Sir Keir Starmer, RIP. May 7th is the date the prime minister becomes a political dead man walking. At least, that’s been the election build up in the media – and not just the right-wing newspapers – and among politicians, including many in Starmer’s own political party.
But will it turn out to be true? Not according to one man with an admittedly vested interest. And that’s Keir Starmer himself. ‘We have a choice: sink into division or rise together stronger’ was the headline in his guest op-ed in Sunday’s Observer.
The opening paragraphs a barely-disguised gauntlet tossed down to his rivals, Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting and – maybe – Ed Miliband whose allies have been frantically briefing papers left and right. On the face of it, this isn’t a prime minister resigned to the idea of a forced resignation anytime soon.
Wrote Starmer: “There are moments in history that shape our future for generations and where we must answer the question anew of who we want to be as a country. This is one of those moments.
“The whole country has been shaken by the horrendous attack in Golders Green. We are seeing a resurgence of terror, fuelled by Islamist extremism. We are seeing thugs paid by foreign powers to commit criminal damage. All in a climate where antisemitism and bare-faced hatred have bubbled over into the mainstream.
“And beyond our shores, we see a fractured world – a perfect storm of crises sweeping towards us. War on two fronts. Global economic strife, already impacting our daily lives. A world that is more dangerous than at any point in my lifetime.
Revive the Covid spirit
“We have a choice. We could sink into the politics of grievance and division. I am talking about a national mission to become a stronger, more resilient, and more united nation, allowing us to take control of our future, raise our sights, and reach towards something better. When the nation rallied together to deal with Covid, the last government could have channelled that spirit to build a better nation. But instead, they descended into political in-fighting and let the country slump back to the old status quo. Not this time.”
No mention of those angry Golders Green scenes with Jewish residents jeering and sporting signs like ‘Starmer Jew Harmer’. No mention either of another ongoing crisis that has done so much to imperil his prime ministerial survival prospects. ‘Mandelstein’ as some of his own backbenchers have dubbed the self-created reputational monster of Peter Mandelson’s disastrous ambassadorial appointment. A saga with some distance yet to run.
End of a century long hegemony?
But, nevertheless, it was a defiant rebuff – at least in the short term – of those encouraging him to throw in the towel and fire the starting gun on a successor election in the immediate aftermath of what the polls indicate will be a Labour bloodbath with up to 2,000 seats being lost across England, Scotland and Wales. With the party’s century-long hegemony control of Wales being sacrificed to Plaid Cymru, or less likely, Reform, with Labour trailing in a humiliating 3rd or even 4th place. Some Labour strategists tell me, “losing anything less than 1,500 seats would be something of a victory and could dial down the heat on the prime minister.” The Guardian columnist Rafael Behr was probably right on Wednesday with his forecast that the May7th results would turn the political landscape into a ‘technicolour mosaic’ with Labour even losing its stranglehold on London.
Defiantly, Starmer spent election week forging overdue closer links to Europe (to Reform and Tory ‘Brexit betrayal’ howls) and staging a widespread crisis conference on antisemitism, while targeting the awkwardly ambiguous approach of the Greens’ Jewish leader, Zack Polanski. Polanski, whose left of Labour positioning has alienated several of my own traditional Green voter friends, wasn’t helped when two Lambeth candidates were arrested over alleged antisemitic posts and another, in Walsall, was exposed over a 2023 post referring to ‘Jewish cockroaches’.
‘Still thinking of voting Green?’ has been the Mail on Sunday’s challenge in a double page spread revealing that other candidates had referred to Labour’s David Lammy and the Tories’ Priti Patel as ‘coconuts’ – the racial slur against a person perceived to be black on the outside and white on the inside.
