There Is Nothing Unprecedented About Plotting Against The PM

For the past six months, Westminster has been swirling with rumours that the Prime Minister’s days are numbered. Commentators have been split as to whether the Prime Minister would be challenged following the local elections in May, or before that, but they seem pretty certain that he will be challenged. The Prime Minister himself has appeared in the media stating that he will be Prime Minister by the end of 2026. Critics both within the Labour Party and the media have pinned their disloyalty towards the Prime Minister to the dire position the Labour Party finds itself in the opinion polls, and the unprecedented unpopularity that Keir Starmer commands throughout the country. Indeed, it would be unprecedented for a Prime Minister with a majority as large as Keir Starmer’s to be forced out of office less than two years into his premiership. But the disloyalty that the Prime Minister commands over his own backbenchers, the whispers of a challenge that have developed into a chorus, well there is nothing unprecedented about that, not in the Labour Party. 

Since the war there have only been six Labour Prime Ministers. They have governed in periods of economic growth and economic decline, they have governed with big majorities, and they have governed with small majorities, and they have all been dogged by whispers and rumors throughout their premiership of their imminent demise. 

Clement Attlee almost faced a vote of no confidence a few weeks after his landslide victory in 1945 when his deputy Herbert Morrison tried to engineer a leadership coup. Harold Wilson spent his entire premiership paranoid of plots to replace him by both the left and the right of the party, the second half of Tony Blair’s premiership was defined by when, rather than if, he would resign in favour of Gordon Brown and when Brown finally did take the helm, whispers of resignations and leadership challenges were almost immediate. In all of these instances the gun was never fired, and the leader limped on until he either resigned or was thrown out by the voters. 

Labour have never once seen their leader challenged whilst serving as Prime Minister. The closest Labour ever managed was David Purnell’s miserable attempt at a mass resignation against Gordon Brown in 2009, but this faltered quickly when plotters were unable to get a decent number of signatures on a letter asking for the Prime Minister to go. An analysis of history matters when assessing the current chatter around Keir Starmer. The idea that the present Labour MPs are uniquely restless, disloyal or ruthless is a nonsense. There is nothing exceptional about them. They are plotters. Labour backbenchers have always been plotters. Talking about ongoing plots is a structural feature of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and it has been ever since the Second World War. Plots and talking about plots and speculating about plots is an endemic feature of the Labour Party. It is a necessary function of a Labour Party born out of a wider labour movement. Labour is a broad ideological church with power resting in multiple sources. There has never been a culture of leadership worship, and the party has never shied away from conducting their arguments in public. 

Yet there are strong institutional reasons why, for all of Labour’s love of plotting, a challenge rarely emerges. Unlike the Conservative Party, Labour’s rules and political culture make leadership challenges whilst in government deeply unattractive. Labour leadership elections take a long time, and the party’s democratic traditions means the outcome is entirely up to its members. The Parliamentary Party, for all its love of plots, cannot orchestrate a stitch up the way the Conservative Party can. A move by one Labour party faction would immediately trigger a move from another, and no faction of the Labour Party likes seeing the other faction in charge. 

In Starmer’s case, the rumours say more about expectations than reality. After a landslide victory, some supporters hoped for radical transformation and a return to the heady days of the First Blair Ministry. Instead, what they have found are the miserable years of government that the party endured during the 1970s or following the 2008 Economic Crash. In these times of economic decline, Labour, the party of optimism and excitement, has never shown a love towards cautious managerialism. Disappointment has followed now just as it followed then, and so too have anonymous briefings and speculative headlines fuelled by politicians motivated by ideological quarrel, misgivings over style, and sheer personal ambition. 

If the past is any indication, Keir Starmer is far more likely to be removed from office by the voters than his own party. The alleged plots swirling around him place him squarely in the tradition of every post-war Labour Prime Minister. There is nothing unprecedented about plotting in the Labour Party, but the tradition of regicide, a tradition popularised by the Conservative Party, is not one that is woven into Labour’s fabrics. Labour figures love plotting and talking, not doing, and this should give Keir Starmer another three years before he is kicked out in resounding fashion by the voters, and the Labour Party is placed dangerously near to the scrap heap of history.

Illustration: Will Allen/Europinion