Starmer has sealed his own fate

The definitive history of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party was written on Sunday afternoon.

By blocking Manchester mayor Andy Burnham from becoming a candidatein the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, the party and the prime minister have made clear that ambition is a dirty word and more suited to other parties.

Consider the current plight of the Labour Party. Is the government suffering from a surfeit of parliamentary talent? Are there too many gifted orators and administrators, communicators and leaders, on the green benches of the House of Commons? Do the whips have trouble corralling all those astute political skills of an evening to ensure that it is properly exploited and directed?

Such would seem to be the case when today’s decision by the party’s ruling National Executive Committee is examined. Whatever you think of Burnham – and I was a colleague of his for 14 years, first elected on the same day in June 2001 – he is a “big beast” in political terms, someone who has served in cabinet and in senior positions for two leaders of the opposition, even before he took charge of one of Britain’s biggest cities. As Burnham himself might modestly acknowledge, he has communication skills that are far too rare in the current crop of Labour MPs, with their vacuous assertions of “As we’ve made very clear” and their desperate tendency to avoid more difficult questions, of which there have been many these last 18 months.

But no, according to the NEC, everything is so tickety-boo in the Parliamentary Labour Party that it does not need any help from outside Westminster, thank you very much, least of all from a politician who won every ward in Manchester last time he was up for re-election. Sure, the government’s popularity has reached record lows in almost every poll, Labour has been trailing in third place for the last eight months and Starmer himself is genuinely loathed by a significant portion of the electorate, but God forbid an ambitious MP be added to the current number.

But all this is just great. Business as usual. Perfectly normal. Burnham? Tell him we’re doing fine as we are, thank you very much.

And so the pathetic, trivial insecurities of a beleaguered prime minister must take precedence over the good of the party. It would have been at least diverting to have Burnham back in the Commons. Yes, he has an inflated opinion of his own abilities, as indicated by his candidacy for Labour’s leadership on two previous occasions, and yes, he undoubtedly would like to take advantage of Starmer’s unpopularity and inability to govern effectively in order to replace him. So what? Isn’t that what politics – democracy – is all about? Or would Labour prefer the government benches to be packed with dead-eyed supporters of the prime minister, willing to follow him down to electoral oblivion rather than raise any objection to his frequent self-inflicted, unforced errors?

How insecure must any prime minister be that they would seek to prevent anyone of any ability from entering the Commons and lending those abilities to his government?

Burnham has every right to feel scorned and unnecessarily humiliated. But at least he now has the consolation of having been correctly identified as a serious rival to Starmer. And the prime minister now has to face another consequence of his underlings’ actions today: whatever the result in Gorton and Denton, he will own it. That is a big risk, at least part of which he could have off-loaded onto Burnham had the NEC chosen differently. But now, he faces the prospect either of receiving all the credit for a victory, or all the blame if Labour loses. And that latter scenario is at least a plausible one.

However long the campaign lasts, it will be the longest ever experienced by Number 10. A defeat where Burnham is not the candidate will have even more profound – and negative – consequences for Keir Starmer than either a victory or a defeat would have been had Burnham been allowed to become Labour’s standard bearer.

This latest act of political control freakery could turn out to be Starmer’s last. And his greatest misjudgment.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]