Starmer on the Brink

As I write this, British cabinet ministers are gathering in Downing Street for what is surely the most fateful moment of Keir Starmer’s premiership. Yesterday, over 60 Labour backbencher MPs AND the Home Secretary publicly called on him to quit in the wake of Labour’s disastrous performance at the local elections, the culmination of a torrid period of missteps and mistakes defined by his cataclysmic error of judgement in appointing Peter Mandelson to be US ambassador.

There are roughly three possible outcomes.

He could survive, though badly wounded.

He could resign immediately, the favoured outcome of Health Secretary Wes Streeting and his backers who would prefer not to face Andy Burnham.

Or he could set out a timetable for his resignation designed to allow Andy Burnham time to find a safe seat where a compliant MP would stand aside to trigger a by-election, thus facilitating Burnham’s return to Parliament (though of course Burnham would actually have to win that election, which in the current climate cannot be taken as a given). Burnham would then be eligible to stand in the leadership election and, on current polling, probably win it.

Suffice to say, while it can go either way, the man’s political career has the whiff of death about him. The same stench clung to Boris Johnson at the end a few years back in those dying hours of his premiership when it took an avalanche of cabinet resignations to make him understand his time was up.

On a personal level, this will be hard for Starmer. He has ascended to the very heights of political power in his country after leading his party to a (on the face of it) historic landslide and anyone facing being forced from that perch must feel the very human urge to fight for it and prove themselves. But politics has little time for sentiment.

As to where it all went wrong? I would argue Starmer is a high-profile example of ‘the Peter Principle‘,

The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”: employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.

Let’s remember the context in which Starmer was elected leader of the Labour Party in the first place. We were in the middle of the Boris Johnson psychodrama, probably the most colourful and controversial individual to ever hold the office of British Prime Minister. Starmer was in many ways the opposite to Johnson, sober and serious against Johnson’s cavalcade of clownish buffoonery. And Starmer had distinguished himself as shadow Brexit secretary, taking a forensic approach to the then Tory government’s ideologically driven hopeless mismanagement of the entire process.

At a time when Labour was in the doldrums after being routed by Johnson in 2019, Starmer’s seriousness and distance from Corbyn’s left-wing project convinced party members he was the man for the job.

Except he wasn’t. The past two years have proven that. They chose a technocrat to lead them, a man who clearly would have been an excellent cabinet minister, but who lacked the necessary enthusing spark of leadership. Labour was, after all, elected on a relatively puny share of the vote and at the time it was said it wasn’t so much Labour won as the Conservatives lost.

That should have been a warning sign.

At the top, with nobody to check him, he blundered into misstep after misstep. He could never do the vision thing that is a pre-requisite of political success, everything was seemingly process. All processes have a termination point though. As I write these final words, a cabinet minister has just resigned. Miatta Fahnbulleh has called on Starmer to ‘do the right thing for the country’.

Whether it is the right thing or not is subjective. Whether he is in office at the end of the day…stay tuned.