When I started out in Westminster in 2001, the parliamentary lobby was a very hierarchical place and the press gallery still had a dining room. We young pups would gather several times a week on the lobby table and listen attentively to the war stories of lobby legends like Phil Webster, Trevor Kavanagh, Michael White, Andy Grice and David Hughes, then the political editors of the Times, Sun, Guardian, Independent and Mail.
Some fondly recalled being told off by Margaret Thatcher or watching Labour’s battles with Militant in the early Eighties. The consensus view, however, was that the peak time for political chaos (and by extension political journalism) was the period of John Major’s premiership after Black Wednesday, an era of plotting, infighting, power struggles and chaos. ‘We’ll never see another time like that again,’ one of the greybeards ventured.
After a week which shows that yet another government has decided to gaze in Major’s direction and say: ‘Hold my beer’, the temptation is to reflect that Britain’s political class has surely delighted us more than enough.
Since last Friday, Keir Starmer has lost his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, his director of communications, Tim Allan, got rid of his Cabinet Secretary, Chris Wormald (by mutual agreement we are told. I’d mutually agree too if sent on my way with £260,000 in my back pocket, as Wormald has been). And that’s before we mention that the leader of Scottish Labour, Anas Sarwar, thinks Starmer should resign.
Beyond the obvious – that 2026 is doing its best to compete with 2019 and 2022 for political drama (1992 eat your heart out) – what have we learned this week?
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1. The Prime Minister has bought himself some time
In Ed Miliband’s words, the Labour party, particularly the cabinet, ‘looked over the precipice’ on Monday afternoon and did not like what it saw: a plunge to the riverbed when it was not clear that the alternative leaders – primarily Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting – were yet ready with the skydiving equipment or the parachutes.
There persists talk that one of them will fire the starting gun on a leadership challenge after the Gorton & Denton by-election or the May elections, but for now Starmer remains in office. Whether he can exercise any power is a different matter.
2. Labour is heading for a pasting in May in Scotland and Wales
Sarwar was not in league with Streeting as No. 10 officials first feared, but his move was that of a desperate man who feels he should be competing to be first minister and risks finishing third in the Scottish Parliament elections behind the SNP and Reform. Distancing himself from the PM was about his own survival rather than Starmer’s. In Wales, Plaid Cymru and Reform look like besting Labour which used to weigh its votes there. There were rumours that Eluned Morgan, Labour’s leader in Cardiff, was also going to demand Starmer’s refusal. Both her team and No. 10 issued statements saying that was not her intention ‘now’. It doesn’t seem impossible that this situation will change. This might all seem a bit distant for those in southern England but don’t underestimate the existential shock that a bronze medal in what were once Labour’s heartlands would deliver to party morale.
3. The soft left is now in control
As Duncan Robinson put it in the Economist, Starmer no longer commands a majority, his majority commands him. In order to extract the support of Angela Rayner, Starmer’s team had to agree he would now devote his attentions to many of her policy priorities. Ed Miliband is going around hailing Starmer’s swing to the left as evidence that a ‘let Keir be Keir’ strategy heralds a new dawn of authenticity. Why change leader, some reason, when Starmer can be made to do their bidding. Many in the party see voters abandoning Labour to the left for the Greens and believe those are the voters they can most easily win back. Their calculation is that in a seven-way battle at the next general election, victory can be achieved simply by uniting enough of the left to stagger to 30 per cent of the vote. This may prove to be true but it is hugely ahistorical. The white working-class vote which used to form the core of Labour’s support doesn’t trust the party on immigration (where the instincts of the PLP are far to the left of Labour’s voters) or on the cost of living. The last time the soft left of the Labour Party won a general election was 1974, before even I was born. And if Starmer continues on his current trajectory, MPs may just conclude that they would be better with full fat Raynerism rather than a Starmerite homage.
4. Labour is going to run cap in hand to the EU
Rachel Reeves has said the quiet bit out loud by declaring that a closer relationship with the EU is the quickest route to economic growth (try cutting taxes, chancellor). Expect a fresh raft of semi-thought-out musings about the customs union from Labour MPs. The government seems to be seeking a Switzerland-style deal, where the UK agrees to align with EU rules in certain sectors. My recent contacts with EU diplomats in London make me think some countries are open to some of this. The only problem is that the Swiss have hundreds of deals with the EU which represent the kind of ‘cherry picking’ Brussels has always rejected and which the Commission has spent a decade or more trying to unpick with the Swiss. Seeing the British government desperate, they are likely to drive a painful bargain. So far Starmer and his chief negotiator Nick Thomas-Symonds have been able to ease closer to the Continent without provoking a huge backlash. But the kind of things Reeves now seems to be contemplating look very like the kind of ‘Brexit betrayal’ which would be liable to alienate working class Leave voters further from the party and push Reform and the Tories together into a united front against rejoinerism.
5. Huge doubts remain about Starmer’s ability to do the job
As my 3,500-word cover story in the magazine showed this week, those who have worked and still work with Starmer think him passive, apolitical, uninquisitive, barely interested in policy and so lacking in direction that he keeps changing his mind when sat on. Even if he survives he is poorly placed to make a success of his premiership. I made a special point in the piece of only quoting sources from the Labour Party, and since it was published I’ve had messages from a range of serving advisers, ministers and even the spouse of one cabinet member stating that the picture these sources paint, while depressing, is substantially accurate. So what did we learn?
6. McSweeney basically had to sack himself. While Starmer dithered about his chief of staff’s fate, the man himself concluded the PM had lost confidence in him and decided to ‘call it quits’
7. Starmer even dithered over his deal to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, having a ‘wobble’ which lasted several days before giving the go-ahead.
8. Tony Blair was one of legions of people who thought Starmer was bonkers to put Sue Gray in charge of his preparations for government – but the former PM was in such despair about Starmer’s judgment that he refused to call him up, reasoning that that the only way he would learn the error of his ways was to see failure in action.
9. It is claimed that Chris Wormald, who Starmer has now booted out, only got the cabinet secretary job after telling the PM he was a lifelong Labour supporter (Wormald denies he said this in his interview).
10. Starmer is virtually unobtainable for staff and ministers between Friday lunchtime and Monday morning, and doesn’t trouble his staff early in the morning with things he’s been thinking about at home.
11. Colleagues thought McSweeney would be forced out last year when the Mandelson scandal first broke – but he was saved when the Chinese spy trial distracted attention.
12. The PM has a fetish for ‘smart casual’ clothes, with one aide saying that orders are issued ahead of meetings to ensure the dress code meets Starmer’s middle of the road tastes.
I hope you have as quiet a weekend as the PM intends to…
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