If The PM Is Pushed, He Need Only Look At His Whip Hand

Last month I summarised how the Prime Minister’s lack of understanding of, and downright disinterest in, politics was leading him to continuously break its first golden rule: don’t make an enemy when you don’t have to. The Prime Minister has made a habit of making mountains out of a molehills, consistently overplaying his hand when disciplining his MPs, withdrawing the whip left right and center, and pushing droves of MPs out of the tent. But all that pushing achieves is an awful lot of piss entering the tent from outside, something we witnessed during the penultimate week of April when these unnecessary enemies showered the Prime Minister one by one.

First and foremost, the scenes in parliament on April 20^th were not good for the PM. Two and a half hours of MPs from all sides of the House questioning his judgement over the Mandelson Affair was always going to be about damage control. But the damage was severe. Criticism from opposition MPs is expected, it is part of their job, unless an opposition MP delivers a quite brilliant speech, they are unlikely to really cut through the mist. Badenoch and Davey were always likely to contribute towards a miasma of criticism rather than inflict severe damage on the Prime Minister, but some comments did cut through the mist, and some comments did damage the Prime Minister. Yet it was not the comments of opposition MPs that were circulating on social media, it was not the comments of opposition MPs that grabbed the headlines, and it was not the comments of opposition MPs that dominated the 10 o’ clock news, it was his own, and more specifically, it was a select few MPs, almost all of whom the Prime Minister had needlessly villified. 

A shower of criticism poured over the back of Prime Minister from the hard left dissenters that he’s actively pushed into enemies since the start of his leadership, the likes of John McDonnell and Richard Burgon accused the Prime Minister of both weakness and poor judgement. A second shower came from a new ‘awkward squad’ of disgruntled MPs the Prime Minister has temporarily booted out of his party at one point or another, such as Rachel Maskell and Karl Turner, assembling on Dennis Skinner’s old bench to his right.

The Prime Minister therefore received the most damaging criticism from an unholy alliance of the ideological enemies he made unnecessarily due to years of active suppression of the hard left and the enemies he has made in his overzealous and unprecedented use of whip withdrawal in pursuit of rigid party discipline. The most damaging words the Prime Minister faced in the House of Commons came from a member who has a foot in both these camps, a member who has been made an enemy thanks to Starmer’s suppression of the hard left and his egregiously eager whip withdrawal. The words that stood head and shoulders above the rest and cut through most decisively were those of the Mother of the House, Diane Abbott, and her simple question, ‘why did the Prime Minister not ask’.

Diane Abbott is a figure who holds a high level of respect in the Labour Party, a level of respect that allowed her to successfully fight off an attempt by Starmer to essentially veto her candidature for the 2024 general election by restoring the whip to her if she agreed to stand down. The Prime Minister made an enemy out of Abbott then, describing the attempted deal as ‘designed to humiliate me’, and his withdrawal of the whip from her again in 2025 withdrew with it any residual feelings of loyalty. Her words were simple, tactful, and perfectly captured the mood of parliament and the nation. Criticism of the Prime Minister in the House of Commons is always most effective when the words echo what the majority of what even the most loyal of the Prime Minister’s own backbenchers are thinking, and it is made far more effective when those comments come from one’s own backbench colleagues. Think May’s ‘which was it’, Amery’s ‘in the name of God, go’ and Howe’s cricketing metaphor, all the words of disgruntled backbenchers that perfectly captured the mood of the Prime Minister’s own backbenchers and transformed a mist of criticism into something tangible that the Prime Minister could never truly recover from. 

So, could Diane Abbott really have brought down the Prime Minister? No. But if he does go, her words will have been an important contribution towards the eventual regicide. What Abbott’s and other’s words do reflect is how the Prime Minister has moulded enemies out of dissenters and that his utopian ideal of a party that votes as one, now and always, has done a great deal to accelerate his decline. It’s hard to believe that Members of Parliament on the Prime Minister’s own benches would be so publicly scathing in their criticism of him had they not felt mistreated. The Labour MPs that have voted against their own whip have done so out of a sense of principle and the Prime Minister has repeatedly responded to this display of principle with a brutal crack of his whip hand. What the Prime Minister doesn’t understand is that withdrawing the whip withdraws with it the sense of loyalty that binds a backbencher to their government, and a simple whip restoration fails to restore that sense of loyalty. Backbenchers are loyal to the party by default, their loyalty to their government temporary, it requires delicacy and cultivation, because when Prime Ministers do fall, they do so because of the mood on their own backbenches, and Keir Starmer has done an awful lot to sour that mood.

Image: Flickr/House of Commons

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