Labours Goose Is Cooked As Panic Grows Over What Comes Next
Labour needs to change its leader or face oblivion
It is manifestly clear Starmer is unsuited for his role. The party’s goose is cooked unless something radical occurs
What are Cabinet members waiting for? Credit: PAThe Labour Party is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, in a landscape designed by Salvador Dalí and adapted for the screen by David Lynch.How else to understand a party so captured and restrained by its own divisions, so desperate to change the world and yet so ill-prepared for the compromises that are part and parcel of government?
One of those compromises must inevitably be with the electorate. Sorry, comrades, but that means occasionally doing something you’d rather not do in exchange for an extension to the electoral mandate you have already won. Yes, it’s grubby and cynical and rather vulgar, but that’s politics for you.
For example, to pluck an issue entirely at random, consider Keir Starmer.
A new poll by JL Partners reveals that almost two thirds of the electorate want shot of the Prime Minister as soon as possible. And nearly half of those who voted Labour in 2024 concur. This is not good news for Labour, and it’s even worse for Starmer personally. Labour have been struggling of late to maintain third place in some polls and polling day on May 7 is shaping up to be catastrophic for its candidates and councillors.
On the other hand…
No. There is no “other hand”. Labour’s goose is cooked unless something very radical occurs to change voters’ minds. And despite believing himself to have had a “good war” – in other words, having kept Britain out of the conflict between the United States and Iran and sought, unsuccessfully and a little embarrassingly, to take credit for the current fragile ceasefire – he is extremely unlikely to benefit from a “Falklands factor” of the sort that propelled a struggling Margaret Thatcher to victory at the 1983 general election (aside from the fact that while she sent a task force to free British territory from fascist occupation, Starmer has bravely refused to allow US jets to use UK airfields).
Ask any Cabinet minister if they are happy with the leadership of the Government and they will, quite properly, say that of course they are and that Starmer is exactly the right person to be leading the country. Pressed further, they will also claim to believe that the Prime Minister will lead their party to further general election victory. Again, this is only to be expected, given collective Cabinet responsibility and all that.
Yet such a charade fools no one. We know that Labour MPs and ministers are deeply unhappy at the prospect of Starmer remaining in office after May 7. They positively shudder at the notion that he’ll still be there on the morning after the 2029 general election. Yet still they do nothing.
The middle of an election campaign, even one that is only for local councils and devolved assemblies, is hardly the right time to launch a coup or resign in principle at Starmer’s continued defiance of the electorate.
But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that even in the aftermath of May 7, when everything has settled down and MPs can once again gather round the tables in the members’ tearoom at Westminster, nothing much will happen even then. Everyone will still be unhappy and the speculation about how bad the next rout of Labour MPs will be is likely to go up a notch.
Labour is the perpetual Micawber party, believing that something will turn up to save them, provided its own MPs aren’t expected to be part of that solution. Leadership and courage are both fine qualities, but they’re more suited to previous generations.
Not that a change of leadership is any sort of guarantee that Labour can turn the ship around in time. All that is certain is that the current leadership can’t, and that should, in any functional political party, be enough to concentrate the minds of the men in grey suits.
Perhaps the majority of MPs consider the current situation to be not as serious as it is, genuinely believing that everything will work out without having to do much other than continue to be well-disciplined cheerleaders for the current leadership.
Perhaps. But the more likely scenario is that most of them share their constituents’ dismal view of the Prime Minister and want him to go. If only they weren’t expected to play any part in such an uncomfortable scene.
But they will have to. Either that or, for many of them, find a new career outside Parliament. But again I ask: what sort of political party so committed to changing the country, and knowing that such change takes far longer than a single parliamentary term, is willing to be thrown back into opposition simply to avoid a leadership contest that even their own constituents desire?
Riddle, mystery, enigma – all accurate yet none of them do justice to a party with so much ambition and yet not enough of it to do what is necessary to survive in office.
