Keir Starmer's own aides say he isn't actually in charge

Starmerism is a train wreck in office, but his own aides want to pin the disaster on their frontman - rather than their failed ideology

The right-wing faction of the Labour party are some of the most vicious, unpleasant people you are very likely to meet in British politics. And given British politics is a cesspit, that’s quite the bar to surpass.

Here is an opinion I can confidently say I now share with Keir Starmer, a prime minister just months away from having “leadership crisis” and “plunged into fresh” permanently associated with his name - until he is unceremoniously dumped.

This may seem like an odd take. What’s the difference between Keir Starmer and the Labour Right when they’re at home anyway? Isn’t that “the most rightwing, illiberal faction in the party” - as former Blair aide and Labour MP Jon Cruddas put it - who Starmer serves as the frontman for? Hasn’t Starmer in fact done literally everything the Labour Right wanted - incinerating left-wing policy commitments, waging a ceaseless war on the Labour Left, embracing right-wing narratives on immigration and the welfare state and the like?

Well yes, quite, and the Labour Right have repaid that gratitude by briefing what a vacuous, unprincipled waste of space he is, that he is essentially a useless, boring clown who just exists to take up space and be told what to do: some sort of giant potato with a face someone hastily scrawled on. I exaggerate a little but it’s not much less damning than what they’ve actually said.

It seems, in fact, that I increasingly agree with Starmer and the Labour Right about the other.

A new book about the rise of Starmerism - ‘Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer’ - has been penned by the extremely well-connected Times political journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, and some tasty morsels have been printed in their Sunday paper.

Here’s how Starmer’s own aides are talking about the prime minister they installed, and who they are paid to work for:

They knew that Starmer’s real life — his true self — was not the work they shared with him. Their political project was predicated on this unpolitical leader doing as he was told. In his weaker moments, even McSweeney would confide to friends that he knew neither what Starmer thought, nor whose advice he had taken.

Occasionally they even spoke of their leader as if he were a useful idiot. Said one, referring to the driverless Docklands Light Railway that wound its way through east London: “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.”

The McSweeney there is Morgan McSweeney, the Downing Street Chief of Staff who ran Starmer’s entire duplicitous leadership campaign. It is striking how the media came to portray Dominic Cummings, former Chief Adviser to Tory prime minister Boris Johnson, as a Machiavellian puppet master, but not McSweeney. You can only conclude it’s because Cummings embraced a pantomime villain public persona, while McSweeney settles for a more unassuming brand, and our political reporters are more interested in style, rather than substance, because they treat every new development in British politics like an episode of East Enders.

What Starmer’s own aides are saying here is really rather remarkable. Tony Blair wasn’t just a very active and engaged member of his political faction - he imprinted himself clearly on that faction, defining its contours, even as he veered ever more rightwards in office. The very ideology of Blairism had Blair’s personality and pet obsessions printed all over it. You could almost say Blair was a leader. Starmer on the other hand is merely a frontman. Anyone who has worked with Starmer will vouch for his lack of politics. He was selected as the frontman for other reasons. He was considered to look like what would happen if you grew a prime minister in a lab. His backstory as former Director of Public Prosecutions presented an image of respectability. He had a canny lack of principle, in that he was willing to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet and pretend to like, admire and agree with him, rather than do what his less strategic but more honest ideological allies did, which was to issue furious tirades and burn their bridges with the Labour membership.

But Starmer also had some useful qualities which opened him up to manipulation. He wanted to be prime minister for the sake of it, rather than to advance any clear vision or purpose. Back in 2015, when he had just been elected as an MP, there was a truly ridiculous online campaign to make him Labour leader, and he made clear to anyone who would listen at the time how flattered he was. His interest in power as an end itself is evident in his embrace of the trappings: hence accepting more freebies from wealthy donors and companies than every other Labour leader combined from Blair onwards. And he is extremely thin skinned, a trait which can be exploited by any good confidence trickster.

Indeed, as the Sunday Times preview piece noted:

“when the Guardian columnist Owen Jones condemned the Labour leadership for betraying the left, Starmer texted him as if he were a hurt and disappointed father. Jones, the leader grumbled, was better than that.”

This is true: in fact he got in touch with me repeatedly about my criticisms, both in my Guardian column - but also tweets. Many Labour right-wingers might ask why the leader of the Labour Party was wasting his time remonstrating with a left-wing newspaper columnist, and that would be a very reasonable question. The answer is really very straightforward: he is just very thin skinned. This was manipulated by the Labour Right, because as Starmer violated both the letter and spirit of his leadership campaign platform, that caused ever growing outrage from the left - which the Labour Right offered as evidence for why he should crack down even harder on them.