For its part the Daily Mail’s May 2nd Splash headline screamed: ‘POLANSKI’S GREENS ARE A PARTY OF POISON’, complete with a new suitably coloured box slogan: ‘BEWARE THE GREEN MENACE’. Inside, the paper gave a large op-ed commentary to Labour’s Communities Secretary Steve Reed arguing, “The vile racists I witnessed in Corbyn’s Labour are now in the Greens. Polanski has to get a grip”. Reed, a solid Starmer loyalist, opened his article with the sentence: “Tackling antisemitism is more important than party politics.”
Wednesday’s Mail then splashed with the explosive claim: THIRTY GREEN CANDIDATES PROBED OVER ANTI-SEMITISM
Inside Wednesday’s Mail there was a ferocious four-page assault on the Greens and Polanski, spearheaded with an essay headlined, ‘Antisemitic hate at the heart of the Greens’ and a long leader headlined, ‘The vile Jew-hatred running deep within the Green Party’.
But the Mail’s blitzkrieg against the party triggered fury among the many traditional members without an antisemitic bone in their bodies. One, a neighbour of mine, protested: “The Mail's gone mad, making it look as if all of us who have supported the party for years on climate change and ecology issues are all a bunch of Jew-hating fanatics.”
By contrast, I know several young people who aren’t in the slightest antisemitic, aren’t preoccupied by Gaza but will be voting for Polanski’s Greens for a variety of reasons close to home and their own lives.
Further controversy hit Polanski on Wednesday with the Guardian and The Times revelations that he had falsely claimed to have been a British Red Cross ‘spokesman’ when he campaigned for the Green Party leadership. The British Red Cross confirmed he hadn’t held such a post and that they had complained over the former actor’s claim. Within hours of the papers’ publication, Polanski was forced to issue an abject apology over his false claim which has only now been removed from his website biography.
In turn, the Greens have lodged a formal complaint to The Times over what they call a “vile antisemitic cartoon” published last weekend depicting Zack Polanski with exaggerated Jewish facial features involved in a street protest struggle.
The cartoon showed Polanski kicking at a police officer holding down an arrested man in a Golders Green-esque scenario.
Starmergeddon looms?
The Golders Green fallout has probably erupted too late to significantly hit the Greens surge on May 7th but opponents believe that for all his early success and charisma, Polanski could prove more liability than asset by the time of the general election.
But elsewhere in that same edition of the Labour-loyalist Observer, there was little comfort for Sir Keir and his op-ed fightback. Take the headline on the column by the paper’s senior political columnist, Andew Rawnsley, ‘Brutal poll predictions have Labour braced for what fatalists are calling ‘Starmergeddon’.’
Rawnsley, an exceptionally well-connected Labour veteran, suggests that while the bad news in Scotland and Wales is already factored in, the prospect of a ‘shellacking’ in its London powerbase to the Greens and Reform could potentially seal Starmer’s fate.
“In Downing Street, the prime minister’s advisors are in the brace position and planning a ‘relaunch’ to try and buy him more time. Sir Keir’s remaining allies will contend that they have suffered the ‘mid-term blues’ which often afflict governments. That won’t cut it.
“Even loyalists don’t pretend to know what will happen next… The ice could break, admits one cabinet member. If Number 10 loses control of events, there will be ministerial resignations and calls for the prime minister to step down followed by a full-frontal challenge if he won’t budge.
“They already know that they are in for a catastrophic night. Only when they have experienced the pain will it become clear whether Sir Keir is going to be given one more chance or his party’s patience is so terminally exhausted that Labour MPs will roll the dice on replacing him,” concluded Rawnsley.
An electoral mess of populism?
Elsewhere in The Observer, a perceptive analysis by Robert Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University and author of the ‘British General Election 2024’, reinforces my own forecast in the 2025 book ‘Pandering to Populism’ that May 7th 2026 is the date that will finally –for better or worse – remap Britain’s political landscape right through to the next general election, whenever that comes. Undoubtedly these are the most significant mid-terms in modern UK political history. Arguably burying forever the two-party dominated system of government and producing a de facto multi-party, European-like proportional representation alternative?
