It sounds like the plot of the Lord of the Rings, but there is a similarity. The Labour battles of yesterday are actually the frothing culmination of plans that were forged in a past age, and a terrible curse of not seeing the world as it is, but with an eye skewed by a self-deluding prism.
Let’s take the key characters one by one.
The now styled King of the North has had leadership ambitions for years.
On a Saturday morning in the autumn of 2011 I boarded a commuter train at Elephant and Castle and took a seat. To my surprise, and his, I sat down opposite Andy Burnham. He was then a recently deposed New Labour princeling, shadow education secretary, and had not yet established his northern power base or earned his new title.
Now, if he’s spotted on a train arriving in London, as he did yesterday, it’s news – back then, nobody cared less about either of us, and I doubt had a clue who we were. We knew each other from my BBC days and had always got on well. We happen to share a birthday. He’s older – just.
He had no aide, not in a suit, and was like me, just being an ‘ordinary working person’. I asked him what his plans were and he was a little cagey – there’s an odd freedom to being released from high office and I think he didn’t want to squander that – but I asked him what came next for him. He was candid, and like a good politician neither ‘confirmed nor denied’ anything, but rather wasn’t ruling anything out.
I got off about twenty minutes later and did that very journalistic thing as the doors closed and he carried on, of thinking ‘when the time comes: he’s running”
It was a few years later after the 2015 election, the fall of the Coalition and that prize of a Tory majority and the opportunity Burnham did indeed take to run for leader that a new kid on the block became available for interview.
Younger Wes Streeting was articulate and smart, and in communications terms streets ahead of many of his older MP colleagues. He was one of those new MPs who seems to arrive in Westminster with the whispered tag of ‘future leader?’ already attached. All parties have them and it’s no guarantee of success, but there he was.
Wes has never denied or disavowed that tag. He didn’t say ‘yes I will be’, or even ‘yes I hope so’ he just told people they were very kind to mention it but ‘early days I’m just focused on just being a decent MP to be honest’ and we hacks would always walk away from any encounter think “Yup, one day, he’s running”
At some point, in a certain set of circumstances both men over a decade ago had one eye on the precious prize.
Told you this was like Lord of the Rings.
Sir Keir, our now Don Quixote, filled with chivalrous delusions did of course back Burnham in the 2015 leadership race. Burnham, people forget was favourite to win at the outset, until the hordes of the left rallied under the red flag of Jeremy Corbyn and swept all aside.
The one time sainted Corbyn fell, watched by his ‘friend’ Starmer, who having also been talked about as a future leader, not only became that leader but set about removing in every way he could any vestiges of the Corbynite curse, including eventually the man himself.
The Tories don’t ‘hate’ Starmer. They just think he isn’t up to the job of Prime Minister, like a number of his own colleagues but the left, some of whom have flocked to the Greens, they really do hate him.
When Starmer says ‘they said I couldn’t win an election’ and I don’t remember that really being said much at all, he doesn’t mean opposing parties or the public he means the left.
All three however are also victims of the same flaw that has brought us to a crunch meeting in Downing Street between Wes Streeting, the prince who would be king, just hours before the actual King’s speech. He sent his troops forward yesterday resigning as they went, but no idea if he can in fact move against the Prime Minister.
All of them spent opposition fostering two crippling delusions. Both of them, their own fault.
First that the Conservatives are bad people, with bad faith in their DNA, and that Labour are inherently good people, with the right motives, and that all they had to do was be themselves and the public and the machinery of Government, within a context their own man Tony Blair had created, would mean a glorious welcome and a decade of calm and plenty.
Second that, you just had to spend public money on those you deemed worthy, borrowing more to do it, and railing against austerity and the system could be saved. All it needs is more money and more cost to those who profit. The private sector was the fatted calf and it would pay, and as it turns out also lend, to this cause and as one MP said yesterday “the bond markets will just have to come into line”
These two mindsets have brough these three men to this current mind boggling ‘psychodrama’ scenario quicker than their worst nightmares.
Adage’s about knife wielders in leadership contests aside, Streeting, not seen by the left as a natural ally, doesn’t seem to be seizing his moment. Which in turn may say rather a lot about his suitability for the role he definitely wants. The Red Queen Angela seems to be taking the role of King maker, which adds it’s own strange dynamic but her seemingly chosen king is stuck outside the tent, desperate to get back in, because he can’t strike down Starmer if he’s not an MP.
Starmer, in my view badly damaged long before last Thursday – after all that’s why their results were so devastating – has been fatally damaged by the last 72 hours and yet shows no signs of exiting stage left.
I understand why his loyalists, and worried economists keep pointing to the spiking guilt yields as reasons to keep him. But his staying on will create its own instability. We know now the crushing verdict of a hedge fund looking into Labour as they arrived in power and wanting to invest – Rishi was right – ‘no plan’.
I was asked on Times Radio in December 2024, which political leader would be in most trouble in 2025. I said Keir Starmer, to raised eyebrows in the studio. They expected me to admit Kemi Badenoch was, and she had a massive bunch of problems besetting her.
Some of those still undoubtedly exist but I could see the “wobbly start but steady reset” narrative was never going to work because the whole premise was flawed from the start.
Burnham doesn’t have the hypocrisy cloak that Starmer has, the sanctimonious promise of being better on all fronts than the Tories, and in the end being worse and as bad as their worst. But right now he’s in enforced encampment the wrong side of the Rubicon.
There’s a myth that every Tory is loving all this. Most pity the country. There is however a schadenfreude of watching those who daily passed flawed judgement, and arrogant promises of being so much better, fall into a trap that all politics is now in. The system and framework they have all tried to operate within is bust. It hurt Conservatives and now it’s hurting Labour. It will hurt anybody who can’t find a way to rewire it, and at the same time tell the public some cold hard truths, that sadly don’t easily attract votes.
Today, Starmer’s going nowhere in every sense of the word. No options are good.
Today is not the end, perhaps the beginning of the end, but the endgame was laid down years ago, and depressingly still has some way to run.
Saddle up, it’s going to be bumpy ride.