There is (cough) a range of opinion on whether Sir Keir Starmer should be pushed out afterwards. One minute, one minister says: “It’s terminal,” and another says “I just can’t see a way through.” The next minute, another says: “I’m firmly of the view we must not doomscroll our way through leaders – we have to wean ourselves off it.”
But the eagerness or reluctance to make a move will be shaped by the results – as one government source says: “A lot rests on them – if it’s Greens up 500, Reform’s up 2,500 and we’re down 2,000, well then: holy shit.”
Around the country, the party is already hacked off with the chatter around whether Starmer can survive, as one senior councillor tells me: “Every time you check your phones there is another intervention from Andy [Burnham] or some more speculation about Angela [Rayner]. It is demotivating – there is a big, big frustration among activists and voters who see it and just think it’s a shambles.” But, shambles or not, going into next week, it is not clear if the PM of the day will keep his job.
A new prediction reaches my ears that Burnham and Rayner might “move as one”, with the possibility Rayner would be pitched as the person to take over from Starmer now, but that Burnham, in time, could be the person to fight the next general election. I’m told the difficulty is there are “two distinct decisions – who’ll deliver the 2024 manifesto, and who could win the next election – they might not be the same person”.
Rayner and Burnham are “talking every day”, I’m told, although a Team Rayner source told me that suggestion was “nonsense”. But neither Rayner or Burnham’s ambitions are a secret.
It is also possible that nothing will happen, and that Labour will take a battering but then stumble on, with Starmer trying to relaunch his leadership again, and hoping that better times come. The problem is, as another senior Labour figure says, “how many times can you press the reset button before people realise it’s not connected to anything?”