Beneath a headline, ‘The Greens and Reform will ensure these elections are the messiest yet’, Professor Ford wrote: “With huge shifts in the polling landscape and in patterns of party competition, this election will ring changes almost everywhere… the nations of Britain look set to diverge as never before and within England, the common threads of competition will be replaced with a patchwork quilt of local patterns. In England, we will witness record-breaking advances for insurgents, record-breaking retreats for the traditional parties of government and unprecedented uncertainty as the first past-the-post system buckles under the strain.”
Gambling on the electoral fruit machine
“Fragmented voting will turn many contests into an electoral fruit machine, with little link between votes cast and seats awarded. This will increase concerns about an electoral system unable to coherently represent the diversity of representation English voters now demand.” Like Britain’s best-known psephologist Professor John Curtice, of Strathclyde University, Ford envisages a scenario where Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (which doesn’t hold elections on May 7th) being run by nationalist parties.
If the Observer offered cold comfort for the prime minister, another traditional Labour ally, The Guardian, ran ‘Burnham plans to return to return to Westminster in weeks’ as its front-page lead last Saturday.
‘No other plan comes close – how Labour turned to Burnham’ was the theme of a ‘Starmer on the brink’ analysis by political team Jessica Elgot and Josh Halliday.
Their piece opened with, “When the eyes of Westminster were on the committee rooms and voting lobbies of parliament this week, Keir Starmer’s political future was being decided elsewhere. Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner were buttering up Labour MPs in the Strangers’ Bar in parliament as colleagues spoke of their ‘existential’ fears about the crucial May 7th elections.
Angela’s bar door encounter
In Rayner’s case, an allegedly inebriated close encounter with a Commons bar door – in which the door came off worse – while Labour’s former deputy PM shouted, “I’m a socialist” made dream headlines for the right-wing papers. Sample: Mail columnist Jan Moir’s May 1st, “I’m also from a working-class background but Rayner doesn’t represent me. I watch her aghast.”
Allies of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood are incensed over reports Rayner has told Starmer he must sack her if he wants his former deputy 's support. Mahmood could herself be a late entry in a future leadership contest although her migration policy and ties to "Blue Labour" would alienate the party's left wing. Ironically, however, the tough talking Home Secretary would also be the leader some Reform strategists would least like to see as PM.
Starmer, meanwhile, tried to calm backbenchers’ nerves as he did the rounds in the members-only smoking room and his private office behind the Commons chamber. One former minister said the mood was so dark that several MPs refused to meet the leader, saying, “We don’t want to be seen with him.”
Allies of Andy Burnham, they reported, were ramping up his leadership campaign and predicting his return to parliament – and becoming the next prime minister – ‘could happen within weeks’. Several northern Labour MPs with relatively safe seats are reportedly prepared to make way for him. Intensive briefing certainly, for the moment, casting the Greater Manchester Mayor as the lead figure in triggering Starmer’s downfall.
With the Daily Telegraph persuaded to run a front-page story suggesting Labour’s national executive committee has dropped blocking Burnham from a parliamentary run – which controversially prevented the mayor from standing in February’s Gorton and Denton by-election which the party lost to the Greens.
But the Telegraph story is fiercely denied by allies of Starmer and Burnham-sceptic committee members resentful of his team’s media briefing strategy. Some key unions, including the GMB and Unison, have briefed the Guardian they aren’t yet charmed by the Burnham lobby, partly because of his perceived closeness to Ed Miliband and his oil and gas licence stance.
That said, the Guardian has given ample space to the ‘manifesto’ Burnham’s team are briefing which includes sweeping electoral reforms, including increased proportional representation, higher defence spending and an inheritance tax overhaul to pay for Britain’s ailing social care system.
Ed the kingmaker?
According to The Times, Ed Miliband has abandoned his own leadership ambitions to act as ‘Kingmaker’ for a Burnham challenge, something a couple of my own contacts echo. No one doubts that both Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting will eventually run, but for now, the momentum and media briefing is centred on the Greater Manchester mayor and his path to securing a Westminster return. There are also suggestions Streeting’s relative silence is linked to upcoming additional Mandelson file releases showing how close he once was to the ‘Prince of Darkness’.