In November 2020, Starmer personally assured me, and I quote, “please be assured, I am determined to tackle antisemitism but I am not out to crush the left”, adding he had always valued my views. 10 months later, he sought to change the rules under which Labour leaders are elected in order to stop the left from ever fielding a candidate again. I then told him his earlier promise was a lie, which is the last time I’ve ever engaged with him. Only Starmer can truly peer into his own soul and explain his true motivations, but the most indulgent scenario is that a pliable weak-willed leader was coerced into abandoning his election commitment to Labour as a “broad church”.

One senior Labour figure once told me that Starmer had a crisis of confidence in his beliefs after the party was crushed in the Hartlepool by-election of May 2021, which is what cemented his pact with Labour’s hardcore right. I don’t buy that Starmer had any solid coherent beliefs to lose confidence in: but he offers a striking contrast with, say, Margaret Thatcher, who had a clear albeit poisonous vision for the country which gave her a solid ideological and political backbone. Nobody could accuse Thatcher of being manipulated by any particular faction.

The Sunday Times piece also explores the tortured relationship between Keir Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, who sought to stage a coup against Starmer after the Hartlepool rout:

Nobody could find Rayner, whose phone was switched off at the instruction of her chief of staff, Nick Parrott. One of Rayner’s closest confidants now says categorically that she was ready to launch a coup: “We could have taken him out there and then, without a shadow of a doubt. All of the unions were on board. We had Unite. We had the money. Momentum were lined up. We were done. We had a rally of 5,000 people ready to go.”

One leading adviser to Starmer rang Rayner in tears, begging her not to run. They begged because they were scared. “If there’d been a concerted challenge from the left,” said another aide involved in crisis talks that night, “Morgan was worried that Keir wouldn’t fight it. He didn’t think he was making headway. He wasn’t enjoying it. We were worried he wouldn’t fight it.”

Well, I can testify that Rayner and her team did indeed conspire to overthrow Starmer at the time, and plotted to do so with some on the left. Starmer’s allies never forgave her for that - one of them suggested it was completely preposterous for Labour’s deputy leader to plot to overthrow the leader “for the first time in its history”. Other than the questionable erasure of Tom Watson, I put it to them that Starmer had nullified his leadership mandate by abandoning the promises he made to the party membership to get elected. Their face suddenly went blank.

Consider the now deputy prime minister’s thoughts about the actual prime minister:

Disaster had been averted. But questions over Starmer’s political judgment lingered. Rayner, still smarting, later texted one confidant to remark that she did not know who ran the Labour Party. It could not be Starmer, she said, because he was incapable of running a bath — never mind the opposition.

Starmer’s literal number two thinks he is a total waste of space. It’s not what you would classically call “normal”, is it? But there is also a major democratic question here, which is that even people at the top of the Labour party aren’t really sure who is really in charge.

Then note this, when Starmer had contemplated resigning after his Hartlepool humiliation:

Morgan McSweeney, the chief of staff who hoodwinked the Labour membership into abandoning Corbynism with Starmer’s soft-left leadership campaign, did not agree. He thought nothing of their leader’s threat to go. From the Irishman instead came one phrase, over and over again: “Change the party. Got to change the party. Haven’t changed enough. Change the party.”

The fact that Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign was an epic political deceit, a pack of lies to con Labour members into voting for their man, is simply treated as a matter-of-fact throwaway comment, too obvious to even bother unpacking. Really? Is it not of wider interest that the people running the country are a pack of totally shameless liars? Is there no sense of just how damaging this is to democracy, not least when an ascendant authoritarian right seeks to exploit growing public disaffection with it?

During the leadership campaign, Starmer’s team told me they would love Corbyn’s key ally John McDonnell to stay on as Shadow Chancellor, but that he clearly wanted to stand down. This was a completely deranged lie, and an example of how they sought to neutralise left-wing critiques of his campaign with shameless horseshit.

Neither is there any wider understanding of how Starmerism being founded in deceit hobbled it from the outset. Tony Blair did not do what Starmer did when he ran for Labour leader in 1994 - that is pretend to be ‘A More Competent And Less Scary Version Of Tony Benn’. Although Blair in his late stages as prime minister had clearly hurtled further to the right, the general political direction he offered was clear from the get go.

