Why the coup that never was could be exactly what Starmer needed

Maybe someone can help me here, but I’m just wondering what the leader of the Scottish Labour Party was doing when he decided to denounce the leader of the British Labour Party. Maybe Anas Sarwar will volunteer to again explain himself to the media. As things stand, the only grilling he’s had about his extraordinary outburst has come from the man he tried to oust, Keir Starmer.

Sarwar had the decency, if not the good sense, to call Starmer beforehand to tell him about his dramatic announcement to the media that Downing Street leadership must change, perhaps the first documented occasion when an assassin warned his victim in advance and yet still expected the desired result – the element of surprise being the deciding factor in the success of any such mission.

According to accounts, which obviously we need to take with due scepticism, Starmer gave him the forensic treatment. “What’s the plan, Anas? When does this happen? Who’s the new prime minister?” Sarwar had no answer to such questions, and so the second attempt on the prime minister’s life fizzled away like a deep-fried Mars bar discarded outside an Edinburgh chippy on a dreich night.

In fact, again according to the Westminster rumour mill, a (naturally, unnamed) cabinet minister has had to concoct the plot of what was lacking in Sarwar’s mission – that it would trigger a series of junior ministerial resignations culminating in the emergence of Wes “Big Wes” Streeting, in a kilt presumably, as the man to restore Labour’s fortunes in Scotland.

As vintage putsches go, “Sarwar 2026” compares unfavourably with Robespierre 1794, Lenin 1917 or even James Purnell 2009, when a brave young work and pensions secretary quit the cabinet and urged the then Labour leader and PM, Gordon Brown, to “stand aside to give Labour a fighting chance of winning the next election”. There was a media frenzy, because my fellow hacks and I are as addicted to leadership crises as we are to opinion polls, but Brown survived, led his party into the following year’s election, and lost. Lost, that is, just as surely as David Miliband would surely have done.

I may be one of the few people in the media who genuinely thinks that Starmer will lead his party into the next general election (not necessarily winning it), and that none of the potential rivals would do such a better job of things that it would be worth the Labour Party’s while to indulge in a leadership scrap.

If there were evidence that the installation of, say, Andy Burnham or Wes Streeting at the top would add 10 points to Labour’s poll ratings, there might be a case, just as there would be if the sight of Angela Rayner or Shabana Mahmood beaming triumphantly outside No 10 would guarantee the SNP were kicked out of power.

What must be remarked upon is that without both his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney and Tim Allan, his director of comms, Starmer was able to rally the entire cabinet to support him publicly in the wake of Sarwar’s intervention, as well as Rayner. And, by all accounts, he came out swinging last night as he addressed the party behind closed doors. One usually grumpy MP told Politico’s Bethany Dawson: “If we could bottle this Keir and show it to the country, we’ll walk 2029.” Is it possible that his former advisers were holding a fizzy Starmer back?

But there are no such indications of a Lazarus-like revival in Labour fortunes, just as there wasn’t even when Rishi Sunak took over from Liz Truss (though that did save the nation, at least from Liz Truss), not when Liz took over from Boris Johnson. Johnson took over from Theresa May and led his party to a famous victory in 2019, but that was more to do with a weary country wanting to end the Brexit agony. The last time a new PM boosted a party’s ratings was when John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher in 1990, and that was accompanied by major policy changes – abolishing the poll tax and trying to be more European.

The truth is that all of the potential successors to Starmer have their own strengths, and all would be an improvement in various ways on the current lawyerly, civil servant manqué. Streeting carries an argument far better; Rayner is more authentic; Mahmood better at getting things done, maybe; Burnham more popular in the North… but none have in their possession a magic money tree, and in terms of policy – currently taking a poor second place in the debate on the government’s future – the difference they make would be marginal. As they say about Burnham, it would be all about the “vibe”.

What any of the would-be next prime ministers do is divide the party in exactly the same way that successive rounds of leadership ballots rendered the Tories a mess, left in rival gangs permanently at war. It did not impress the voters and only added to their already grave misfortunes. Starmer, for all his errors and shortcomings, has not, like Johnson, been guilty and personally involved in a scandal the size of Partygate, he has not (unless we discover from the Mandelson papers) lied to parliament; and he has not, like Truss actually crashed the public finances – in fact the markets rather fear his and Rachel Reeves’s potential replacements.

Starmer is, in fact, actually like every Labour prime minister before him since the war; all (except Callaghan) faced plots to depose them, and all survived because at any given moment they were, on balance, the best that the party had available, and their various rivals often hated each other more than they did Attlee, Wilson, Blair and Brown. So it is today with Starmer, and that is why, for now, he has prevailed.