Keir Starmer’s week of chaos brings us closer to Nigel Farage as prime minister

No 10 briefing against a cabinet minister and U-turning on the Budget at the last moment are signs of a weak government, says John Rentoul

The word of the week was “shambles”. Indeed, the verdict was so unanimous that we are duty bound to consider the contrarian case in Keir Starmer’s defence.

The briefing on the prime minister’s behalf against Wes Streeting, the health secretary, plainly went too far, giving the impression of a government at war with itself. But it achieved part of its aim, which was to let Labour MPs know that Starmer would not go quietly if – as some of them imagined – a group of cabinet ministers told him privately that the game was up.

It reminded Labour MPs that removing a sitting prime minister who doesn’t want to go is difficult. It is harder to remove a Labour prime minister than it used to be to remove a Conservative one, because Labour’s rules require 81 MPs – 20 per cent of the parliamentary party – to declare publicly that they support an alternative candidate. Under the Tory rules, the first stage of the procedure was triggered by 15 per cent of MPs privately demanding a vote of no confidence – although that has now been raised to 33 per cent.

The briefing by No 10 also reminded the Labour Party that changing prime minister would unsettle the markets – although the Budget U-turn two days later reminded everyone that keeping the same prime minister could also unsettle the markets.

Attempts have been made to shore up Sir Keir Starmer’s tenure at No 10 this week (Stefan Rousseau/PA) (PA Wire)

But the briefing also had the effect of forcing leadership plotters to face other awkward facts. One is that Labour members cannot be relied on to choose a prime minister who would be an improvement on Starmer. Streeting may be more popular with the people who have the deciding vote in Labour leadership elections at the end of this week than he was at the beginning, but he is still a Blairite.

These are the people, after all, who thought that Lucy Powell, sacked for encouraging a rebellion against welfare spending restraint that she was supposed to be managing, should be deputy leader of the party.

I do not believe that the members would choose Ed Miliband as leader again. Polls of members have been misread: he is popular with them because Labour is sentimental about losers; but when asked in June who should be leader if Starmer goes, Miliband had fewer supporters than Clive Lewis, the Socialist Campaign Group MP for Norwich South.

Still, this is not a risk that a sensible party should want to take, with Liz Truss’s seven-week premiership standing as a reminder of the folly of allowing unrepresentative party members to decide who the country’s prime minister should be.

It is possible to make the case, too, for abandoning the plan to raise income tax in the Budget. Politically, I think it is the right decision. Explicitly breaking such an important manifesto promise would have been catastrophic. Starmer and Rachel Reeves knew that, which is why the chancellor made that unusual early-morning speech last week to prepare the ground.

It is also, incidentally, part of the reason for the No 10 briefing against Streeting. Starmer was so fearful of the reaction to a manifesto-busting Budget that his aides were panicked into launching Operation Shore-Up.

So when the Office for Budget Responsibility offered Starmer and Reeves a way out, they leapt at the chance. Its latest forecast this week suggested a narrower fiscal gap than expected, which could be bridged without an increase in income tax.

Of course, all the sensible economists say that an income tax rise would be the best policy, which it would be if Labour weren’t starting from the position of having promised not to do it. But Labour made the promise and must keep it if it can, even if it has to stretch the meaning of words close to breaking point.

That, then, is the case for the defence. But the prime minister hasn’t half made it easy for the prosecution. Instead of strengthening his defences against a leadership challenge, he has weakened them in the longer run. I never took seriously this summer’s predictions from sources on the Labour right of a leadership challenge by Christmas, and I still think talk of Starmer going after next year’s local elections is premature. Who is the candidate, and what is the alternative policy?

But it is harder now to imagine Starmer leading Labour into the next general election. His opinion-poll ratings are dire, and his handling of this week’s twin shambles has not suggested that he has the ability to turn things round.

He and Reeves may have ended up with the less bad of two options for the Budget, but the way they got there didn’t inspire confidence. It was a mistake for the chancellor to make that “scene-setter” speech on 4 November warning of an income tax rise: if it hadn’t been for that speech and later interviews, we wouldn’t have known that she and the prime minister had now changed their minds.

Of course, changing your mind in the light of new information is a good thing, as Maynard Keynes never quite said, but there is no need to advertise it if you don’t have to, because it can look like indecision.

This week’s confusion in Downing Street may not have been quite as bad as it seemed, then, but it confirmed an underlying shift in the tectonic plates. We are 16 months into this government, which means the window for delivering meaningful change in this parliament is closing fast. One-and-a-half million new homes? No chance. Noticeable improvement in the NHS? In the balance. Stopping the boats? No sign of it yet, although Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, will sound tough on asylum seekers this weekend.

Starmer has been in power long enough to confirm that there is a big gap in his case between knowing how to win elections – for the Labour leadership and for the keys to No 10 – and knowing how to govern.

The trouble is that governing well is the key to Labour winning a second term at the next general election. This was a week that brought the prospect of Nigel Farage as prime minister a step closer.