Sir Keir Starmer’s biographer has warned there is a “real chance” Labour will have to change leaders again before the next election if it ousts him from No 10 now.
Tom Baldwin said he was “astonished” the party was “behaving like this” after Labour civil war erupted amid a chorus of calls for the prime minister to resign following the party’s disastrous local election results last week.
As allies of health secretary Wes Streeting say they expect him to resign on Thursday to trigger a leadership challenge, Mr Baldwin called on Labour not to repeat the Conservatives’ “bad habit” of changing prime ministers.
In an interview with The Independent, he said the moves against Sir Keir make Labour “look like an unserious party” and the UK “look like Italy in the 1980s… undermining our economy and undermining our security at a time of international crisis”.
He warned that the strategy backfired for the Tories, as successive Conservative leaders found they became more and more unpopular with the country.
And he cautioned that Labour could find it has to eject not just Sir Keir but also another party leader and PM before the next election if it wants to beat Nigel Farage and Reform UK.
He said: “There is a real chance now that if we have a leadership election in the Labour party and a new prime minister, it won’t be the last one we have before the next election. We get into that cycle.
“Like any bad habit, eventually you have to collectively decide you are going to break it”.
He also said that if it did happen, a leadership election contest should not be swift. He described the current moment as a “highly wrought, emotional environment to make decisions”.
And he said that if the party did have to have a leadership election, it should take place “not in the midst of a global and economic crisis”, a reference to the current conflict in the Middle East.
In what will be seen as a swipe at Mr Streeting and his allies, several of whom resigned earlier this week as part of moves to force Sir Keir out of office, he said that it was “hard to say” that those pushing for Sir Keir to leave office are “acting in the national interest”.
Sir Keir has managed to cling on to power for now and see off an immediate threat to his leadership in the past few days, despite the resignation of four ministers. and calls by more than 90 MPs for him to go.
But Mr Streeting’s resignation could lead to a full-blown leadership contest, which Sir Keir’s allies have made clear he would fight.
