BY PAUL T HORGAN
What no-one has commented on is the actual point in time that the question stopped being how Sir Keir would step down as Labour leader and therefore also as Prime Minister, but instead when. The fall of the Marxist Human Rights lawyer from the head of His Majesty’s Government now seems all but inevitable. There will be a tipping-point, largely predicted to be in the wake of disastrous local election results next year, the British equivalent of America’s Congressional mid-terms, when Labour MPs will start to realise that they will be losing their £90,000+ annual salary in 2029, and have limited prospect of recouping that level of earnings outside of Parliament.
The path may be cabinet resignations, with few Labour MPs wanting to take over the newly-vacant positions. Sir Keir may force the issue by starting to give top jobs to Corbynist MPs from the Socialist Campaign Group if other MPs refuse to work in his government, but this would be in the realm of fantasy politics, the kind of fiction that Chris Mullin would write about.
But the fall of Sir Keir has increasingly become a calculation in British politics. However the people doing the calculation are ignoring a major trend in what happens next.
People constantly point out that the United Kingdom has an unwritten constitution. This is not actually true. The ‘constitution’ is actually written down, but not in a single document, and also not in a codified fashion. This fluidity is actually a good thing, as it permits adaptability. This adaptability has resulted in Great Britain (the religiously balkanised Ireland is another story, but still compares favourably with the actual Balkans) experiencing the fewest political killings of any major power in the last 250 years.
Leftists and progressives will nitpick this fact, perhaps stating that unlike other countries we exported our political violence to our empire, but again, the number of deaths in our colonies were substantially fewer than any other past or current colonial power. And by ‘colonial’, I include every incarnation of Russia, Germany, and China during that period and to the present day. But I digress.
The major trend to which I refer is so ingrained in British politics that it has the appearance of constitutionality, but it isn’t. It is that any successor in the same party to an outgoing Prime Minister who leaves office in the middle of a Parliament has been, for at least the last 100 years, a current or former holder of one of the other Great Offices of State, being Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, or Foreign Secretary.
Don’t believe me? Here are the facts:
| Year | Outgoing Prime Minister | Replacement Prime Minister | Most Recent Great Office Position |
| 1916 | Herbert Asquith | David Lloyd George | Chancellor of the Exchequer |
| 1922 | David Lloyd George | Bonar Law | Chancellor of the Exchequer |
| 1923 | Bonar Law | Stanley Baldwin | Chancellor of the Exchequer |
| 1935 | Ramsay MacDonald | Stanley Baldwin | Chancellor of the Exchequer |
| 1937 | Stanley Baldwin | Neville Chamberlain | Chancellor of the Exchequer |
| 1940 | Neville Chamberlain | Winston Churchill | Chancellor of the Exchequer |
| 1955 | Winston Churchill | Anthony Eden | Foreign Secretary |
| 1957 | Anthony Eden | Harold Macmillan | Chancellor of the Exchequer |
| 1976 | Harold Wilson | James Callaghan | Foreign Secretary |
| 1990 | Margaret Thatcher | John Major | Chancellor of the Exchequer |
| 2007 | Tony Blair | Gordon Brown | Chancellor of the Exchequer |
| 2016 | David Cameron | Theresa May | Home Secretary |
| 2019 | Theresa May | Boris Johnson | Foreign Secretary |
| 2022 | Boris Johnson | Liz Truss | Foreign Secretary |
| 2022 | Liz Truss | Rishi Sunak | Chancellor of the Exchequer |
Pedants might observe that Ramsay MacDonald took over from Stanley Baldwin in 1924 as Prime Minister, and that MacDonald had never held any prior ministerial position whatsoever. However, MacDonald took over at the start of a Parliament, and not in the middle, and also he took over because the main requirement for being Prime Minister is to be able to command a majority in the House, and Baldwin failed to do so in the first instance in the wake of the inconclusive 1923 General Election as his King’s Speech was voted down. So while Baldwin was first invited to form a government by George V as he was the leader of the largest party in a hung Parliament, Baldwin tried, but failed to form one which could survive its first test.
So, while speculation runs rife as to whether Angela Rayner may successfully mount a coup, history suggests that at present the only people who will walk into No.10 after Sir Keir’s moving vans have left would be Rachel Reeves, David Lammy, Yvette Cooper, or Shabana Mahmoud.
In other words, using this unwritten tradition, the British people now face the prospect of a choice between a failed Chancellor of the Exchequer, a failed Foreign Secretary, a failed Home Secretary, and a current Home Secretary who, while she may not be on manoeuvres, seems to be clearing a path for making a run by starting to be somewhat pragmatic in the national interest by ditching party ideology to the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth fromevery progressive in the land, and also Owen Jones (yes, apparently still alive and kicking).
However, it is also possible that none of the above may get the top spot, as Labour Party members are no respecters of tradition. And this is where the problems start. The reason for the failure of these Great Office holders is because Labour has an extremely shallow talent pool. Put brutally, none of the three people (Mahmoud has yet to prove herself one way or another) were up to the job. While they may be quite good at cat-calling the Conservatives from across the floor, that did not translate into being any good when the cat-calling had to stop.
For decades, Labour has recruited candidates from a mix of trade union officials, state-sector workers, think-tank staff, charity employees and the like. Few Labour MPs have held ‘real’ jobs in the private sector where profit and risk are important factors. The United Kingdom is a trading nation and has a large private sector that is always on the look-out for new ways to make profits. This concept is utterly alien to Labour activists, who persist in regarding any wealth creation as a form of theft by ignoring the role of risk in the business process. Their ignorance may come from the fact that most Labour activists do not work in the private sector, and do not understand the culture. Instead they only work in sectors that feed off the wealth created by others but do not create wealth. They do not understand what money actually is, or where it originally comes from.
Labour activists are, and have always been, to the left of where the party normally presents itself to the voting public. When these activists take control of the leadership, it always ends in electoral disaster. Tony Blair avoided the fate of his predecessors by recognising this and ensuring that activists had no say in Labour’s economic policy. Gordon Brown reverted to type, and so did the electoral outcome for Labour for the next decade.
It is now highly unlikely that Reeves, Lammy, Cooper, or Mahmoud will get sufficient nominations to even be on the ballot paper for a leadership contest. Their presence in the party now seems limited to those MPs that support them, and little more. Mahmoud might get on the ballot through ethnic affinity, assuming that British Muslims have not deserted Labour en masse for Jihadist politicians in the wake of the Gaza War, and other progressives to the Greens, but her new asylum policy now makes that unlikely.
Angela Rayner seems to be at present the most likely successor, and if she wins, this long tradition will be broken. But her victory would just be Labour talking to itself and not to the country, and her time in high office would probably be spent causing so much damage to the country such that when Labour lose in 2029, it will take 30 years to unravel the mess, during which time Labour might get in again when a succeeding government finds itself tied in knots and losing popularity. The Conservatives from 2010 onwards barely reversed any of the changes made to our country by Tony Blair, and they ultimately found themselves hamstrung by the Human Rights Act, and increasingly radical interpretations of the European Convention on Human Rights by activist judges in Strasbourg.
It is to be hoped that the very fact that our constitution is not codified will be the salvation of the country, because Labour’s talent problem is acute and damaging, especially if only Rayner is seen as Sir Keir’s likely successor. Whatever happens, there are at least 100 Labour MPs that know for certain that they will be losing their seats in 2029, and that they have no future in front-line politics, so these talentless individuals may not care what happens next, and a talent-free Rayner government will not stop them from being doomed. Maybe they won’t take the country with them.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.