The end of the Labour party as a going concern in electoral politics?

0:01Gabriel Pogrund: Welcome to a bonus episode of The State of This. We're coming to you this morning in the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election, which I think on any measure is catastrophic for Keir Starmer. His leadership was already on the rocks. This result, which has seen Labour finish third in a seat that was one of the safest held in the country, is devastating. thing. And I think we're going to get loads of questions about what happens to Starmer next. Is this the end? May not be today, maybe the future. Is he now a prisoner of the left? And more broadly, this is tectonic. It is a realignment of the kind of electoral state of Britain.

0:37Gabriel Pogrund: The duopoly is gone of Labour and the Tories. And we now have five parties vying for contention. So look, with me this morning, we've got Patrick Maguire, the chief political accommodator at the Times, and Gabriel Pogrand of the Sunday Times, both utterly brilliant. Patrick, Do you want to kick us off? How bad is it?

0:54Patrick Maguire: Look, this is, we are staring down the barrel of the end of the Labour Party as a going concern in electoral politics. And that is not hyperbole. That is literally what has just happened. A seat they have held since 1931, where they have walked it at every general election, even under Jeremy Corbyn. They're now in a distant third to the Greens. And by the way, this wasn't the sort of Greens winning by 200 votes or it was a split. three ways with a thousand votes in it as some of us expected it to be the greens won 40 percent of the vote in one of labor's 40 safest seats even if you factor in uh midterm blues by elections all the cliches that don't actually apply here that is as you said steve catastrophic and even that doesn't feel like a strong enough word for it and if you multiply that right what's what's bad about it is, it's clearly not a one-off because look at what happened in Caffili in Wales in October, something very similar.

1:52Patrick Maguire: Labour falling back to a weaker third there, but still third behind another progressive party. It was plied there, then reform, then the Labour Party. And we've seen that pattern repeated in Gorton and Denton. And come May, it will inevitably be repeated across Manchester, in parts of Birmingham, in London. And we also saw, by the way, reform can still turn out 30 % of the vote in a seat that doesn't demographically favour it. So we'll see reform do its thing across swathes of the country and the electoral map, I think, frankly, will not have very much red in it on that morning, particularly in Scotland and Wales as well.

2:32Patrick Maguire: So it is really, really bad. And I think most of the Labour Party, at least in private, recognises that.

2:39Steven Swinford: I think that by-elections are, they're obviously irresistible for people that read the runes of politics and care about the sophology and the arithmetic they can also from time to time provide camouflage for parties you can hide behind the results we're talking about Keir Starmer in 2026 let's just for one moment flashback to 2021 everybody talks about the Hartlepool by-election as the the nadir in Keir Starmer's Nike tick in the J curve of his time in opposition, we could actually dwell on the Batley by-election that followed shortly thereafter, in which Starmer, courtesy of Shabana Mahmood, won by a few hundred votes.

3:24Steven Swinford: And in that instance, there were big structural trends, among them the dislocation of Labour's traditional support within the Muslim community, that were masked by Labour winning by a whisker against George Galloway. Well, in this instance, that hasn't happened. The result is impossible to ignore from the Labour Party. And as Patrick says, it does suggest that Labour now has lost the two demographics that were once lock square behind it. The ethnic minority communities of the United Kingdom. Forgive me for an oversimplification, but for the purpose of this podcast, let's refer to them as a pun.

4:05Steven Swinford: And then on the other hand, the wide working class block. And I will say, it is difficult not to overstate the significance of this. Flashback to 2024 election, I was re-examining the results. Not only did Labour get a simple majority just above 50 % of all votes cast at the last general election, but the Greens came not that much higher than the Workers' Party of Britain, George Galloway's party. And I think it is important to say, given the story that you two had on our podcast on Tuesday about Labour accusing the Greens of upping the salience of Israel-Gaza, that, you know, we've often contemplated, well, will the salience remain as high come the next general election?

4:55Steven Swinford: Will there be some relief or reprieve for Labour on the topic of Israel-Gaza. Well, look at what the Greens got in 2024 and look at what they got last night. The salience hasn't diminished. The Greens have transformed themselves into the ultimate repository for left, liberal and Muslim protest votes. And that's not going away. And just one last thing I feel I need to say. I spoke to a Labour source earlier who said that this has the biggest implications now for what happens in May. And they said you and your colleagues need to start thinking less about the Gorton and Dentons. But actually, how about London?

5:40Steven Swinford: You know, a lot of people are predicting a bloodbath in Wales and Scotland. Think about the capital. Every prospect now looking at this result, that Labour is about to be shredded by reform in a doughnut and those many of those white working class constituencies encircling the capital and then you know in the inner city bits uh which laborers depend upon you know also for a century it looks like the greens are going to plunder votes for fun so starmer is now you know he's faced the pressure from both sides and it's not that obvious whether he personally forget the Labour Party for one moment, but whether he personally has any way of squaring that circle or forestalling either of those electoral trends.

