The Labour Left can now smell blood

Telegraph

22-05-2025

When the history of Keir Starmer's premiership comes to be written, the week beginning May 19, 2025 could be as significant as the week beginning November 19, 1990 was for Mrs Thatcher.
Just as, 35 years ago, it had all started to unravel for the Conservatives' most successful Prime Minister much earlier, so, in 2025, the wheels started to fall off this Labour Government some time ago.
But it is this week that we first caught a glimpse of exactly how Starmer's time in Downing Street could end – at the hands of his own parliamentary party and his own Deputy Leader.
When Kemi Badenoch challenged the Prime Minister over the despatch box of the Commons yesterday over Angela Rayner's proposals she had made to the Chancellor for tax increases, a number of interesting elements of this drama came together.
The first was an acceptance that Rayner has indeed been going somewhat beyond her ministerial remit by proposing new taxes – mainly on the wealthy and those who are savers – an activity that would have been violently disowned had it occurred before last year's general election.
That Starmer's Deputy feels emboldened to write such a memo today, and to be entirely relaxed about its subsequent 'accidental' leaking to the media suggests she believes she has the support of enough back bench colleagues to make her position in the cabinet impregnable.
Rayner's advocacy of a shift from Rachel Reeves's strategy of cuts presents some clear blue water between her position and that of both Reeves and the Prime Minister, not something that you might have expected in a Government that is less than a year old.
Then there was Starmer's announcement that he will, after months of insisting that his (and Reeves's) policies were the only safe route to economic recovery, review his decision to restrict the winter fuel payments to only the poorest pensioners.
This was the first real sign of blood in the water. Labour MPs are known to be frustrated at the original decision, announced by Reeves just weeks after the party returned to office last year, which sparked a drastic slide in popularity of the Government from an already modest 'high' of barely a third of the vote on polling day.
It became a focus of Starmer's lack of political nous that he had approved a cut that was massively unpopular across all age groups and demographics, while raising such small sums for the Treasury that it was hardly worth the political risk.
And now, having suffered all that unpopularity and criticism, he is rowing back from the policy after all – not in full, of course, so much of the original criticism will stand while even less money is raised for the hard-pressed Treasury.
Both of these events – Starmer's continuing struggles over the winter fuel allowance and Rayner's bold challenge to tax the rich rather than cut budgets – are being watched closely by unhappy back benchers, even as opinion polls deliver further bad news about their own electoral prospects.
A More In Common poll yesterday gave Reform an eight-point lead over Labour, which was on 22 per cent. No governing party in polling history has ever recovered from such lows and gone on to win the subsequent general election – at least, not without a change in leadership.
Labour's own support had fallen by three points since the previous poll, which some back benchers are putting down to Starmer's unexpectedly belligerent 'island of strangers' speech on immigration last week.
With Starmer caving in to demands for a reversal of policy on the hated winter fuel allowance, there will be MPs who detect an opportunity to pry from him some more concessions, perhaps on the Government's plans to slash social security benefits, another area causing back benchers to glance nervously at the results in their own constituencies last July.
In the aftermath of that general election victory, it would have been ludicrous to suggest that a leader who had just led his party to a 170-seat Commons majority might not survive as Prime Minister until the end of the Parliament. But things change quickly in this new political era.
If, as persistent rumours suggest, Reeves is to be removed from the Treasury, that would be a blow to Starmer's own authority, given how closely the two have worked together for the last four years.
How severe a blow would depend on how successful Reeves' successor was in reversing the Government's reputation for competence. But having lost both his Chancellor and his defining economic policy, could he remain in Number 10 for much longer?
Fickle though the public might be when it comes to our political leaders, they rarely, if ever, change their minds once they have decided that this or that politician no longer meets with their approval.
Labour is not about to take a dramatic turn to the Left: the centre of gravity in the parliamentary party remains decidedly moderate, but that doesn't mean Labour MPs will reject any opportunity to leverage more concessions from an already weakened prime minister.
Starmer's troubles are piling up on too many fronts. That history of his administration might yet be published as a pamphlet rather than a book.