The reason one of the grandest political deceptions in British democratic history isn’t properly scrutinised within our media is very straightforward. Those who dominate the British media ecosystem loathe the left. From the right to so-called ‘centrists’, this is a unifying theme. The left are not seen as legitimate political actors, but an alien toxin to be eliminated from our body politic. So our political reporters and commentators mostly believe that a politician lying through their teeth in order to destroy the left is just good sound politics, rather than scandalous chicanery.

But even though this is a fight in which I’d prefer both sides to lose, let me offer some defence of Starmer from his own aides. There were those of us who argued that Starmer’s Labour was only destined to win the 2024 election because the Tories had self-immolated, that his leadership offered no vision or answers to a crisis-ridden country, and that it would fall apart in office.

Here’s what I wrote in October 2023, in a column entitled ‘Tory conference revealed a party that’s crumbling – and with Nigel Farage laying siege to its future’:

So consider this for a scenario. Labour triumphs at the next election, but wins by default and with no enthusiasm for Starmerism in the tank from the start. Unlike 1997, the new administration rules a country defined by turmoil and decline, but offers no transformative policies to answer our multiple and overlapping crises. Disillusionment sets in, while the Tories complete their metamorphosis into loud, proud, brash rightwing populism, hoovering up votes from the disaffected. In the general election of 2029, a new model Tory party – flushed with British Trumpism – stages a stunning comeback.

The part I got wrong here was about that surge in right-wing populism finding its most effective expression in the Tories. That could still happen, and the Tories have certainly embraced Trumpism, but Reform are currently the major beneficiaries.

Five months before the general election, I wrote:

An administration that lacks meaningful answers to domestic crises and is wedded to a toxic foreign policy will soon find itself in trouble. Look at Starmer’s political equivalents in the US, Germany and Australia: they won but swiftly became unpopular, and none U-turned so comprehensively as him on their original promises. If he enjoys a honeymoon, it will be short-lived.

And at the beginning of the election campaign, I wrote:

“Starmer should consider, for a moment, the cautionary tale of Boris Johnson – another leader who purged his parliamentary party. Yes, he scooped an 80-seat majority. But then, in less than three years, he was driven from office in disgrace, and the Tory party was left in tatters.”

You’re probably wondering when the defence of Starmer is going to appear. Well, the truth is, those of us who very correctly predicted Starmer would unravel in office did not do so simply because we thought he is a crap leader, although he is. It’s because what is known as the “Labour Right” has no answers to the problems of a country defined by crisis since the 2008 financial crash. The lack of vision isn’t a Starmer-specific problem. It’s a Labour Right specific problem. This is why Corbynism staged its sensational political breakthrough in 2015: because the Labour Right was politically and intellectually bankrupt. It then had years in exile to try and do something about that, to come up with a coherent Labour Right plan for turmoil-defined Britain. And guess what: they came up with nothing. So they lied to get elected, by signing up to left-wing policies they didn’t really believe in, then abandoned them by attrition in favour of… nothing.

The truth is Starmer has done exactly what his Labour masters wanted him to do, to the letter. Indeed they were taken aback by just how much he delivered them, as they wrote endless political cheques he signed off without even blinking. When the Tories all but completely destroyed themselves in office, amidst an unparalleled cost of living crisis and disintegrating public realm, and with Rishi Sunak running the worst general election campaign of our age, Labour could only scrape 33.7% on the lowest turnout of eligible voters in British democratic history, only a marginally higher share and with fewer votes than the 2019 rout - a result presented as public revulsion at Corbynism - and several points lower - and over 3 million votes fewer - than the 2017 election result.

Yet given our absurd election system granted Labour a huge victory in parliamentary seats, the party’s masters simply sank further into hubris. They briefed willing client journalists that only getting 33.7% of the vote was a sign of genius, actually, because Labour wasn’t piling up votes in seats it did not need, rather than understanding the desperate lack of public enthusiasm they had secured. They behaved as though they’d just won the 43.2% secured by Labour in 1997, rather than understanding that their landslide was a Jenga tower which could topple at any moment.

During the election campaign, one senior Labour figure told me that there was a widespread sense that Starmer’s team had a secret plan lying in some drawer somewhere, to be enacted when he was safely in No. 10, but that none existed. With no clear vision, the government literally chose scrapping the universal winter fuel payment as a flagship policy, believing it would win the respect of the electorate by showing a willingness to take tough decisions - it’s never tough decisions for the rich, is it! - and were clearly blindsided by a general public who concluded they were sadistic monsters intent on freezing grannies to death. They thought they were oh so terribly clever preparing the ground for renewed cuts, when their doom and gloom speeches sucked business and consumer confidence out of the economy. They thought they had been supremely canny in ruling out multiple tax hikes on the well-off and big business before the election, backing themselves into a corner and then hiking employers’ national insurance contributions, an astonishingly stupid decision which harms wages and jobs.

