Daniel Hannan: The man most likely to depose Starmer is Starmer himself

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.

No Labour prime minister has ever been toppled by his MPs. Even in opposition, Labour leaders are granted a kind of unspoken tenure.

The people’s party stuck loyally by Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband as their ratings plummeted. Even when most of Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench resigned, the old boob could shrug it off; when his MPs passed a motion of no confidence by 172 votes to 40, he declared, “they won’t beat me; I’m going nowhere”.

When they ran a candidate against him, he was re-elected. It took Labour’s historic defeat at in 2019 to convince the bearded Bolshevist that it was time to go.

This history is worth bearing in mind when talk turns to whether the game is up for Sir Keir Starmer. Labour MPs, unlike Conservatives, have no mechanism to remove a sitting leader.

The more relevant question is how long Starmer will want to carry on. His approval ratings, positive when he took office, have plummeted to minus 30 – well below Kemi Badenoch, Ed Davey or Nigel Farage.

Like others in Cabinet, Starmer was emotionally unprepared for unpopularity. Attacking a government as exhausted as the last one was too easy. Simply turning up the TV debates without tripping over his shoelaces was enough. Voters, grumpy since the lockdown bills came in and furious about immigration, projected their hopes onto him without looking too closely.

Who can blame Starmer him for being carried away by their mood? His attack-lines were landing so well that he started to believe his own propaganda.

He convinced himself that Britain’s only problem was that Bad People were in charge. Everything would improve once the Good People took over. After all, if the awful Tories had managed for 14 years, how hard could it be?

Labour would be kinder, more moral, better. It would give more money to nurses and teachers, the poor and the disabled. It would be less nationalistic vis-à-vis the EU. It would do this while making growth, in the nasal tautology of both Starmer and Rachel Reeves, its “number one priority”.

But government is not about Good People and Bad People. It is about trade-offs, the arbitration of clashing interests. It depends on a readiness to sustain short-term unpopularity for the sake of long-term prosperity. Ministers seem flummoxed by this discovery. Hence their fish-on-the slab demeanour.

None more than Sir Keir, who looks not so much dazed as drained. In the old, Tolkienian sense of the word, he seems fey – marked for death. Watching him last week, I thought of Yeats’s Irish Airman: “The years to come seemed waste of breath…”

Why, after all, is he doing this? William Atkinson, reviewing the Pogrund/Maguire biography on this site six months ago, wrote a telling paragraph:

“He is, in essence, just a slightly podgy late middle-aged man of conventional soft left opinions who quite fancied being prime minister as a late career change. But what the book conveys so well is how bizarrely apolitical Starmer is. You will search in vain for the Prime Minister’s vision. Bar winning, he has no real goal. He arrived in Number 10 assuming someone would tell him what to do.”

It explains both his glazed demeanour and his clumsiness when it comes to the mechanics of politics. Leave aside, for a moment, the rights and wrongs of immigration policy. As a matter of pure tactics, what madness has made him talk tough on the subject with no plan to follow through?

In fact, it’s worse than that. Having spoken one line that was meant to connect with popular concerns – “island of strangers” – he has now repudiated it. The only memorable words he uttered as prime minister, suggested by some focus group, were disowned as soon as Guardianistas chided him for his tone.

It’s the same story again and again. Calling demands for a grooming gang inquiry a “far-right bandwagon” and then announcing one; oaying tens of billions of pounds to Mauritius at the very moment that he was trying to convince his MPs to cut the winter fuel allowance – and then U-turning on that cut; recording a video to tell the world that Britain had no policy on Iran.

I mean, for God’s sake, man, back the Americans or don’t back them, but why draw attention to the fact that you are being sidelined? And that’s before I even get to the climbdown on benefits.

The Prime Minister is unbelievably inept at day-to-day politics. So why is he bothering? Why persist in a job that gives him no pleasure and serves no higher ideological goal? It’s not even as if he is the champion of a Labour faction in the way that Blair, Brown and Corbyn were. Nor law, nor duty bade him fight, nor public men, nor cheering crowds…

What if Starmer decides he has had had enough? Stepping aside would guarantee him the thanks of his party. If Labour won the next election, he’d be the elder statesman who had facilitated it; if it lost, someone else would get the blame.

What does it mean for the rest of us? Well, we should prepare for the possibility of an earlier election if a new leader (please let it be Angela Rayner) decides to go during her honeymoon. Which, of course, raises the whole question of whether the Conservatives and Reform could afford to fight each other in every constituency – but that’s another column.

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