BY PAUL T HORGAN
While the Conservative Party is vying with a lump of uranium to see how much of its mass can leave the main body – and doing rather better – this is a deflection from the big question: Sir Keir has failed as a Prime Minister, so when will he step down?
The defection of Robert Jenrick has had a predictable outcome. Sir Keir had a ‘Jenrick’ of his own, in the form of Wes Streeting, who has been employing similar, but not identical tactics. There have been calls from unnamed Labour ministers and backbenchers for Sir Keir to sack Wes Streeting. Like Jenrick, Streeting has been rather successful at self-promotion, for the same reason. Both appeared to believe they should be the one leading their respective parties – well, former party in the case of Jenrick.
Jenrick made use of social media, in the form of X (Twitter in old money), to make punchy videos exposing the ills of the country for ordinary folk in a manner that was not being done by any other front-rank politician. While his contemporaries talk about large and powerful forces or how billions are funnelled here and there, Jenrick took to the streets, pointing out the day-to-day inequities that plague the common man. His most famous offering to the public was him railing against fare dodgers jumping turnstiles at London stations, and how this was being ignored by uniformed officials who literally stood around doing nothing. This may explain why there has been an increasing number of stories in the press about the authorities clamping down on fare dodgers.
Streeting, by contrast, has complicated matters for his boss by discussing matters outside his brief in a manner that is almost, but not quite, a challenge to Sir Keir’s leadership. Streeting’s flowing manner of communication, where he avoids the contortions of ideology to speak as plainly as it is possible for a socialist to speak, is in contrast with the stilted hesitancy that is more exposed for the absence of a Scottish brogue that Sir Keir’s predecessor as Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was able to employ. While both Brown and Sir Keir talk like Daleks, Brown could disguise this better. Sir Keir’s attempt at Received Pronunciation makes it more obvious.
So Sir Keir has become a lame duck Prime Minister in record time due to policy failure and poor presentation. While some talk of a coup to topple him, this is provably impossible in the Labour Party.
More General Secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have been toppled using the rulebook than have been Labour Leaders (that is, one-nil). When 80% of Labour MPs (including Sir Keir) passed a vote of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn in the wake of Corbyn’s deliberately feeble performance during the EU Referendum campaign, this had zero effect, and they slunk back into the shadow cabinet. Corbyn went on to lead Labour to two additional defeats at General Elections before he realised his time was up and he stood down.
Presumably Corbyn could have stayed on as Labour Leader after the landslide defeat of 2019, but this would have just resulted in Labour destroying itself and being replaced by a new party of the centre-left. And a lot of unintentional comedy on the way to its doom.
Sir Keir’s time is pretty much up as well, but barring some event that makes resignation unavoidable, it may be his MPs taking actions outside Labour’s rules that decides his fate. Tony Blair was required to issue a timetable for his departure when there was a wave of junior minister resignations from his government. So perhaps this will be the driver for Sir Keir, as MPs in government, but not in the cabinet, realise that they will definitely lose their seats – and thus an income of a level they will be unable to make elsewhere – unless they take action. The only question remains when will be the time to strike.
But Sir Keir may already realise it is not his destiny to fight a General Election in 2029, the full life of a Parliament, which is now the most logical date for whoever is Prime Minister then to ask His Majesty for a dissolution.
Unless Labour cancel that election as well. They do seem to have disturbingly increasing form here.
So when, assuming Sir Keir does not engineer a constitutional crisis, or NATO goes to war with Russia, will he go?
I believe Sir Keir cannot step down before Autumn 2027, and it is actually in the interests of the Labour Party for him to stay until that time.
If Sir Keir were to step down any time before this, then he would have served less time as Prime Minister than Boris Johnson or Theresa May.
Boris was Prime Minister for 1,140 days, engineering a departure date that was slightly longer than Mrs May, who served for 1,106 days. Some wags may point out that Rishi Sunak served less than 700 days, but he left office after losing a General Election – unlike his predecessors – and would have continued in office if he had won. I remove Liz Truss from consideration in these calculations because, well, Liz Truss (I need say no more here).
If Sir Keir was to step down after having served less time than Boris Johnson or Theresa May, then his premiership would be immediately compared to theirs. It would be damaging for the wider Labour Party, which has tried to make itself distinctive from the chopping and changing Conservatives, to be shown to be actually no different. The self-proclaimed ‘grown-ups’ would be exposed as equally childish. Sir Keir could argue that he saved Labour from oblivion, but if he made that his only achievement then it would be a backhanded confession that he did little else of positive note.
So, unless there is a defining moment, being a significant policy reversal (like losing the EU referendum) or national humiliation (like Suez), distinct from the now-increasing sequence of U-turns, Sir Keir will remain as Prime Minister until Autumn 2027, after which he will step down to give time for a successor, who at this time seems to be Wes Streeting, to lead Labour into a 2029 General Election.
In the meantime, it makes sense for Sir Keir to promote rather than sack Streeting, perhaps to Chancellor or Foreign Secretary. Foreign Secretary is the best because it exiles the office holder away from national issues, but exposes them to be hostage to the whims and caprices of foreigners. Yvette Cooper was a failure as Home Secretary and for her failure at the job she had coveted for over a decade she was banished into worrying about the fate of Iranian demonstrators, a fate over which she has zero control. Sacking Cooper and replacing her with Streeting keeps Streeting in the tent. Cooper’s clout on the backbenches will be almost zero now she has been exposed. She can sulk in peace. This also means that there can be a smooth succession in late 2027, assuming Labour Party members do not do something stupid, something on which they do have some form. Making Streeting Chancellor means recreating the tension that existed between Blair and Brown to the detriment of the national interest. So far there is no reason to sack the current Home Secretary, but, events, dear boy . . .
Of course this is all pure, but informed speculation, or at least as informed as it is possible to be outside the famed Westminster Bubble. If I am right, please remember you read it all here first.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.