Over the weekend, I spoke with Jonathan Rutherford, a longtime Labour adviser, who was invited into the government, briefly, last year. He despaired at the gulf between the party’s London-based leadership and the voters who live in the country’s post-industrialized former heartlands—a gulf that Starmer’s rather inert leadership has only deepened. “We’re living through an élite class that is, in cultural and political terms, wholly different to the people it claims to represent,” Rutherford told me. “Go up north. He is hated,” he said, of Starmer. “In a way, that’s sort of deeply unfair to him. He is viscerally hated, and I don’t think he understands that. I don’t think that people in No. 10 quite understand it.”
The question is whether replacing Starmer at this point will actually help, or make matters even worse. On Monday morning, the Prime Minister gave a speech that was intended to show that he understood the gravity of his situation and that his government must be bolder from now on. A few minutes before he stepped onstage, I spoke with a peer who has worked with Starmer and endured Labour’s ups and downs for decades.
The peer reminded me why the Party elected him in the first place—as an antidote to the soap opera of the Conservative party, which was in power at the time, and as a way to move on from Labour’s internal bickering under Jeremy Corbyn. “We voted for a man in a suit that wasn’t Boris Johnson or Liz Truss,” the peer said. “There was never deep love for him in the Party, but absolutely the awareness that this man could do it.” Whereas Labour’s former troubles were mostly ideological and internecine, the peer was struck by the external nature of the challenges it now faces—namely, Britain’s fiscal reality and the shallowness, and brittleness, of its public support. “During Corbyn, the problem was in the Labour Party. So we knew what to do,” the peer said. “It was really hard work, but it was within the Labour Party. This problem is not within the Labour Party. This problem is much bigger.”
Starmer’s speech—even the idea that a speech might still alter people’s perceptions at this stage—summed up everything about him. It was sincere but small-bore. He stressed the danger posed by Britain’s adversaries abroad and by Farage’s popularity at home. “This hurts,” Starmer said. “Not just because Labour has done badly, but because, if we don’t get this right, our country will go down a very dark path.” He was in his shirtsleeves, oddly enthused, still in campaign mode, even though the polls had closed four days earlier. Starmer promised narrative and emotion. “Stories beat spreadsheets,” he said. “People need hope.” And then, because he is Starmer, he announced a list of policies—the government would nationalize a steelworks, continue its negotiations with the E.U, and really crank up its work “in apprenticeships, in technical-excellence colleges, in special-educational needs”—that made it sound like he was reading from a spreadsheet.
He was at his most convincing when he talked about the harm that would be caused by yet another change of Prime Minister—Starmer is the sixth of the past decade—and all the uncertainty that it would bring. “We tested it to destruction with the last government, and it inflicted huge damage on this country,” Starmer said. “Labour will never be forgiven if we repeat that.” And yet, within hours, that is what dozens of his colleagues were attempting to orchestrate. “I do have quite a lot of people saying to me they don’t want chaos,” the Labour M.P. told me. “And I understand that. However, they are much smaller in number than the number of people who have rejected the Labour Party this time. So, there will have to be a change.”
