Just when even Sir Keir Starmer must have been giving some thought to his political survival – everyone else is, after all – along comes Danny Kruger, one of the more “individual” members of parliament, to provide some respite from his troubles.
It is not just that Mr Kruger and his new party leader, Nigel Farage, will helpfully distract attention and grab the headlines for a while, but also that this latest defection from the Conservatives to Reform UK shows just how divided the right of British politics remains. Mr Kruger declares that his old party is “over, over as a national party”, which may be true, but not so true that it could not still prove an obstacle to Mr Farage when the general election does eventually come round.
During their joint press conference, Mr Farage was asked if he’d prefer to face Sir Keir or Andy Burnham as Labour leader and prime minister at the next general election. Never one to miss a further opportunity to destabilise another rival party, Mr Farage opined that Sir Keir wouldn’t be in office for much longer anyway, and that Mr Burnham would push Labour so far to the left, he’d lose. Therefore, the Reform leader added, he “wasn’t bothered”.
A smart answer – but one that betrays itself, and should be taken seriously by Labour MPs, because it happens to be true.
A shift to the left would serve Labour and the country badly. There is no necessary or logical reason to believe that Mr Burnham, even if he overcame the considerable practical political obstacles to getting into No 10 “by the back door”, would defeat Mr Farage, or see off Labour’s other rivals to the left, right and centre.
Prime Minister Burnham – if he were magically to become PM in the morning – would not suddenly find himself at the head of a go-go economy, Britain’s fragile public finances suddenly refreshed by an influx of tax revenues, the public services transformed, and the small boats in the Channel suddenly stopped. He might, conceivably, benefit from a probably brief and modest boost in the opinion polls – but the realities of the situation facing his government would soon overwhelm the honeymoon atmosphere.
Mr Burnham may be a popular mayor of Manchester, and personable with it – but so what? The premiership is an entirely different role. Mr Burnham would be in no stronger a position to get public borrowing under control, nor to place the social security system on a sustainable basis, nor to get NHS waiting lists down, nor to fix the asylum system. Indeed, he encouraged Labour MPs to defeat the welfare reform bill, and it’s not clear he’s even interested in meeting national challenges with anything more substantial than warm words with a northern burr.
Now, of course, Mr Burnham – maybe with Ed Miliband installed as chancellor – would cleave to a more “tax and spend” approach than Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves, with greener edges and a compassionate gloss. Yet there is much reason to suppose that such a strategy would stifle investment and economic growth even more, losing the increasingly fragile confidence of the financial markets. (Witness the nervous moves in UK bond yields when it was rumoured Ms Reeves might quit after her tearful appearance in the Commons.)
If he wanted to please the left, Mr Burnham, who is something of a blank canvas (and thus more attractive to the less discerning Labour backbenchers), might support for some kind of “wealth tax” as a bedrock of “Burnhamonics”. Yet even the socialist wing of the Labour Party put the yield at £20bn a year, which, like it or not, would not be transformational in the context of the national debt. That, however, is being over-optimistic; no such levy on wealth has enjoyed much lasting success anywhere in the world. It might make matters worse.
Besides, none of this – neither Mr Burnham as PM, nor Mr Miliband second in command, nor soft-left policies, nor a government divided on ideological lines – was what the country voted for in July 2024. In fact, such a soft-left package also failed when Mr Miliband was leader of the opposition and presented it to the voters with a “hell, yes I’m tough enough” snarl at the 2015 election. Sir Keir’s government may have broken the spirit of what was pledged in the last manifesto, but a Burnham leadership would represent a repudiation of it.
In other words, while Labour backbenchers and party members can think of numerous reasons why they’d like to get rid of Sir Keir, they have not thought it through.
Could Mr Burnham win a by-election even in a supposedly safe Labour seat such as Graham Stringer’s – and what if Reform just nicked it? Where are the concrete reasons to suppose Mr Burnham would be better than Sir Keir in practice? What are his policies? Would they work? Is it worth all the turmoil and the lasting division that would lead to endless chaos and confusion as the government limps towards the next general election?
What does the Conservative Party’s churn of party leaders, prime ministers and constant plotting say about the wisdom of such an approach? Perhaps some self-discipline would be a better idea.
At the moment, Labour MPs are suffering from what might be termed the Conservatives’ disease, the main symptom being a belief that a new leader will solve everything. They are panicking because the polls are, admittedly, grim; because they are freaked out by Reform UK; but also because so few of them have lived through an electoral cycle as MPs. About half were elected in 2024 – and it shows.
Where once they foolishly thought nothing could go wrong with their new Labour government, they are equally wrong now to think things are irrecoverable. This far out from a general election it is absurd to draw such a conclusion. Both the Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson scandals are essentially one-offs – coincidental, but not a trend. By the next election, they’ll be forgotten.
The public are fed up and angry, and Reform is an attractive receptacle for a protest vote. But if the government – and Labour MPs – can make the tough decisions to put growth first, reform welfare, repair the public finances, improve public services and, at last, stem the flow of irregular migrants and empty the asylum hotels, then things will improve.
It is by no means obvious that Mr Burnham would be better at delivering any of this than Sir Keir. To borrow a familiar phrase, things can only get worse if the soft left seize control. Delivery is the issue, not the PM. The parliamentary Labour Party needs to calm down.