BY PAUL T HORGAN
Of course, Sir Keir could see a revival in the opinion polls. British armed forces could reveal a Wunderwaffe that, when used by Ukrainians, causes the Russian hordes to retreat from Ukraine like the Blue Meanies did from Pepperland when confronted by The Beatles, while, when used by the USA, permanently secures safe passage in the international waters of the Straits of Hormuz.
Or he could invent the cure for cancer.
Yes, Sir Keir is in miracle territory when it comes to recovering from his trough in the polls, a trough that started even before he had been a year into office. Of course Labour, under his leadership, did recover from the trough of the post-Corbyn years, but the soufflé never rises twice.
That’s a record. Excluding Blair’s premiership, Labour Prime Ministers normally take up to three years to alienate the voter. Doing it so quickly and with such depth is a major achievement for Sir Keir.
Labour’s problem is that they are lumbered with a Lame Duck Prime Minister. But to dispose of him now through party processes will expose Labour as being no different to the Conservatives and that the malaise of Prime Ministers failing to serve for a complete Parliament since the fall of David Cameron almost a decade ago has become a quasi-permanent feature of British politics.
If Sir Keir was forced to resign later this year, he will have served less time than either Theresa May or Boris Johnson. Mrs May was brought down by a Parliament that corruptly refused to respect the outcome of the EU referendum. Boris had the misfortune to be the incumbent just as COVID hit the world. Few political leaders managed to weather that storm with their reputations intact, and it is probable that the pandemic’s impact on Russia is what led Putin to invade Ukraine when he did so, so the consequent economic malaise in Russia could be blamed on war rather than the effects of the disease and Putin’s mismanagement.
Sir Keir has no such excuse, not even the Hormuz War. He is just quite bad at his job, not the least by making terrible appointments to senior positions.
So the country is in a sort of holding pattern, the political limbo that resembles when a government is polling negatively in the last year before a General Election has to be called, except it’s not even 2028. The difference is that Labour’s limbo-dancing is because the party’s rule-book has been carefully crafted so as to prevent the leader from being toppled within the rules.
This will probably change should Labour be slaughtered in the local elections. Reform UK look like they will sweep up the white working-class vote, and the Greens will take the progressive/Muslim vote, which seems an absurd alliance apart from both elements having a common enemy, and seems as much a recipe for disaster as Jeremy Corbyn being dragged into forming his own socialist party by a monomaniacal harridan. The Lib-Dems may also benefit as they do when any government gets unpopular.
But it will be better for the challengers, who seem to be Angela Rayner and (eventually) Andy Burnham at present, if Sir Keir were to be forced to resign later this year rather than defending himself in a leadership election. Sir Keir knows his time is coming to an end, and all he seems to be doing is to prolong the inevitable for as long as he is able. This is the antithesis of public service, and makes Liz Truss accepting the game was up after 45 days seem like an act of the highest virtue. Sir Keir is kicking the can, but only for his personal benefit.
Perhaps Sir Keir has, extremely privately, devised a timetable for his departure. But given what seems to be his laissez-faire attitude to leadership, this appears unlikely. So if he will not step down without a formal challenge, what will make him do so?
We saw that his predecessor refused to quit even when 80% of his MPs passed a no-confidence motion in his leadership, as such votes are not binding. But if Labour MPs look at the local election results and extrapolate that for them holding the seat at the 2029 General Election, they will conclude that their best chance of surviving may be in a change at the top. So their fear of backing a challenger may diminish, except that this infighting in the party may not improve their prospects and the visuals cannot help but look terrible to the public.
There is also the problem, perhaps less so in Labour than with the Conservatives, that he (or she) that wields the dagger never gets the crown, as Michael Heseltine found out in 1990, something that probably deterred Michael Portillo from making a bid in 1995. So a senior minister quitting the front bench and calling for Sir Keir to go may not result in their restoration in any manner by Sir Keir’s successor, lest they become a kingmaker and repeat the routine a couple of years later. Michael Gove did not really recover from competing with Boris Johnson in the race for the leadership in 2016 rather than backing him.
If Angela Rayner forced a leadership contest, other MPs may coalesce around a ‘Stop Angela’ candidate who could win, rather like John Major did in 1990. This may deter Rayner from doing so.
Sir Keir may rely on this stalemate to keep going until Autumn 2027, after which he will have served longer than Theresa May and therefore could escape comparison with her. But the cost to Labour in the polls may be immense, especially if Sir Keir keeps piling on terrible decision after terrible decision, or lets activist lawyers inside government keep trashing the country.
There is, however, what I call The Watson Solution. Rather than a cabinet minister resigning, one or more junior ministers (as Tom Watson did in 2006) plus a slew of Parliamentary Private Secretaries (PPS) could quit. This is what did Blair in, and forced him to make a timetable for his eventual resignation in 2007.
A Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) is appointed by a minister to be his or her assistant. He or she is selected from backbench MPs as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the minister in the House of Commons. It is an unpaid job but it is useful for an MP to become a PPS to gain experience of working in government. Sir Keir has three of them, Abena Oppong-Asare, Catherine Fookes, and Jon Pearce. Of the three, Oppong-Asare is the most interesting. She had previously been a junior minister in the Cabinet Office, so moving to this unpaid role seems to be a demotion following the reshuffle in the wake of Rayner’s forced resignation for fiddling her taxes, but may have been necessary to keep Sir Keir’s premiership afloat.
But if these three were to quit, and no Labour MP was willing to replace them, this would mark the end of Sir Keir’s premiership. While this scenario is unlikely, it does give these MPs more power than they would normally have. It is the most impact that can be made by the least powerful of Sir Keir’s team.
The prospect of resignation is a powerful tool when wielded correctly. The ‘silent dictatorship’ of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in Imperial Germany after 1916 was based on the fear their resignations would cause on the war effort were they to quit. The duo managed to marginalise and subordinate the Kaiser (which was not difficult to do, given his record of idiocy), but also the executive authority of the civilian government.
Thus Sir Keir may find himself hostage to even the lowest of his own subordinates. Given that his powers of patronage (hospital here, new bypass road there) rely on the cooperation of ministers and what is probably by now a thoroughly cheesed-off civil service, these may now be quite limited. While Sir Keir is somewhat wanton in sacking his staff, and the odd ambassador, his ability to sack a minister has now become somewhat curtailed unless their conduct causes public outrage, such as hiding a serious conviction while seeking election. He is no longer ‘first among equals’, and someone else might be filling in.
The country needs to be put out of the misery of Sir Keir. The most likely route, absent an unprecedented formal challenge, will be a series of strategic resignations by quite junior members of the Labour government whose careers, unlike their senior colleagues, can recover thereafter, allied to the reluctance of any Labour MP to replace them without major concession (hospital, bypass, etc.).
The catalyst for the strategic resignations will be the level of defeat experienced by Labour in the local elections.
If I am right about all of this, you read it here first. If I am not, I will have another go as new facts emerge. Stay tuned.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.