Keir Starmer’s leadership hangs between survival and collapse

Erwin Schrödinger gave us his famous cat, which is simultaneously alive and dead. The curious case of Sir Keir Starmer presents us with Schrödinger’s prime minister.

His premiership is fatally wounded in the view of a great many Labour MPs across the factions. It is their settled conclusion that he will not lead them into the next general election and is likely to be removed from Number 10 before this year is out. That view, principally driven by his dire opinion poll ratings, has been entrenched by the misjudgments over Peter Mandelson and Matthew Doyle. In both cases, the Labour leader pleads that he was misled. Even if true, that isn’t a great excuse for a man who was sold to the voters as a fearsome prosecutor.

Yet his premiership is also very much alive. There he is giving a well-received address to a packed gathering of Labour MPs. There he is getting ratty with Sir Ed Davey at PMQs. There he is on the international stage where he seems most comfortable representing Britain at the Munich security conference.

In Schrödinger’s thought experiment, designed to illustrate the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, the moggie is in a sealed box. Only when the container is opened is it decided whether the cat is alive or dead. The key question facing his senior colleagues over the past week was whether or not to settle the prime minister’s fate by opening the lid on a leadership contest. Some thought the game was up. “By late Monday morning, it looked very serious,” says one cabinet member. All agree that this has been the most peril-infused period of his leadership since it began.

Morgan McSweeney, the man with a fair claim to have invented the prime minister, is no longer chief of staff. Tim Allan, the fourth director of communications at Starmer’s Number 10, unexpectedly decided to spend more time with his golf clubs. It has been confirmed that Sir Chris Wormald, the prime minister’s personal and mystifying pick as cabinet secretary little more than a year ago, is clearing his desk. Downing Street looks less like the pumping heart of government than the departure lounge at a regional airport.

The situations vacant should include prime minister, according to Anas Sarwar, leader of Labour’s embattled cohort in Scotland. I couldn’t entirely follow his logic when he demanded Sir Keir’s head because “the distraction has to end”. Would not a lengthy and grisly contest to supplant the prime minister be somewhat distracting? We may have to wait for the memoirs to know whether Mr Sarwar was a solo operator, as he claims and I suspect, or thought he was the first mover in a coup attempt that then failed to materialise because others bottled out.

For now, what matters is that this presented a test not just for Sir Keir, but also for the cabinet. He had to decide how much he wanted to keep his job. As I have previously suggested, he was up for the fight. The cabinet had to decide whether to try to prise power from his stubborn grip. By the close of play, and with varying degrees of alacrity and enthusiasm, they had rowed in behind the prime minister. Once Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting issued supportive statements, he was safe – for the time being. They had collectively concluded to keep the lid on the box for now. “What we’ve just had is a moment of peril,” reflects a cabinet member. “I felt the peril. I felt the ground shaking. And then the party pulled back from the brink.”

Some senior ministers genuinely believe it would be foolish to defenestrate Sir Keir in a humiliating fashion and he ought to be given more time to try to claw back some respect. Many have in mind Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary poem about the boy who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion. They are keeping a-hold of Sir Keir “For fear of finding something worse”. How would financial markets react to a change of prime minister, especially if a leftward swerve put Ms Rayner in Number 10? How would it look internationally? Would voters be impressed – or revolted – by Labour imitating the Tory penchant for burning through leaders? And then there is the question Sir Keir put to Mr Sarwar during a difficult phone conversation: if not him, then who?

This was a clarifying moment. It confirmed that those with leadership ambitions are not yet ready to do what is required to pursue them. Ms Rayner’s hopes are stymied until HMRC decide whether her failure to pay the proper amount of tax on a flat purchase was an innocent mistake, a negligent blunder or something worse. Ed Miliband was turned down by the voters when he offered to lead the country in 2015. Andy Burnham is popular with Labour members, but ineligible to run. Critics say Wes Streeting has been too Mandelson-adjacent to become prime minister. In a bid to scotch that idea, he unilaterally released WhatsApp messages between himself and the disgraced peer, a move that irritated police and colleagues alike. Rachel Reeves is not best pleased to discover that the health secretary believes the government has “no growth strategy at all”. No prizes for guessing who Mr Streeting was criticising in another message: “There isn’t a clear answer to the question: why Labour?”

Sir Keir may now have a final opportunity to demonstrate what he’s made of as he battles for survival without the help of Mr McSweeney. “Keir is still on thin ice, but what he can do is deepen the ice on which he is skating,” says one cabinet member. “He will only do that by giving the public a very clear definition of his purpose and what he hopes to deliver.”

Let’s be generous and suppose that he manages to become a more persuasive advocate with a more compelling vision. Let’s suppose this prompts voters to take a fresh look at the prime minister. Labour should still brace for a shellacking at the May elections. That will be the next juncture at which the party will agonise again over whether or not to open the box. Until then, he will remain Schrödinger’s prime minister, precariously poised between life and death.

Photograph by Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images