Has sacrificing the critical advisors ever worked? It depends, I suppose, on how one defines ‘worked’. Theresa May managed to limp on for a couple of years after the departure of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, but her authority was broken. Does that count?
Perhaps Sir Keir Starmer will cling on following Morgan McSweeney’s exit (and, it is sincerely to be hoped, that of Jonathan Powell). As in May’s case, one might argue that this would simply be an exercise in prolonging his misery. But the circumstances aren’t entirely similar; whereas May at least started out with a distinct vision for her premiership, Starmer did not.
Certainly, Conservatives hoping for – or trying to precipitate – the Prime Minister’s resignation should be clear-eyed about the potential consequences. Not because any of the hopefuls out on manoeuvres in the press would deliver any lasting revival of Labour’s fortunes, but the opposite: a change of leadership is likely to see the party retreat even further into its castle in the sky, indulging the whims of backbenchers even as reality closes in around it.
To put it another way, the status quo is about as right-wing as any Labour government in the current parliament is going to get. Even if the Parliamentary Labour Party were more disciplined and less self-indulgent, the fact that the final choice of the leader rests with the party membership militates against any candidate prepared to tell hard truths or try to sell difficult choices. There seems little prospect of Shabana Mahmood’s bare-minimum changes to indefinite leave to remain surviving a leadership contest, let alone a victor emerging with the will or means to combat the unsustainable trajectory of this country’s public spending.
There is some little irony in Starmer’s outriders warning that the markets would react very badly to his ousting; everyone hates being in hoc to the bond vigilantes until they’re the reason you can’t be sacked. But the warning is not wrong. However bad this Government is proving – and that is very bad indeed – it is by no means the worst we could get.
Nor is there likely to be a general election. Constitutionally none is required, and politically it just seems highly unlikely that any new prime minister would choose to go to the polls when hundreds of Labour MPs are sitting on slender majorities and Reform UK is still in first place. (The Conservatives, at least if they think Kemi Badenoch’s recent rally in the polls has legs, might quietly welcome this, although they wouldn’t say so.)
Perhaps a new leader in those circumstances would accelerate the collapse in Labour’s position, making life easier for the Right at the eventual 2029 general election. But the trade-off would be that the scale of the problems facing the country – and thus, the unpleasantness of the decisions a future government would have to make to fix them – would be that much worse. Which is an ill omen, given that neither the Conservatives nor Reform are currently exhibiting much willingness to face up to those problems in their current form.
Were we the southern European country whose politics ours increasingly resembled, this is about the point where the European Central Bank would step in and appoint the prime minister for us. Happily, our democratic system is stronger than that; less happily, that means we have nobody to save us from the consequences of our choices.