Labour

Warm wine, small talk and curling canapés have long defined the Westminster summer scene. But regime change has added a certain frisson to the party circuit this year. As many of Labour’s finest toasted America’s semiquincentennial at the US ambassador’s house last week, the hostility radiating from Keir Starmer’s No. 10 team was unmistakable. ‘I’ve had them shooting daggers at me all night,’ complained one rebel MP, amid toasts to the revolution. ‘It’s over guys, you lost.’ As fireworks exploded overhead, another added: ‘The king is dead, long live the king.’ The Prime Minister’s decision to step down, paving the way for Andy Burnham’s coronation, has spared his party plenty of pyrotechnics.

Once again the question occurs: ‘Why do they want it?’ Keir Starmer held a very important role in the legal profession before entering parliament, but for some reason he desperately wanted to be even more political. As soon as he became an MP it was plain that he was so keen to get the top job that he was even willing to go through the Jeremy Corbyn period – immiserating his reputation and presumably himself by spending years having to pretend that Corbyn was a suitable candidate for prime minister. Serving in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet was not something that any decent person would do – leading some of us to conclude either that Starmer was not a decent person or that he had such a surfeit of ambition it didn’t matter because it was a means to an end.

It’s been another bizarre week in Westminster, with Sir Keir Starmer going about business as if everything is completely normal while a shadow leadership race to replace him ramps up in the background. But the absurdity of left-wing turmoil hit its peak yesterday when Andy Burnham officially launched his campaign to win the Makerfield by-election and take over as PM. In the car park of a sports and social club in Ashton-in-Makerfield, the Greater Manchester mayor was flanked by a cadre of MPs from Labour’s more left-leaning flank, including the Corbynista Rebecca Long-Bailey, Barry Gardiner and Charlotte Nichols. Liverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotheram was there. And so, too, was Jonathan Reynolds, the chief whip and man in charge of upholding loyalty to the Prime Minister.

When the Labour party football team played a group of journalists at Loftus Road two years ago the hacks won 4-1. The politicians’ solitary goal came from a late penalty. When the referee pointed to the spot, the centre-forward stepped up, elbowing well-known names like Ed Balls, David Miliband and Sadiq Khan out of the way in his rush to grab the glory. There was a notable absentee that day. ‘Keir [Starmer] had been due to play, but he didn’t turn up,’ a witness recalls. ‘If he had been there, he’d probably have grabbed the ball and there might have been a tussle.’ Instead, Andy Burnham said: ‘This is mine,’ and calmly slotted it into the corner. ‘It was a perfect penalty.

Keir Starmer is Labour’s king of freebies. He promised to clean up politics, but has accepted more free stuff than all his party’s leaders since 1997 combined: more than £100,000 in tickets, accommodation and clothing. In 2024, the Prime Minister said it was ‘right to repay’ the cost of some freebies, and stumped up for six Taylor Swift tickets, four tickets to the races and some clothes for his wife (total value: £6,000). Where Starmer has led, his MPs have followed – including those who now might hope to succeed him. Eleven other Labour MPs (and Ed Davey) accepted Taylor Swift tickets courtesy of football clubs and music companies. Seven cabinet members took money from Lord Alli. Few have not watched a football match from complimentary box seats.

British by-elections are often prolonged affairs, dragging on for months. Yet in the Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton – once home to Myra Hindley and the Gallagher brothers – campaigners are on a frantic dash to canvas the 82,000 voters before polling day on 26 February. ‘It is a proper three-horse race,’ says one. ‘And it’s coming down to a photo finish.’ Gorton has been red since the days of Ramsay MacDonald – but now a WhatsApp scandal threatens to end Labour’s hegemony. Andrew Gwynne, the departing MP, has quit over a series of lewd messages. Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, blocked from standing to replace him, has instead become the spectre of this contest.

With his owlish expression and affable manner, Nick Thomas-Symonds looks more like the academic that he was, rather than the political bomb disposal expert he has become. Brexit is the greatest political issue for a generation, yet Keir Starmer has chosen to put this softly spoken Welshman in charge of defusing it. The Cabinet Office minister, responsible for post-Brexit negotiations with the EU, is following in the footsteps of Olly Robbins and David Frost, but his lack of public notoriety says much about how things have changed as we approach the tenth anniversary next year of the vote to Leave.

The Labour conference in Liverpool was a curiously upbeat affair. Much of the good spirit came from schadenfreude at the misadventures of Andy Burnham. The Mayor of Greater Manchester scuttled out of Liverpool just before Keir Starmer’s speech, having united the party in mutual contempt at his posturing in recent days. ‘A fucking clown’ was the verdict of an ex-cabinet minister. ‘He did an Eric Heffer,’ remarked one Labour official – a reference to the cantankerous Liverpool MP who stormed out of Neil Kinnock’s conference speech 40 years ago. ‘It was the worst coup attempt since South Korea,’ says a former aide. Burnham, however, is merely a symptom, not a cause of Labour’s woes. Serious rivals are unlikely to telegraph their ambitions quite so blatantly.

The ‘nonce party.’ That’s how Zarah Sultana described the Labour party at a rally in Brixton last night where the independent MP for Coventry South addressed supporters of her new movement, Your Party. She claimed to have posted numerous images of Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein on her X account, but her warnings went unheeded by Labour strategists. The lively rally opened with a videotaped greeting from Jeremy Corbyn, co-leader alongside Sultana, who affirmed his support for ‘Net Zero by 2030’, and a handful of benefit increases. After this formality, his name was barely mentioned. Sultana topped the bill ahead of seven activists who urged the crowd to oppose ‘the far-right on the streets.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but I have a better serving suggestion. How about revenge plated up simmering, every single day, again and again, inescapable and eternal? For surely that is the intended outcome of Emily Thornberry’s plan to – maybe, possibly – run for the position of deputy leader of the Labour party. Even that ‘possibly’ caveat has the air of somebody turning the knife. How she must delight in dangling this ‘I might, I might not’ eventuality before Keir Starmer. Because it was Starmer, after all, who stabbed her in the front after the 2024 election, chucking her unceremoniously out from her shadow position of attorney-general and handing this plum job to his old chum Lord Hermer.