And now, clearly panic stricken and terrified of an impending bond market crisis, they’ve resorted to hitting a big red button labelled ‘Expand Heathrow’ as a derisory substitute for any meaningful vision - not only yet another violation of Starmer’s farcically dishonest leadership platform, but a button fruitlessly pressed by governments for the last 16 years. The only people cheering them on with any gusto are right-wing think tanks, which tells its own story.

The reason Starmer’s team are throwing their man overboard just months after an election victory is because it is a substitute for any self-reflection. Your man did exactly what you asked of him! You could not have had a more pliable yes man as your leader! You thought you had all the right ingredients for a triumphant government which would conquer all before it! So why did it all go so wrong? Here his embittered, dieheard detractors - otherwise known as “his staff” - have very little to say.

It does not help that Starmer’s aides are correct that he is crap, but they aren’t aware that they are also crap. I may have rejected New Labour’s project, but there was no doubting that it was founded by extremely substantial figures. It was a project with an intellectual rationale: in an odd twist of history, it emerged out of Eurocommunism, with the pages of Marxism Today laying the foundations. It had a theory: a post-Fordist economy meant the electorate was far more fragmented. I can passionately reject what it sought to do, whilst understanding it tapped into a zeitgeist and exploited it ruthlessly for its own ends.

Starmer’s aides are no such things. They are overwhelmingly mediocre, intellectually disinterested, on a personal level unpleasant, and defined by a hatred of the left and desire to score settle which did not define New Labour, which chose to largely exile the left from their thoughts altogether. They are middle managers who belong in a mid-brand clothing label. They are devoid of interesting ideas, and are driven by the same impulse that led them to do pretend conference speeches in front of bathroom mirrors when they were 13, where they borrowed Blair’s verbless sentences and power thumb - that is, an addiction to power for its own sake. They have no loyalty to anyone but themselves, which is why they are now publicly humiliating the man who made the extremely unfortunate mistake of doing everything they asked of him.

None of them are prepared to ask themselves if it is in fact their politics which are the problem, and reheating Blairism circa 2006 (when it was all falling apart) for a completely different country two decades later isn’t in fact a major error. Neither do you see any of this reflection from Starmer’s natural supporters in the British media, none of whom expected this all to be a disaster, which it is not unreasonable to ask them to account for.

Well, the dead-behind-the-eyes geniuses who brought you the Starmer project have a back-up plan. They have concluded that the real reason this has gone belly up is because Starmer isn’t really a true believer. Thus, they want to install the ultra-Blairite Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, in No. 10 instead. That he was nearly defeated from the left - his majority collapsed from 5,198 when Labour was smashed in 2019 to just 528 votes - in what was once a Tory constituency by a 23-year-old British-Palestinian wunderkind, Leanne Mohamad, is not something they’ve bothered to interrogate. Why? Because, again, they don’t see the left as legitimate political actors, and only respect and want to concede to political pressure from the right.

That Streeting had bad approval ratings even in Opposition, when he was Shadow Health Secretary and the NHS was falling apart under Tory rule, has apparently passed them by: and that was not for lack of media exposure, or the commentariat lauding him as their prince over the water. Well, in my view Labour should make Streeting leader, and see how that pans out. What excuses will the Labour Right come up with when that disintegrates, too?

The fact is the Labour leadership, as I wrote in 2021, “lacks a political soul and is devoid of any meaningful coherent vision for the country it seeks to lead.” It owes its victory to Tory self-destruction, Nigel Farage splitting the right-of-centre vote, and the vagaries of our electoral system. Well, who knows, maybe they’ll strike it lucky and Reform will help land them back in office. But the sad truth is this would be all terribly funny if the actual end result wasn’t plausibly an extremely right-wing authoritarian government.

The tragedy, once again, is that the left is doomed to its repeated fate: making the right calls, being vindicated by events, its predictions becoming a commonsense, but getting no credit or political advantage from it. We were tragically right about the foreign policy calamities of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, we were entirely correct about financial deregulation and austerity. When Starmerism does fall apart, many of the critiques the left offered up will be stated sagely by Labour grandees and their media outriders.

The truth is, a political project based on preserving a broken economic order and catering for every presumed reactionary inclination certain voters might have, like a gruesome tick box exercise, will never offer Britain stability - and paves the way for a very dark episode in our country’s history. Which is why, alas, the left was completely correct about Starmerism, and will never be forgiven for it.