The race to replace Keir Starmer is still on – and Angela Rayner is ready to strike

The next time the prime minister stumbles, his former deputy will be primped and primed – and in spite of the best efforts of Wes Streeting and his undeclared leadership campaign, says John Rentoul

Keir Starmer fought back from the political equivalent of the intensive care unit yesterday, and tried today to tell people at a community centre in Hertfordshire that he was feeling fine.

His second speech of a lifetime in as many days – the first being his address to the parliamentary Labour Party on Monday – was not a wholly convincing performance, because it cannot have been obvious to the man in the Arsenal scarf in the audience what the “mandate” was that the prime minister would “never walk away” from. But he came across as someone who cared, and who was going to “fight for the millions of people who need us to fight for them”.

Following his brush with near expulsion from Downing Street this week, someone in No 10 had at least realised that Starmer performs most persuasively in informal settings with normal people – as he did before Christmas in a primary school doing the “six-seven” TikTok meme.

The “most working-class cabinet in history” manages to sound both patronising and Bolshevik at the same time, but it served its purpose in cementing the support he rounded up from his senior ministers yesterday – a show of support that forced Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting to pause their leadership campaigns and join the North Korean display of unity.

The contrast between the frontrunner and the second-placed candidate in the undeclared campaign to succeed Starmer has been stark this week. Rayner posted a TikTok video of her having her hair done like a normal person. Then she arrived at the weekly meeting of Labour MPs on Monday, looking relaxed, all smiles and great hair, to hear Starmer beg for his job.

Streeting, on the other hand, was engaged in a bold operation to try to save his undeclared campaign from being dragged into the abyss by his association with Peter Mandelson.

Streeting published his WhatsApp messages with the former US ambassador to get them out in the open before No 10 released them with all the other material demanded by Kemi Badenoch’s humble address – to the annoyance of the police, who last week launched a criminal investigation into claims that Lord Mandelson passed sensitive government information to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

By cheekily stealing a march on his cabinet colleagues – ministers have now been warned by the Cabinet Office not to follow suit – Streeting was able to kill the rumours swirling that his messages would contain career-ending embarrassments.

Some of the messages were certainly embarrassing. He agreed with Mandelson that “the government problems do not stem from comms” [communications]. He said the government had “no growth strategy at all”. And he signed off some messages with an “x”, although the overall tone was not intimate and the infrequency of their interactions was consistent with Streeting’s account: “The reality is I maybe had dinner with Peter Mandelson on average once a year.”

But the second purpose was to advertise Streeting’s support for recognising the Palestinian state – a position on which he had sought Mandelson’s advice. Talk about turning a problem into an opportunity.

Streeting knows that most Labour members, who have the final vote in a leadership election, think he is a Blairite right-winger. For them, Mandelson, even before the Epstein revelations, represented everything they didn’t like about the New Labour era. But the same members care about Palestine, and thought – as Streeting said to Mandelson in June – that Israel was “committing war crimes before our eyes”. They agree with him that the Israeli government “talks the language of ethnic cleansing”.

I don’t know how effective this pitch to the pro-Palestinian left will be, although it was notable that in a Survation/Labour List poll of Labour members just before the Epstein files were published, Streeting had narrowed the gap with Rayner. Whether this reflected Streeting’s tilt to the left, or his achievements on the NHS, or the departure of Corbynite Labour members to the Greens and other, smaller parties, is unclear.

All we know is that Streeting is fighting his corner with some aggression. People around the prime minister are said to be annoyed with him for unilaterally publishing his WhatsApps – and today the Cabinet Office shut the stable door, telling cabinet ministers not to follow Streeting’s example.

Meanwhile, Rayner, the party members’ favourite (excluding the ineligible Andy Burnham), sails serenely on. Last week, she led the calls for independent vetting of the Mandelson documents withheld for reasons of national security. Yesterday, she issued a butter-wouldn’t-melt statement of support for the prime minister after the cabinet’s orchestrated response to Anas Sarwar’s call for Starmer to stand down.

Hair apparent: Angela Rayner gets her tresses pampered (TikTok/@natalie.blow51.jones)

Westminster was alive with speculation last night about what Starmer might have offered her for that statement. He has already said publicly that he wants her back in government – has he now discussed a specific job and the timing in relation to HMRC settling her tax affairs or the May local elections?

I do not think that he needed to. She is not ready to launch her campaign publicly, and after the cabinet rallied round Starmer, it was in her interest to join the show of party unity. Labour members prize discipline and loyalty above internal factional interests.

So she will wait, knowing that the next time Starmer stumbles, she is better placed than any other candidate to succeed him. Streeting is most likely to be her main opponent, although it was striking that Ed Miliband was coincidentally on the media round this morning.

He denied that he wanted to be prime minister or chancellor. “Oh God, no, don’t be ridiculous. I’m happy doing the job I’m doing,” he told LBC. But this gave him the chance to blow another trumpet popular with Labour members, saying he was “passionate about issues around climate change, and passionate about the opportunity as well for energy security for good jobs”.

If those are the candidates – Rayner, Streeting and Miliband, in that order – is it any wonder the cabinet drew back from the brink yesterday?