But allies of Streeting and Rayner also suggest both are biding their time, mindful of the famous British political maxim credited to Michael Heseltine: ‘He who wields the knife never wears the crown’. Content, seemingly, to allow Andy Burnham to be first to reach for the dagger.
Significantly, however, the former Miliband aide and left leaning commentator / broadcaster Sonia Sodha produced a guest column in Monday’s Times headlined, ‘Labour’s only chance is a Starmer exit plan’.
She argued that “while the political and media establishment seems addicted the thrill of claiming scalps”, there is “in the fevered speculation about Starmer’s future, something much more substantial at play. The prime minister’s personal ratings are historically dire. Active hostility bubbles up from focus groups and doorsteps. MPs who think this is all confected by a right-wing press are kidding themselves; the public is not that easily manipulated. The reason we are all talking about it is because it is quite plain to see that going into the next election with Starmer at the helm would be a disaster for Labour.”
Tuesday’s Times front-page headline was, ‘Labour MPs plot Starmer putsch after poll losses’. Co-authored by Chief Political Commentator Patrick Magure, renowned for his Labour backbench sources, it reported a ‘group of disgruntled MPs’ are discussing sending an open letter to the prime minister demanding a timetable for his resignation. A move apparently inspired by the tactic used by Gordon Brown allies in 2006 to force Tony Blair to concede a deadline for his departure. Some ministers are said to be privy to the move.
Retail politics
But the paper’s same day leader ‘Retail Politics’ begins with the insightful line: “Safe to say that many of those voting for Reform UK and the Greens on Thursday will have little detailed knowledge of the parties’ manifestos. What matters is ‘feel’… if you are older and feel a sense of grievance at the state of the country – too many immigrants, too many potholes, too many shoplifters – Reform is probably your thing. If you are young, worried about your spiralling student debt, worried about securing an entry-level job, worried about the planet, already disillusioned with adult life, you’ll be Green.”
“The more questionable aspects of these parties’ agendas seem to be neither here nor there. Both indulge in fiscal fantasising to a quite comical degree, and both have a tendency to recruit bigots: general racists in Reform’s case the Greens specialising in antisemites. Being shady and unserious is no disqualification for elected office in the age of grievance, however. Not being Conservative, and especially not being Labour, is qualification enough. The nationalists will benefit too.”
The leader concluded: “Sir Keir’s defenestration would do little to solve the country’s ills in the medium term. His successor will probably increase the national debt, bequeathing it again to posterity. Unfortunately, in this era of retail politics, seriousness doesn’t sell.”
The war of Farage’s £5million
Meanwhile, the Guardian and Telegraph continue to be sharply at odds over another fiscal controversy. The Guardian was first to seize on Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s £5m personal security ‘gift’ from the party’s main donor, the billionaire Thailand-based crypto-currency pioneer Christopher Harborne. But when the paper approached Reform for a comment, they were asked for time to respond and then, to the Guardian’s chagrin, leaked a more sympathetic version to the Daily Telegraph.
Not that that prevented rival political parties from reporting the affair to the electoral and parliamentary authorities as a potential breach of the rules.
On Sunday, the Observer made it the entire leader page item under the headline; ‘Politics for sale… Farage funding has exposed a degraded democracy’.
The leader argued: “Unequivocally, Nigel Farage’s actions fail the appearance test. Last week, he was forced to admit he had taken £5m as a gift from Reform UK’s billionaire donor, Christopher Harborne. Farage claims he did not have to declare the money because he was not an MP when he received it but the riles are clear: the millions should have been made public when they were given in 2024. Nothing remotely similar has happened in living memory. It would take a backbench MP 50 years to earn what Farage was handed, and earnings are taxable while the gift was not. So make that 75 years.
