British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has reached for his last-ditch defence against a Labour Party coup against his leadership, warning that if he’s brought down, it will mean Britain getting a Nigel Farage government.
Starmer is fighting for his political life after it was revealed that the long scandal-struck Labour grandee known as “The Prince of Darkness” he picked to be Britain’s ambassador to the United States was secretly selling government secrets to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Having already attempted to shift blame onto others, pointing the finger in turn at his chief of staff and Britain’s spies for not having known about it, Sir Keir is not-so-subtly making clear to his Labour colleagues that he’s the only thing standing between the multicultural dream and a future hellscape of ethno-nationalism under Nigel Farage. Under the British Parliamentary system, between elections, the only constituency in the country that can do harm to the Prime Minister is his own Parliamentary colleagues, and it is solely to them now he is appealing.
Starmer kicked this narrative off on Thursday, but having perhaps been a touch too subtle, his lieutenants hit the newspapers on Friday, making the warning explicit. Speaking at a policy launch event as the Epstein-Mandelson scandal roared around him, Starmer made a heavy-handed pitch for multiculturalism as the core essence of Britain, and made his veiled warning to think twice before deposing him.
Implying the only choice on the table is between Keir Starmer in the driving seat or Prime Minister Nigel Farage, he said: “every minute we spend talking about anything other than the cost of living, Pride in Place, how we stabilise our economy … that we must unite this country, understand that to be British is to be tolerant, reasonable, compassionate and diverse, and fight for it against the toxic division of Reform, every minute we spend not talking and focusing on that is an absolute minute wasted.”
Turning up the heat — and really spelling out the facts, lest they be lost on anyone — close supporters of the Prime Minister were apparently dispatched to the newspapers. The Daily Telegraph reports these figures honed in on Angela Rayner, perhaps the most likely of a very small field of potential candidates to stand up and challenge Starmer for the top role, warning her off. One unnamed Parliamentarian close to Starmer reportedly said that a change of leader means fresh elections.
He is reported to have remarked:
Presumably Angela Rayner, if she got elected, would have a completely different agenda. If you come in with a completely different agenda then the country legitimately says, ‘We didn’t vote for this’.
And so what are the grounds for refusing a general election? You can claim constitutional grounds, but in the world of frenzied media, of TikTok, YouTube and GB News, is it really sustainable? It doesn’t feel sustainable to me.
An unnamed Cabinet Minister said, the report states: “The pressure for an election would be enormous”.
Of course, in the British constitution, this isn’t technically correct. Prime Ministers don’t have personal mandates, and all that matters is whether any one individual can command the confidence of a majority of Members of Parliament. Yet, as the unnamed Labour member implied, in an intensely media-oriented age, some have perceived the standards as having de facto changed.
The same arguments were rolled out by Boris Johnson’s defenders in 2022 to protect him from a coup and fell flat. Yet while this has never been the case so far, that is not to say there isn’t an element of hypocrisy introduced for Labour here, given every time the Conservatives changed leader — and hence Prime Minister — in their last 14 years of government, they called for fresh elections on those very grounds of seeking a fresh mandate from the people.
Indeed, Angela Rayner herself said when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took power back in 2022: “He has no mandate, no answers and no ideas. Nobody voted for this. The public deserve their say on Britain’s future through a General Election. It’s time for a fresh start with Labour.”
Because, present internal strife aside, Labour still has an unassailable majority in the commons an early general election is unlikely. The government isn’t obliged to hold a fresh vote until 2029, and given how bad the polling is for Labour and how consistently good it is for Nigel Farage’s Reform, circumstances would have to be dire for the government to relinquish power any sooner than they need to.
Yet strange things can happen, and events are moving fast. Brexit leader Nigel Farage has long insisted he’s aware of the possibility of an earlier election triggered by an economic crisis caused by the country’s incompetent government, although this is likely as much a strategy to keep his base engaged as anything else.
The Conservative Party’s Kemi Badenoch lent into such talk this week as it became clear the Starmer era was likely coming to a close. She said: “Britain is not being governed… we need a better government. Labour was voted in with a huge majority but they can’t get anything done. Something is wrong… if a General Election is on the cards, we’ll take it because we know we’ll do a better job”.