It was clear from the outset that Keir Starmer’s Labour would win the election by default, then prove a fiasco in power. Starmer’s ratings are now worse than Rishi Sunak’s at his nadir, and Nigel Farage’s Reform – a party with just five MPs – appears to be edging ahead of the party of government in the polls. So far, this government has spent its time clobbering pensioners, being showered with freebies by well-heeled donors and damaging economic confidence with ill-judged post-election doom and gloom, followed by a panicked “growth above all else” reverse ferret. Just months after securing power, the prime minister’s own staff briefed two Times journalists that they had no idea what he really believed, and that he wasn’t really running the country – that he’d been deceived into thinking he was “driving the train”, when he’s really been sat at the front of the driverless Docklands Light Railway.
It’s almost enough to make you pity Starmer – imagine publicly humiliating the prime minister you are paid to work for just months after winning power? – until you remember that he appointed this backstabbing rabble in the first place. The published excerpts from Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s new book, Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, lay out the strategy of this rightwing faction. “Occasionally they even spoke of their leader as if he were a useful idiot,” they write. “Keir acts like an HR manager, not a leader,” his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, is quoted as saying. They saw Starmer as a convenient empty vessel, whom they could deceive a Corbynite Labour membership into voting for, then use their yes-man to permanently bury the left before replacing him with a true believer, the ultra-Blairite Wes Streeting. Alas, the Tories managed to implode and the man they see as a useful idiot sits in No 10, pretending to drive a train.
Let me mount a defence of Starmer, the scapegoat of these rightwing factionalists, who are ridiculing him for doing literally everything they asked him to do. To be successful, a government needs purpose. Purpose gives it coherence, provides backbone to survive crises, prevents it from being buffeted by events, leaves ministers understanding what goals they’re working towards, and allows voters to understand what their rulers are trying to do. Whatever you thought of them, the Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair governments had purpose, and succeeded, but the administrations of Gordon Brown and Rishi Sunak did not, and collapsed.
Purpose does not deliver inevitable success – no one can accuse Liz Truss of lacking vision, yet she was famously outlasted by a lettuce – but it is a precondition. The political project of Starmer’s aides is a crude replication of late-stage Blairism, lacking that crucial ingredient of purpose. Whatever I may think about New Labour, it wasn’t a cheap rip-off, and the party’s current masters are political and intellectual minnows by comparison. New Labour’s project was straightforward: accept the Thatcherite settlement, but humanise it using the tax revenues flowing from an unsustainable economic model centred on the City of London. That model went bust in 2008, never to recover, and the Labour establishment couldn’t think up anything new. Their cupboard was empty, which is why Corbynism – which offered a clear alternative narrative – usurped them in 2015. The problem isn’t Starmer per se: it’s a faction with no answers to the crisis-afflicted Britain of 2025.
That Starmer has many personal traits that make him unsuitable as leader is undeniable. The new book notes that he used to text me rather peculiar reprimands when I criticised him in this column or on Twitter (now X). For example, when I wrote a column criticising Starmer for ordering Labour MPs to abstain on a Tory bill that allowed MI5 agents and police officers to commit crimes if it prevented a more serious crime or threat to national security, he texted me to say I was better than that, like a disappointed schoolteacher. You might wonder whether he had better things to do. I would agree. The point is: he is thin-skinned, and the faction around him weaponised that to crush the left. That emphasises why this is a caricature of New Labour. Blair used to telephone leftwing firebrand Dennis Skinner for advice, and invite him for tea. Starmer would probably have purged him.
The problem is that Starmer’s team always knew what they opposed – those ghastly lefties! – but not what they stood for. In opposition, Starmer assailed the Tories for their mantra of “cut the green crap”; his flailing government now has a growth strategy dependent on expanding Heathrow, to the distaste of even a parliamentary Labour party largely handpicked for blind loyalty. The suggestion that this government is in thrall to vested interests is underscored by the book’s claims that wealthy donor Waheed Alli, who showered Starmer with clothes and spectacles, blocked proposals to ban foreign political donations, opening the way for Elon Musk to try to help bankroll Farage into Downing Street.
Here’s the problem. Our economic model has stopped offering sustained rises in living standards and improvements to the public realm. Two possible outcomes flow from this. Either voters are offered an alternative, which means challenging the concentration of wealth and power in the bank accounts of a few. Or voters may simply conclude that democracy no longer delivers, and be susceptible to messages that blame migrants and other stigmatised minorities for decline. The latter is now on the ascendant across the west, because the former is missing in action.
That’s where the left comes in. As well as a need for the timid Greens to find their voice, the Labour left should stop being the punch bags of the soulless hacks using Starmer as their hapless puppet. Seven of those MPs were suspended for voting against keeping Tory benefit cuts that drive children into poverty. Some may never be let back in; others only if they pledge slavish obedience – and then what’s the point of being there anyway? Call the bluff of your assailants: leave, and form an alliance with the Green and leftwing independent MPs. There are other leftwing Labour MPs who haven’t been booted out – such as Clive Lewis – who would be a good fit. Such an alliance, with the right strategy, could suddenly put formidable pressure on Labour from the left, and force a conversation about redistributing wealth and power that would force Labour, Tory and Reform UK alike on to the defensive.
Alas, these MPs have an ingrained loyalty to Labour, one that is not reciprocated by the leadership. But if they don’t make a difficult but courageous jump, what beckons? They will be condemned to irrelevance. If and when Starmer eventually goes, the vultures circling him – that is, his aides – will replace him with someone who does the same thing, but with more gusto. Farage will dictate the terms of our national conversation, until he plausibly secures power. This is not inevitable: the appetite for an alternative exists, but lacks direction and leadership. If it remains untapped, whoever is driving this train, it will plunge into the abyss, taking all its passengers with it.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