6:29Gabriel Pogrund: Let's talk a bit about what went wrong during the actual campaign itself and then move on to what comes next shortly. So the things I just wanted to touch on that, looking back, were just vaguely nuts. One, the decision to block Andy Burnham from running to the seat, who would have been their best shot at it. That is on Starmer. That was his decision. Two, this utterly surreal campaign where they pretended the Greens didn't exist at every turn and just kept saying the straight race between reform and Labour, which was a willful defiance of reality. and then three I guess it's the the misplaced confidence we were getting briefings as recently as yesterday morning saying we think we've got it we've got the numbers and clearly either that misplaced confidence was because some kind of extraordinary reverse expectation management strategy or they just didn't know what was happening on the ground in their own constituency and all three of those things were deeply worrying well look the original sin of this campaign of

7:32Patrick Maguire: of course, was the fact that Andy Burnham wasn't the candidate. Andy Burnham caught this entirely correctly when he said he was the only person who could win. And the fact of his being blocked would cost Labour the by-election. He said that in a late night, slightly intemperate Twitter exchange with Tom Baldwin, the Prime Minister's biographer. And he's been vindicated. He's been proven right. In a way, actually, by the way, Keir Starmer and the late Morgan McSweeney have also been vindicated because their argument was that Labour would definitely lose the Manchester a Merrill by-election, if Andy Burnham triggered a by-election for that by becoming the MP, I think that definitely would have happened as well.

8:08Patrick Maguire: But in the more immediate sense, you know, we now have proof of concept. Andy Burnham would have won that by-election, Keir Starmer can't. And actually, Keir Starmer lost it really, really badly. And I think, you know, it was inevitable that this would have happened. And Keir Starmer has thrown this by-election basically for what um you know he remains prime minister but you know what is the point it's another entirely negative proposition which is which is how we got here in the first place with

8:37Steven Swinford: with andy burnham being blocked yeah i think also i mean i think there are two questions that inevitably flow from the result one is just relates to starmer's own future starmer by inserting himself into the by-election hitting the campaign trail days before the result I mean, to the extent there is any ambiguity, there is none now that this was a rejoinder to Starmer's own leadership. And I think Steve said in our last episode that, you know, Starmer losing this or the Labour Party losing this wouldn't necessarily accelerate Starmer's replacement. I would stand by that. I don't see that it makes sense for Wes Streeting or Angela Rayner or Andy Burnham to go now.

9:21Steven Swinford: what it does do though is it deepens the debate on the second question which is on an interim basis what is Keir Starmer for but long term what is Labour for and I think the complexity of this result is the fact that there's something for everybody in the result you know if your conviction is that Labour has not been adequately left-wing over the course of Starmer's premiership which let's be straightforward most people around the cabinet table on the soft left seem to believe from uh yeah ed miller bound is parodied as the personification of that tendency but so much of the labor party from the back benches to the membership believes that starmer's essential sin was his accommodation with morgan mitsweeney and blue labor so if that's your existing conviction then this result is vindication in the extreme but then also when you look at reform's result i mean this is not dissimilar to carefully in that they may not have won but they are plundering labor votes they are at the expense of the tory party becoming you know the representatives of white working class britain and so it kind of deepens the existing ambiguity about what it is that Labour should be for.

10:39Steven Swinford: I don't think anybody yesterday could answer the question straightforwardly, what is Keir Starmer for? What is Labour for? We've been trying to answer that question since 2019, possibly 2015, possibly longer still. Many people would say that question has been criminally unanswered since Blair's second term, but it is the essential question of the moment now and it is the one that will define whatever comes next.

11:05Gabriel Pogrund: And look, just because people aren't going over the top today. That doesn't mean the threat to Starmer's leadership has receded. We're sitting here this morning and Angela Rayner has already come out, the former Deputy Prime Minister, and says this should be a wake-up call for the Prime Minister, that there needs to be a braver form of politics from here on in. And that's the point of what we're going to get now, I think. We are going to get a proper battle of ideas between the left and the right of the Labour party. If you talk to people like Angela Rayner, if you talk to those on the left in the cabinet, they will say Starmer needs to listen to the PLP.

11:41Gabriel Pogrund: He needs to kind of go back to Labour values, Labour roots, and kind of basically socialism is a lot of what is being talked about. If you talk to those on the centre of the party and slightly more to the right, they will make a very different argument. They are making a very different argument this morning. They are arguing that we cannot retreat to the comfort zone. We got brutally beaten when Corbyn ran with a kind of a left-wing socialist platform, and we need to stick with the centre ground. So this is the kind of battle for the soul of the Labour Party, of which, at some point, Keir Starmer could end up as collateral damage, effectively, as they decide to move on without him eventually.

12:19Patrick Maguire: I think that is the obvious subtext of what Angela Rayner was writing, when she said the Labour Party needs to be braver. It's certainly putting the Prime Minister on notice. Had a long conversation about the internal politics of the soft left with a well-placed person early in the week. And Angela Rayner is up for it. And I think her like-minded colleagues who are still around the cabinet table, well, I know they're feeling very angry this morning with the state of the party. But this is all incredibly finely poised. It's still an awkward time for anyone to launch a leadership bid. I don't think no one in the cabinet is talking in those terms.

