Are the vultures circling around Keir Starmer?

0:02Clive Lewis:This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:06Andy Burnham:We're in a quandary. It feels like we're in checkmate and I don't, it's hard to see a way out of it. Is Andy Burnham up for this? You have to ask Andy Burnham. Have you spoken to him? I have spoken to Andy Burnham, yeah. But you, yeah, I'm not sure if he wants to move to Norwich, but would you give up your seat? It's a question I've asked myself, and I'd love to obviously consult with my wife as well on family, But you know what? You know, if I'm going to sit here and say, you know, country before party, party for personal ambition, then yes, I have to say yes, don't I? You give up your seat for Andy Burnham?

0:36Clive Lewis:I would, yeah.

0:37Andy Burnham:Well, OK, we'll get him on the phone.

0:39Clive Lewis:That is Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich, not Manchester, saying he would give up his seat for Andy Burnham so that Andy Burnham could run for the Labour leadership.

0:52Andy Burnham:What is going on when backbench MPs feel emboldened to go on television and openly call for a mutiny against their own leader? Is it now an open secret that Keir Starmer isn't going to make it past May? Welcome to The News Agents.

1:13Clive Lewis:The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And Clive Lewis is, I mean, is he the typical Labour MP? Does he represent the beating heart of the backbench? He's probably not. I mean, he's openly been critical of the leadership before, and he will do so again. He's on the left of the party. And he's on the left of the party. But it is sort of telling that, as you say, Emily, in the introduction, that people just think, yeah, I can go and do this now. I can say this now. And back when they brought down Thatcher, they talked about a stalking horse. I mean, it does look like it's all shaping up for a leadership contest, even though Keir Starmer himself, I keep hearing, doesn't think there's a problem and thinks that everything is fine.

1:55Clive Lewis:You should explain a stalking horse,

1:56Andy Burnham:just because our younger viewers won't kind of go back to the Thatcher days.

2:01Clive Lewis:Sir Anthony Mayer was put up as a sort of person, not because he could beat Margaret Thatcher, but that he would open up a race. And that would facilitate Michael Heseltine coming into the race to be the real challenger to Margaret Thatcher. And that eventually sort of did work.

2:17Andy Burnham:In other words, nobody's expecting Clive Lewis to be the next leader. And maybe it wouldn't even be Andy Burnham who's the next leader. But it just shows that the sands would start to shift around a new leadership contest. Exactly.

2:31Clive Lewis:And so you kind of think, does this matter? Well, it's Clive Lewis. Maybe it doesn't matter that much. But that it's happening at all. And it's such a terrible time for this government, given the events of the past week, where the kind of Rachel Reeves U-turn on what she was going to do about income tax, Keir Starmer sort of bringing the spectre of a leadership contest ever closer by Downing Street briefing that he would fight any leadership contest and then sort of slagging off West Streeting and a couple of others in the process. It's all added to this sense of impending crisis when we are a week out from the budget.

3:07Andy Burnham:I mean, you could say it's a really stupid time to do it. Inflation is down today. It's lower than, it's fallen lower than many had predicted. and they've had a really strong week on immigration messages. Now, whether backbench MPs will eventually support Shabana Mahmood, we don't yet know, but they've had a very strong message. It's been kind of well-received by other parties and it looks as if it is being well-received by the wider electorate. And so, in a way, it's a completely counterintuitive time to start raising the issue of instability once again in their own party.

3:39Clive Lewis:I think there has been a psychological step change among Labour MPs, my impression is from conversations with him over the course of the last week or two. If we'd been having this conversation a month ago, everyone knew that Starr was struggling. Everyone knew that the poll situation was bad. It should be said that the more and more that those polls look like they are in stasis, which they have looked, they've actually been remarkably stable for a long time now. If anything, Labour just gradually sort of declining. The worse the kind of political situation gets. But I think there has been a step change psychologically between that, the sense that he is in trouble, and a more real sense now that he cannot lead them into the next election.

4:14Clive Lewis:Now, of course, that could change. And it could be that the results, local election results next May, are anticipated to be so bad that psychologically they end up being slightly better and that allows him to stay for longer. But I think that the general feeling among the Labour MPs is that it's not just about the national poll rating. It's about his poll ratings. They are catastrophically bad. I mean, genuinely catastrophically bad. We've talked on this show before about the slight curiosity, in a way, of why Starmer has become so reviled in the country. And he has become reviled in the country.

4:43Clive Lewis:He is now the most unpopular prime minister on record since modern polling began in 1977. That includes all of the litany of catastrophic prime ministers that we had in recent years, even at their nadir. And the feeling and concern is, among Labour MPs, is that Starmer may be irreparably damaging, not just himself, but the Labour brand overall. And I think that is the change that in a way, number 10 brought upon themselves when they briefed about West Streeting challenging him only last week. They've basically introduced and legitimised the idea of a challenge, which lots of Labour MPs were already thinking about because of that set of polls about him.

5:22Clive Lewis:I mean, I was struck over the weekend. I had communications with former senior Labour minister, someone who is so tribally Labour, it's not true. one or two others who kind of know about the Downing Street operation and the sense of utter despair and I think a degree of anger not just that things have gone badly for Keir Starmer but this is authored a lot of it by Keir Starmer himself it's not just that the events of politics have conspired to make life difficult for him it is that the ineptness the unforgivability of so much of what has gone on from the Downing Street operation needed to be called out.

6:01Clive Lewis:And just the language that was being used by people who I think are... Temperate. Just temperate, and they are Labour through and through, and loyalists, their sense of just despair was really palpable.

6:15Andy Burnham:I do think, funny enough, I was reading Danny Finkelstein in The Times today, and he quotes Stephen Pinker. I mean, this is sounding like Russian dolls, but bear with it. The Stephen Pinker book is called When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony. and Danny Finkelstein's point is that sometimes people can feel things but they're not said out loud the moment something is said out loud it kind of legitimizes everyone else to start talking about it in other words the example he gives is the emperor's new clothes everyone knows that the emperor's wearing no clothes but it takes the little boy to start laughing and pointing and And then everyone can go, oh, phew, it wasn't just me.

6:55Andy Burnham:It was you. It was you. It was you. And I think that's what the briefing did two weeks ago with Wes. I mean, we were sort of directed towards Morgan McSweeney as being the orchestrator. That has been denied. But let's just say whoever it was that put out that slightly frenzied, pugilistic fight back leak, you know, about Starmer's going to take it on and all the rest of it. unwittingly allowed everyone to kind of go, oh, wow, he really is in trouble then. Oh, I see that. That wasn't just me thinking it privately on my own. Everyone's been having the same discussion. So it's almost like it was designed to work against Starmer, belying the very thing it was saying.

7:38Clive Lewis:Well, also, as you say, we're weak to the budget. And I think the PRP, Parliamentary Labour Party, are deeply pissed off that they feel that the run-up to the budget, which is supposed to be the sort of seminal political moments of the autumn, around which some sort of fight back could begin, has itself been so botched. I mean, Kelly Badenock had a line in Prime Minister's Questions today, which I thought, you know, was pretty fair enough, when she said that this is the only budget which has fallen apart before it's even happened. And I think that is fair enough, right? Because we spent, you know, Rachel Reeves had that early morning, almost felt like an emergency press conference that were supposed to be pitch rolling the budget and the idea of income tax rises.

8:18Clive Lewis:Now, we discussed that on the show at the time. I actually thought that the income tax rise stuff would be really catastrophic for them. But that is what she said was going to happen. And of course, what we discover only last week is that now they've decided, probably because Labour MPs, and they should have known this, were so down on the idea of breaking that manifesto pledge, they've retreated from it. And there was a good quote from a Labour MP, unnamed Labour MP, I think it was in The Times the other day. It said they rolled the wrong fucking pitch, right? And that is the problem. You know, when you're basically leading your MPs up to the top of the hill...

8:49Clive Lewis:Please don't.

8:51Andy Burnham:We've had enough nursery rhymes.

8:52Clive Lewis:But when you get marching them up to the top of the hill and you march them down before the battle's even begun, it just conveys a sense of political chaos at the top of the party.

9:01Andy Burnham:So I'd go back even further than that. I think if you wanted to point to the moment, you know, we did all these sort of what-if episodes at History, the moment that Starmer stood up in the Commons did not give the Chancellor his full backing and then she began to cry, was clearly very upset and the bond markets kind of took her side and he felt she was unsackable. I wonder if he had made a move at that point, if he had changed his Chancellor at that point, would it have provided insulation in the shape of something more creative, given more confidence, done more to stabilise the party now? And I sort of think, actually, the trouble is not...

9:39Andy Burnham:I mean, polling-wise, you're absolutely right, Lewis, in terms of where his numbers are. But I think it's the problem of him and her together. They both sort of sink each other.

9:47Clive Lewis:But that presupposes that there is a political titan that is waiting to take over as Chancellor, where the markets would feel confident, the Labour-back benches would feel happy.

9:57Andy Burnham:The markets would feel confident if there was somebody who just had the balls to kind of get on with the thing they wanted to do. And we haven't seen that.

10:04Clive Lewis:Also, she undermined her market. But by doing the income tax thing, The one argument they were making is that the markets would not tolerate her removal because she was willing to do the thing that no other person would be. But she undermined that one card that she had by retreating from the income tax pledge. And of course, there is a very obvious point, which I haven't seen made that much. But if this has been the long term thinking of the Treasury, that what needed to happen was for income tax to go up. And that was the neatest, best way to raise the revenues that eliminate the shortfall. and that has been the planning process for weeks and weeks and weeks and Rachel Reeves does that morning news conference so more or less confirming that and then they change their mind it means that we are going to get a budget next week that has been cobbled together that hasn't got any strategy that is not got reform minded kind of proposals in it because it's all being rewritten really fast you mean little reform not big reform yeah it's just going to be bits and pieces here and there and it's being made up as they go along.

