The good ship Labour has sprung a leak – is there mutiny aboard?

Leak inquiries, candidate troubles, infighting and poll scares: now Keir Starmer is really being tested, writes John Rentoul

All of a sudden, the long run of admiring reviews of Starmer have come to an end (PA)

Sue Gray, the former civil servant poached by Keir Starmer to be his chief of staff, was supposed to bring some of the discipline of running an actual government to Labour’s preparations for power.

But she has imported one of the more pointless rituals of government to the opposition: the leak inquiry. The Times reports that she interrogated Labour staff over the leak to The Guardian of the plan to ditch the £28bn-a-year green investment plan – and that some officials were left “in tears” by her alleged heavy-handedness.

It seems that the Labour Party is feeling the pressure of being a government in waiting. Not only is it springing leaks – and this is not the first inquiry that Starmer has ordered – but shadow cabinet members seem to be struggling to maintain public unity, while a second parliamentary candidate has been suspended and the party has taken fright at two opinion polls showing reduced Labour leads.

Leak inquiries are usually carried out by civil servants in government, and they almost never find anything. I assumed that Gray knows this and that she was going through the motions either to try to discourage further leaks or to satisfy a raging party leader. All leaders find leaks irritating: cabinet minutes are strewn with examples of Harold Wilson, John Major and Tony Blair lecturing ministers about the importance of not talking to journalists.

But this leak inquiry does seem particularly futile, given the sheer volume of reporting in the weeks leading up to the U-turn that there was about to be a U-turn on green policy. The Guardian report, the day before the change in policy was announced, was a little more specific about what the change would be and when the announcement would be made, but what will have annoyed Starmer is that it must have come from someone in the tight circle around him.

It is also surprising, given Gray’s long experience of managing leak inquiries in government, that she seems to have upset party officials – to the extent that The Times reported that the branch of the GMB union representing party staff has submitted a formal complaint. So far all the reporting of Gray’s role, which she took up in September, has been positive. I have been told that she works hard to bring people together and to make MPs and staff who felt undervalued by the leader of the opposition’s office feel valued.

But as the election approaches and the pressures build, it would seem that some of the tensions are hard to contain. The £28bn U-turn certainly strained some shadow cabinet loyalties, as shadow ministers knew that they were being sent out to defend a policy that wouldn’t last.

Similarly, the delay in disowning Azhar Ali, the Rochdale by-election candidate – although it was only 48 hours rather than several months – meant that Lisa Nandy, Pat McFadden and Nick Thomas-Symonds were all exposed, required to stand by a candidate in public shortly before he was cast into the wilderness by Starmer on Monday night.

All of a sudden, the long run of admiring reviews of Starmer have come to an end. He was justly praised for turning the basket case of a party he took over four years ago into a government-presumptive. But the way recent decisions have been handled has prompted criticism from otherwise loyal quarters. Neil Kinnock, the former leader, told students: “Up until now what we’ve had from the current Labour leadership is loads and loads of strategy, which is fine, and very little savvy, which is a pity.”

Which is why the party was so jumpy about two opinion polls this week, showing Labour leads of 11 and 12 points, about half of the average to which we have been accustomed over the past year. But they were both from pollsters – More in Common and Savanta – that have tended to show lower Labour leads, and there have been two polls with more recent fieldwork from Redfield & Wilton and Deltapoll showing leads of 25 points and 18 points respectively.

The thing about opinion polls is that very few things that obsess Westminster affect them enough to cut through the noise of random variation. Most voters have not given a second thought to the £28bn or to what the Labour candidate in Rochdale has said (many voters in Rochdale may even have missed the fuss and will put their mark by Ali, who is still the Labour candidate on the ballot paper). The only thing that has really happened in the opinion polls recently is the gradual rise of Reform, mostly at the expense of the Conservatives.

It may be that the good ship Labour has sprung a leak and its crew are at each others’ throats, but she is likely to sail serenely on. As I have said before, the trouble will only really begin once Labour has arrived in government.