Keir Starmer stands weaker than ever

It was handbags at dawn again in Westminster, as prime minister Keir Starmer chose to pick a curious fight with ever-ambitious health secretary Wes Streeting.

Last night, ‘sources close to the PM’ let rip on Streeting, firing furious WhatsApp messages to lobby journalists, accusing him of plotting a putsch against the beleaguered Starmer.

Streeting denies these claims. Starmer was at Prime Minister’s Questions today, valiantly pretending he had nothing to do with it. And everyone’s been left wondering what the point was.

We often lament Westminster as just high school for old people, or Hollywood for ugly people – the high-minded rhetoric being just the backing track to bitchfests and a scrabble for fame.

Well, this spat reveals that this crop of leaders can’t even do political infighting and ruthless careerism particularly well.

If the Downing St team’s intention was to quash any prospect of a move against the prime minister, either after the budget or next spring’s local elections, they have failed miserably.

They might have let it be known that Starmer would fight any challenge to him, rather than skulk away defeated. They’ve also briefed out some ‘research’ that any attempt to bin Starmer would send the bond markets haywire, Liz Truss-style.

But all that this botched pre-emptive strike seems to have achieved is advertising the prime minister’s already apparent vulnerability, while giving Streeting a chance to fire off some punchy lines to the broadcasters: he’s accused the operators in No10 of ‘watching too much Celebrity Traitors’.

Streeting may have had to profess his loyalty to the PM, being careful to train his ire on the excitable briefers around him instead. But if Streeting does intend to depose Starmer, I doubt this display of vitriol and incompetence will dissuade him.

Meanwhile, Labour MPs are even more agitated than before, and ordinary people will be struggling to tell the difference with the dying days of the Tories, when you could set your watch by the leadership challenges. Adults in the room, eh?

Rarely has a show of strength showcased such weakness.

Starmer has already failed to project his authority in the country. Despite being such a boring man, he has wound up being more hated than Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher, the least-popular PM since pollsters started asking the question.

Nor can he project any authority within his own party. Lucy Powell has just been elected deputy leader, weeks after she was sacked from cabinet. MPs are remarkably twitchy, given they are barely 16 months on from a landslide election victory.

It’s not just the ineptitude – the failure to get a grip on migration, the health service and the economy. This government was elected on an entirely false prospectus: that there was nothing wrong with Britain that a few kindly technocrats could not fix. Now it has collided with reality.

Not that the voters were ever that convinced. Labour didn’t so much win the last election as the Tories lost it. Thanks to the Conservatives’ spectacular immolation, Starmer secured a 174-seat majority on less than 34 per cent of the vote, and fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn won in his 2019 drubbing.

The crises that envelop us demand new thinking, radical solutions, impressive people. More than anything, they require listening to the concerns of ordinary people, who spotted the perils of, say, the migration crisis long before the politicians did.

We’re certainly not getting that with Starmer – and I dare say we wouldn’t get it with Streeting, either. He may, unlike Starmer, claim to know what a woman is. He may, unlike Starmer, appear to have a pulse when appearing on telly. But, very much like Starmer, he remains a creature of Blairism, of the Third Way, the era when many of our current discontents began.

It’s telling that Starmer is relying on economic fear-mongering in order to warn against ousting him. He has nothing else – no vision, and certainly no success stories – to point to. But the question of ‘what is this government for?’ would haunt a Streeting premiership as much as a Starmer one.

No wonder Brits are so willing to roll the dice on alternatives. Unlike in the 1990s, the era today’s political and media classes still get misty-eyed about, politics is back. Big questions – about globalism, borders, democracy – are firmly on the table.

While these New Labour cosplayers tear lumps out of each other, the world is moving on without them.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater