As the prime minister fought for his political life before Labour MPs at their Monday evening meeting, even hardened sceptics saw a flash of something different in Keir Starmer.
Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said Starmer had been “liberated”. He did not have to spell out who from. His comments came 24 hours after the departure of Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, a man who has shaped Labour’s modern incarnation.
McSweeney’s presence loomed the largest over any other in Starmer’s government, and his departure means there are many cabinet ministers, groups and factions of the party who spy an opportunity to define what comes next.
“There is a vacuum in Morgan’s absence,” one senior Labour figure said. Referring to the cruel anecdote often used about Starmer – that he is a man who believe he is in control of a driverless train – he said: “Everyone is now vying for the central controls of the DLR, with Keir still in the fake driving seat. We really need the prime minister at some point to work out the controls for himself.”
Starmer’s closest friends in politics, including his biographer Tom Baldwin, have often expressed frustration that he has not shown his true beliefs in power.
On Tuesday, Miliband said he believed this was a moment when Starmer could decide to be more radical. “I’m one of his closest friends in politics. I have had a frustration, that the private Keir we know hasn’t been sufficiently on display to the public,” he said. He believed Starmer would “seize this moment and make it a moment of change”.
But what does that mean? Another senior Labour source said: “When people say: ‘Let Keir be Keir,’ they can often just mean he should do whatever they personally believe in.”
There are those who want to see a progressive pivot, for Starmer to more aggressively challenge Reform UK. Many want to see a symbolic gesture to end the McSweeney era of factionalism – a cabinet reshuffle, a change to the whips’ office, the end of parliamentary suspensions. Many believe the party needs to chart a new economic course, especially on the cost of living.
“He’s on reprieve until May. I think people looked on Monday and went: ‘I definitely don’t want a leadership contest now,’” one MP said. “But people can’t afford a decent life; it’s the most important issue. If you want to win again, we have to sort that out. The current policy prospectus isn’t going to do it.”
The faction that will flex its muscles the most in the coming weeks is the soft left, represented by the Tribune group of Labour MPs, of which Starmer was himself once a member.
Tribune’s executive, which includes the former cabinet minister Louise Haigh, will soon begin to put forward its own policy proposals, on the economy, long-term welfare reform and social cohesion.
One soft-left MP said: “We need a much more coherent economic and political strategy. Yes, the culture needs addressing, but No 10 also needs beefing up. It is horribly underpowered. And we need to turbocharge cleaning up politics – put some white knight in charge of it and let them crack on, not just a review.
“I don’t know what Keir’s appetite actually is to change anything radically. It’s not been evident so far. I fear he will just think he’s got through this and now back to business as usual.”
A left turn would be fiercely resisted by some in the parliamentary party. Starmer may have started off in Tribune, but under McSweeney’s direction, his most natural loyalists are now on the party’s right – including many ambitious new MPs who want to modernise Labour’s economic offering.
They want a focus on housing, growth and opportunities for the young, rather than a return to Labour’s traditional comfort zones of nationalisation and welfare.
In the coming weeks, the Labour Growth Group (LGG) will produce a document with the draft title the Beveridge report for the economy, which is already in the hands of Treasury ministers.
The group, often painted as loyalists to the Starmer project, will accuse the government of having come into power without a without a political and economic philosophy. But it will say a relentless focus on wages, opportunity and costs is the way to attract voters back both from Reform and the Greens.
The group will argue that Labour’s economic vision has been insufficiently radical and say Britain has become an “extraction economy” that rewards loopholes, skimming and grifting, rather than building and investing.
It will name a new list of “five giants” – as William Beveridge did in his 1942 foundation for the welfare state. The new barriers are the immiseration of low wages; the insecurity that comes from crushingly high bills; powerlessness that comes from a loss of faith in democracy; indignity, and the fracture of communities pitted against each other.
But the new MP Yuan Yang, who sits both on Tribune’s executive and the LGG, said there was common ground between the two groups.
“I’m personally very concerned about where productivity growth is really happening in the economy,” she said, adding that there were far too many companies that thrived on rent extraction, rather than innovation or producing valued services.
“In my part of Reading, property management agencies are a prime example of this. Residents are trapped and paying hundreds of pounds in monthly fees to them. They get away with it because they effectively have a monopoly over each residential estate,” she said.
“There are too many examples of this kind of anticompetitive behaviour. I want economic regulation, including a tax system, that disincentivises corporate grift and rewards hard graft. We need to make clear whose side we’re on.”
One minister called the report the most serious answer they had seen to the question of what Labour should be for. “Reform, the Greens and the nationalists are all eating into our vote because they can name something people feel in their daily lives – the system is broken – and point to who broke it. Their answers are garbage but at least they have a diagnosis. Right now we don’t even have that,” the minister said.
“The question the whole party is struggling with is how to respond when you’re losing voters to Reform and the Greens on both flanks. You can’t rebuild the coalition by just tacking one way and giving up the other, you need to be able to speak to both.”
For many new MPs there is intense frustration at the pace of change and the infighting and scandal that have dominated the last 18 months. More groups across the parliamentary Labour party are multiplying to generate new ideas to offer up.
Five MPs – Jeevun Sandher, Liam Byrne, Anna Gelderd, Andrew Lewin and Luke Murphy – have set up a space called Labour Thinks to bring in guest speakers on how to govern well and win back disillusioned voters.
Among almost all of Starmer’s critics, there is a desire to see a big change in the way No 10 operates and communicates. At present, Starmer has no chief of staff, communications chief or cabinet secretary, with the roles split across a number of acting placeholders.
“The most important thing Keir can do now is build the right team,” one minister said. “He must have the right chief of staff, the right lines of accountability, a person who can command trust and make fast decisions. I don’t know who that person is.
“I do not think it works as a shared position. Someone has to make the final call, quickly, and that cannot always be the prime minister himself, but someone who absolutely knows his mind and instincts.”
Cabinet ministers also wanted to see a marked change in approach. “You make bad decisions and bad judgments when you have an ever increasingly smaller worldview. That’s what leads to missteps and mistakes, because you’re not hearing alternatives,” one said. “We just need to give a much clearer articulation of ourselves and whose side we’re on and what we’re doing, who we’re doing it for.”
Another cabinet minister said: “I think Keir often gives the impression he thinks it is unfair that we are not being sufficiently credited for what we are doing,. Instead of believing it is unfair, we need to ruthlessly interrogate why that is.”
MPs and ministers are divided about whether a post-factional reshuffle would help Starmer, though the Tribune group made an explicit call when it gave its qualified backing to Starmer on Monday.
Many say the whips’ office is in need of total reform, with too many of the whips distrusted by MPs because they have personal relationships with ministers or advisers in No 10.
“In an ideal world we would do a reshuffle. We clearly need a broader coalition of voices at the top; we clearly need to bring in new talent,” one senior party figure said. “But at the same time, I don’t know if you can do an effective reshuffle at this point, when you are weak like this. It has to come from a position of strength. We are only a few months since the last disastrous one. I think Keir would have to tread very carefully with that.”
Almost every MP and cabinet minister said Starmer’s reprieve was temporary. Another scandal, the loss of the Gorton and Denton byelection, or catastrophe in the May elections could seal the prime minister’s fate.
But almost all said they thought the fundamental work of what needed to change to revive Labour’s fortunes had not been done by its potential new leaders. “I could not tell you a single thing about what the difference is between Wes [Streeting] and Angela [Rayner] and what they would change about the country – apart from vibes,” one Labour MP said.
For some new MPs, there is a sense of despair about how shallow the thinking is among those eager to change leader, reflected in the obvious leadership candidates’ lack of depth.
“One thing that has fucked our politics since 2016 is the delusion of people who think they can do the job for reasons that are ultimately facile and nothing to do with the massive challenges our country faces,” one said.
“Until people get serious about that being the test of who should be PM, our politics will keep convulsing and cycling through PMs at pace.”
