Keir Starmer does not want a contest for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party. He would like a supporter of his to be installed without a vote.
Hence the short timetable. Candidates have to scramble until 5pm on Thursday to secure nominations from 80 Labour MPs – which amounts to a fifth of the Labour benches. This is harder than it looks, because we can be sure that the whips are reminding MPs that their nominations will be made public, and that anyone nominating a candidate regarded as unhelpful to the government will be overlooked for promotion.
There are probably 80 Labour MPs who are embittered, reckless or old enough to ignore the threats, but they have to be organised behind a single candidate in two days. This is why Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff, is reported to have hoped that ego-driven troublemakers will “flood the pitch” and make it harder to herd the cats behind a single non-government candidate.
If that was McSweeney’s hope, it is already fading, as several candidates have ruled themselves out. Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary, who I thought was the early frontrunner, pulled out despite writing a sharp article for the New Statesman that railed against Rachel Reeves being in thrall to Treasury orthodoxy.
Rosena Allin-Khan, the MP for Tooting and a doctor at St George’s hospital who, for five years, has been the answer to the quiz question “Who came second to Angela Rayner in the 2020 deputy leadership election?”, withdrew because “the field is too crowded”, according to an anonymous ally.
This was a strange reason, given that, within hours of Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, announcing her candidacy, the number of potential candidates ranged against her had come down to three.
Emily Thornberry, Lucy Powell and Bell Ribeiro-Addy are the only other declared candidates. Thornberry is an accomplished media performer who is still seething about being the only member of Starmer’s shadow cabinet not taken into government – she was displaced as attorney general by Richard Hermer, the prime minister’s Doughty Street friend. Powell, sacked last week, is the candidate of the so-called soft left: she was Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign manager in 2010 and has been backed for the deputy leadership by Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester.
Ribeiro-Addy has no chance. She is the candidate of the Corbynite Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, but according to my calculations, the group is down to 19 members of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and it is unclear where she would get the other 61 nominations from.
So the contest is already resolving. It will be Phillipson unopposed, or up against one or both of Thornberry and Powell, although I doubt that there is room for two non-government candidates. Powell’s campaign launch stressed unity and her aim to “ensure that our Labour government, led by our prime minister, is successful in delivering our mandate of change”, presumably in the hope of persuading No 10 to allow loyalist MPs to nominate her.
The first question, though, is whether No 10 can prevent the nomination of any rival candidate at all. Starmer’s ideal contest would be a coronation without debate – anything to avoid six weeks of Thornberry assailing him on, as she said in her announcement: “Welfare. Gaza. Wealth tax. Changes to come on Send.”
I assume that Thornberry at least will secure the nominations she needs. She then needs trade unions or local parties to make supporting nominations by the end of the month, but the MPs’ hurdle is the highest.
If she does, my second assumption is that no minister can win a contest that is decided by Labour Party members. Phillipson is one of the more popular cabinet ministers among the members, and an early Survation poll of them for Labour List puts her ahead, but previous Survation polls for Labour List suggest that a big majority of members want to “move to the left” (64 per cent), end the two-child benefit cap (79 per cent), restore the £28bn-a-year green investment plan (61 per cent), reverse the foreign aid cut (58 per cent) and say it was wrong to proscribe Palestine Action (71 per cent).
It would not be a disaster for Starmer to have Thornberry as deputy leader of the party. She would not have to be made a minister, although she would have an additional platform in the media as the more recent choice of party members than the prime minister.
But a campaign fought over the next six weeks by Thornberry criticising the government over “welfare, Gaza, a wealth tax and special educational needs” – or even Powell doing the same thing in a slightly more moderate register – is the last thing Keir Starmer wants.