“Britain has entered a new era in the relationship between money and politics with only outdated rules to protect its troubled democracy. Farage has been referred to the parliamentary commissioner for standards. In theory, depending on the commissioner’s recommendations, parliament could choose to suspend Farage. In practice, sanctions of that severity are rare. A comprehensive rewriting of the rules is now urgent.”
On the day of that Observer leader, Nigel Farage mysteriously pulled out of a scheduled appearance on last Sunday’s Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC political show – an ideal platform to push Reform’s election campaign. Inevitably, there was speculation he didn’t fancy being grilled on the £5m gift issue.
(*Reform UK is the only British political party to officially champion the controversial crypto currency system, campaigning to make the UK a ‘crypto currency powerhouse’. Nigel Farage has publicly declared investing just over £200k in a new vehicle chaired by Liz Truss’s former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. If successful, it could potentially make Farage millions. But the LibDems and others claim it raises conflict of interest questions for the party and its leader).
Importing Trumpian politics?
The final paragraph of the Observer leader concluded that without new rules, “the risk is that the political culture Donald Trump has created in the US is imported to the UK: the realisation that it is not just possible to be on the make in politics , it is normalised and acceptable. Farage behaves as if the rules – probity, integrity, accountability – do not apply to him.”
The £5m gift issue hasn’t gained enough widespread traction to damage Reform UK’s expected success on May 7th but, along with Farage’s Trump cheerleader history, it should offer a challenge for whoever eventually succeeds Keir Starmer as Labour’s prime minister. Whether that is Burnham, Streeting, Rayner or a dark horse coming through on the rails. For my part, although I’ve long argued in this column and on air, that Sir Keir isn’t the man to lead the party into the next general election, I don’t believe that bringing him down straight off the back of this week’s election carnage would be the right moment to do it.
Darkest and finest hours
If the ‘Mandelstein’ folly represents Starmer’s darkest hour, then his willingness to stand up to Trump over the Iran War represents his finest hour and, for that, he deserves to survive until Labour’s party conference in Liverpool at the end of September where both his future – and the direction of the government and who should lead it – should be thrashed out. A future that demands both a leader and a strategy not just to counter Reform UK on the populist right but simultaneously the Greens on its populist left in this new fragmented age of social media driven political impatience.
Unless Labour MPs and members pick the right man or woman this time, then the very real possibility of Prime Minister Farage will become a probability and with it, a Trumpian approach to government that we’ll quickly live to regret. Rather like the Brexit the polls consistently show the majority of the public would rather reverse but which paradoxically – lest we forget – still represents Nigel Farage’s crowning political achievement to date. Opponents also – hopefully? – believe the more seats and councils Reform win on Thursday the more it could backfire at the next general election. One senior cabinet minister telling me: “Reform is already proving useless at running councils it won last year, the more people experience local government by Reform, the more the chance they won’t fancy prime minister Farage and his motley crew running the country.”
Starmer’s final appeal
‘WE’RE STILL ONLY ONES ON YOUR SIDE’… Keir Starmer chose my old Labour loyalist ship, the Mirror’s front page to launch his personal election eve appeal to voters.
He wrote: “Politics is about choices. The choices that affect you and your family. On Thursday, when you go to put your vote in the ballot box, there’s a clear choice on that piece of paper. Unity or division. Progress versus the politics of anger. The right plan for our country up against easy answers that will lead us nowhere,
“Farage, Badenoch and Polanski have proven they cannot meet this moment. But my Labour government is.”
Ostensibly a message to the electorate, it was implicitly one to those of his own MPs and ministers weighing up whether to oust him. An appeal for more time in Number 10, a breathing space for his premiership. Whether he’ll get it when the full results of ‘Bloody Thursday’ roll in, looks anybody’s guess. But no, he won’t, according to the Times aforementioned Patrick Maguire. Back on April 24th, his column headline predicted: ‘By the early hours of May 8th, the cabinet will know Starmer is done for’. Needless to say, the prime minister would appear disinclined to agree,
