by Rob Marchant
“And you call that statesmanship? I call it an emotional spasm.”
Aneurin Bevan to the Labour Party Conference, 1957.
This week has been an extraordinary one, and one for which Nye’s famous line might easily have been written.
A party which still enjoys a majority of 164 in the Commons has, for some reason, collectively decided to lose its mind.
After some dire local election results, it began with a short meeting between the PM and the Health Secretary, followed by the latter’s resignation, and ended with the calling of a by-election, so that a more-popular colleague can return to parliament and challenge for the leadership. A more convoluted script you could not find in The Thick Of It.
Now, if Labour wins that by-election, it may have a route to a new leader. But that route is fraught with unpredictability. There are, as they say, a great number of moving parts.
First, Burnham needs to win in a seat where every one of its eight wards has just been won by Reform, and by a good margin in each case. As Mayor and former MP for nearby Leigh, he has previously enjoyed a good personal vote, yes, but he is betting the entire farm on that fact (for comparison, individual MPs are usually felt to make a difference of plus or minus 3% to the vote garnered by the colour of the rosette). It is as if the turquoise wave of the 7th of May had never happened.
In addition, unlike the mayoral campaigns, where Burnham has generally had an easy ride, this is likely to be a bruising one, the biggest by-election in decades, with immense media scrutiny at national level. No politician, who has been around as long as Burnham has, does so without enemies, or skeletons in the closet.
Furthermore, the local voters of the famously independent-minded Wigan area, may not like being pawns in someone else’s leadership ambitions, be he a local boy or not. Turnout may well be higher than usual for a by-election, where in both mayorals and locals it was low, making predictions more difficult. And no-one really knows how other parties will fare.
In short, this by-election is like betting your entire stack of chips on the roulette ball landing on the zero. It might just work, but it is a wild punt, not a calculated risk. What happens now is really anyone’s guess.
If the gambit fails, the challenge to Starmer might or might not collapse altogether. For his part, Burnham could continue as Mayor until the end of his term, but likely as a severely weakened one, and unlikely to stand again. The mayoralty will therefore very likely be lost in either case, most probably to Reform, the very people that Labour is trying to beat at national level.
In the meantime, Whitehall will be in paralysis for at least the next six weeks, as no-one will want to do anything important while there might be an imminent changing of the guard. Labour looks at best distracted to the country, embroiled in internal battles instead of doing the job it’s been elected for. Again, a gift to Reform.
All for the sake of one man’s desire for the top job.
Finally, let us return to the start and deal with Wes Streeting. Having started the week as a serious challenger – perhaps the only serious challenger – to Starmer, he is now in limbo: like all the other potential candidates, awaiting the results of the by-election. Even if he stands, it is doubtful whether he would win or even has the PLP support to trigger a leadership election in the first place.
It may ultimately be that his sole contribution, be it deliberately or unwittingly, will have been to force Burnham’s ambitions to the surface. That is how quickly things have been changing during the course of a single week.
Not a shot has yet been fired, note, in any leadership contest, if there even is to be one. The hopeful vultures are still circling, although one possible outcome is certainly that Keir Starmer remains prime minister, at least for the moment.
Yet again, it has been shown that a week really is a long time in politics. And, amidst all this week’s chaos, there is one certainty: British politics is about to see a major example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Rob Marchant is an activist and former Labour party manager who blogs at The Centre Left
Tags: Andy Burnham, Keir Starmer, Labour leadership, Nye Bevan, Rob Marchant