12:57Patrick Maguire: then there's still a lot of nervousness about what a leadership contest will unleash. Because with every electoral event that happens while Keir Starmer is leader for longer, the stakes at play get higher. And we've seen that today with the Greens winning 40 % of the really safe Labour seat. 40 % of the vote in a really safe Labour seat. And thus it's almost like a bigger inhibitor to moving. Because you're like, if we get this wrong, we are going to kill the Labour Party, not save it. So it's very, very, very tricky.

13:25Steven Swinford: And I think another dimension which kind of will influence the party's position on this is that Starmer's in this weird moment where the ideological complexion and just the straightforward question of the personnel and his Downing Street team is subject to a big question mark. At every point up until a few weeks ago, you knew or could imagine what Morgan McSweeney might say in a response to a result like this. We know what he would say because his template to the 2024 election was, we have to shift to the right, win marginally but decisively by regaining the people who left the Labour Party in 2017 after the Brexit vote.

14:11Steven Swinford: recapture the red wall, whatever that is, and we're going to do just enough to hold on to our traditional seats in the cities. And I think that when Patrick and I were writing our book, we spoke to somebody who said that, you know, Stalin was one of the first prime ministers or Labour leaders in modern times who, in a hypothetical scenario, you can't imagine speaking to. So, you know, people say you could always imagine what Gordon Brown would say when confronted with a tax and spend issue or confronted with a party management issue or a geopolitical issue. And Blair was the same. And Corbyn also, you know, people accused him.

14:49Steven Swinford: People said this was his Achilles heel. Obviously, to his supporters, it was what made him the politician he was. But you knew exactly what it was that he would say on a given issue. Starmer now has his dire electoral predicament, but it's not that straight, not clear from his number 10 team more from him personally what it is that he proposes to do about it which is why i think you know as patrick has outlined more eloquently than me starmer is now he's a vessel he's sort of in office but not in power and you know to the extent that it doesn't serve the interest of his cabinet to move now he will remain in post for the time being but because he is congenitally incapable of resolving those big political questions it really is now a question i think of timing and waiting till May.

15:39Steven Swinford: And if you're Angela Rayner, if you're West Streeting, if you're Andy Burnham, the next few months, next few weeks will be spent dwelling on this result and considering what it is that they would lay out as their critique and their constructive response to a result like this. How do you prevent this being the story of 2024? Heidi Alexander and those poor souls who've been deputising on the airwaves today keep saying this isn't going to happen in the general election. Well, Labour said this was a straight toss-up between themselves and reform, and that wasn't so. Obviously, the credibility of their message and how they attempted to find these contests is shocked now.

16:23Steven Swinford: So the real question becomes, well, what does Tom's successor or challenger have as their remedy to the predicament at hand?

16:32Patrick Maguire: Yeah, absolutely. and the fallback strategy the Labour Party could all agree on even while Keir Starmer was leader was well I had this conversation with someone in government just this week that Keir Starmer still beats Nigel Farage in head-to-head best PM polling but we saw in Gorton that actually the government might not get to define the question Keir Starmer might not get to define the question particularly for progressive voters actually they've been given on several occasions a choice of do you want uh keir starmer's labour party or reform uk we know you don't want reform uk so vote for us or else and then they say okay well i don't want i review so i'm going to vote for a nicer progressive option as i see it and and that's the problem for labour and that that is the problem uh that is the problem any leader is going to have to contend with now and it will shape the direction the party goes in

17:25Steven Swinford: politically i think possibly a final word we need to address is the conservatives losing their deposit as well there's probably no greater example of the discrepancy between what the mood and vibes are in westminster and what they are in the country then you know the narrative surrounding kemi baden over the last few months which is you know she's been credited for her polished pmq's performances for shoring up her position uh it faced with a strategic setback in generics defection she played a tactical masterstroke in flushing him out you know if you read what we are writing down here and listen to what people are saying you would assume that the

18:10Patrick Maguire: tories would have won this by-election because you know it's chemi mania chemi's amazing chemi's brilliant and that's not to be childish and say she's not good at parliamentary opposition as you say but clearly actually what's happening out there in the real world certainly in swathes of the country is that reform are now the party of the right and there is now an open competition similar to that the Tories and reform are engaging until not long ago as to who is the dominant party on the left and the answer actually may vary to either of those questions across the country but if this is existential for the Labour Party it's really really existential for the Tories to sort to win a couple hundred more votes than the Monster Raving Dooney Party, win 2%, and for people to be utterly unsurprised by that.

18:51Patrick Maguire: You know, it's not normal, even in a seat in a Manchester.

18:54Steven Swinford: Yeah. So the duopoly is shattered, and Starmer limps on for now. We hope you enjoyed this special bonus edition of The State of It. We always try and give you a real flavour of what our lives are actually like as political journalists. In this instance, for the sake of full disclosure, I think Steve has had some internet connectivity issues, or perhaps he's just got a call from a good source. But we will be back as one with you on Tuesday. And thank you for tuning in.