11:06Clive Lewis:And that ain't the way for good financial planning.

11:09Andy Burnham:Well, she had a moment where she nearly, she could have sold it as a good news story. Do you remember it was because the OBR said that her black hole was smaller than it was, that she could then not have to raise income tax. But that story got completely lost. You know, I mean, a massive PR failure if that was true. Or maybe she just didn't believe she could even sell it to the public. I don't know. But, you know, now we've got this awful turn, the smorgasbord of taxes as if everyone went to a buffet choosing their favourite tax. I mean, that's not going to work.

11:38Clive Lewis:I mean, what I'd worry about if I were number 10, this budget is clearly not going to be a happy budget. It's clearly been, as you say, John, quite sort of politically all over the place. The backdrop to it is this. You've got a member of the cabinet feeling able, and not just able, but licensed in a way to go on television and attack, not the prime minister, but attack is number 10, which is basically tantamount to attacking the prime minister. You've got backbench MPs, albeit, as you say, Clive Lewis. I mean, the idea, I think, that Andy Burnham would go and seek a seat in Norwich, given his association with Manchester.

12:08Clive Lewis:King of the North. Yeah, exactly. To Norwich. It would completely undermine his personal brand politically. But the fact that you've got an MP openly saying, yeah, maybe I'll do this because maybe we need a vacancy. It verts to a kind of like real collapse of authority at the centre. The one thing I'd say is, I mean, we're talking a lot about criticism of Starmer. I do think the PLP, the Parliamentary Labour Party, I do think some of their MPs, I think some of these problems do are about the sort of slight ungovernability of that group, considering how big, you know, even despite how big the majority is.

12:38Clive Lewis:Maybe because. Well, maybe or because, yeah, indeed. Yeah. And two things about that. One is, I mean, Boris Johnson said this funnily enough about the 2019 intake of Tory MPs. I think it's the same with the 2024 intake of Labour MPs. I think that, you know, you've got a lot of younger, newer MPs. I think we have so many more polls than we used to. We have Twitter in a way that we never used to. And I think that there was a time when governments could be underwater, as recently as the Cameron government, could be underwater in the polls for quite long periods. And it resulted in, yeah, some nervousness and some conversation, but not in a sort of existential angst.

13:11Clive Lewis:Yes, you've got the reform element as well, which complicates things. But I think the kind of skittishness of MPs is problematic. And the other thing is to say, I think in a way, do you remember like during the election, there was all this talk about like command and control selections of Labour MPs and sort of saying these are all going to be sort of people in Starmer's image and they're all from that wing of the party. I think one thing we've discovered with this intake is that they're not. They are actually substantially to the left. I'm not talking about the Corbynite left, but they are firmly on the so-called soft left of the Labour Party.

13:39Clive Lewis:They don't like the welfare changes. They probably aren't going to like the immigration changes. They don't like the direction of the economy under Reeves. And that is why when we're hearing about all these potential successes, whether it's Burnham or Rayner or even, dare I say, Lucy Powell, who I think is perhaps a bit underpriced as a potential future leader of the Labour Party. They are all from that wing of the party and adverting to a sort of, even West Streeting pushing into this, a more left-wing agenda. Because it's not just what you have to do to become Labour leader. I think it is where the median Labour backbench MP now is.

14:08Clive Lewis:But Lewis, to your point about the soft left and the concerns that there are, and there are so many people of that wing of the party in the Commons right now. I mean, the Times is reporting today that the Tribune group say they have the 80 MPs that are needed to back a candidate in a leadership contest that would, you know, trigger a leadership contest. Now, you know, you don't know how solid that is. You don't know whether that is spin by someone in the Tribune group to try to kind of create a crisis or whatever. I mean, the details of that, I kind of never believe these things unless I can see the names of the people and who've been willing to publicly sign up to it.

14:46Clive Lewis:So you've got to take it with a bit of a grain of salt. But whoever the reporter was believes that there is sufficient in it that they write up a story that, you know, maybe there are enough MPs ready to go who are prepared to pull the trigger on Starmer's leadership. And the impression I keep getting from speaking to people in and around number 10 is that Keir Starmer is sort of in a slightly other world about it, that, you know, he's loving being prime minister, he enjoys all the kind of cut and thrust, and I think he's so removed from the politics of it, which is part of the problem. Well, he's never been that sort of politician who, that sort of back slapping kind of in the tea rooms and all that sort of stuff.

15:27Clive Lewis:And again, it speaks to the sensitivity of Labour MPs that there was a quite good story. I can't remember where I read it. It may have been in the FT. I can't remember what it was at the weekend. One of the big write ups was just talking about at a recent PLP meeting where Starmer was supposed to be sort of getting to know again. Somebody's back benches a bit better taking questions. and he didn't know someone's name and he had to sort of ask them. And OK, he's got 400 MPs. But it's kind of symptomatic of that kind of like, you know, it's been quite a long time since the election now. And yeah, it's one of those sort of petty things, but it sort of crystallises the kind of just the kind of foie de that there is between the PLP, the backbenches and Stam himself.