on his colleague. We will see how long he survives.
Disillusionment in Britain is fed by a broken economic model: crumbling public services, creaking infrastructure and the failure to grow disposable incomes, which are set to fall under this government. Faragism offers an answer: it’s immigrants’ fault! A coherent economic agenda that speaks to the country’s woes could offer an alternative to the threat from Reform. But Starmer’s allies are ideologically opposed to this, so instead they seem determined to compete with the populist right on migrant-bashing. Centre-right and centre-left parties have tried this approach in Europe and – spoiler! – it only succeeded in boosting the insurgent right, by pushing political conversation on to exactly the terrain in which they prosper.
Our intellectually bankrupt rulers risk delivering Britain into the hands of hard-right demagoguery. It falls, then, to the left to channel disillusionment into a more constructive direction. So far, the response is lacking. The Green party surged in July, but has failed to pick headline-grabbing fights, or build momentum in the dozens of seats in which it secured second place in July. The seven Labour MPs suspended for opposing the poverty-generating two-child benefit cap have not accepted they have no future in the party, and haven’t redirected their energy elsewhere. If Jeremy Corbyn and his four fellow independent MPs set up a new party, it will need to strike an arrangement with the Greens. Whatever happens, the left needs to present a clear coherent vision, and fight to set the political agenda in the face of hostile media. If that fails, then start the countdown clock to a grinning Farage in front of the No 10 lectern.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
