Starmer’s countdown begins

Tick tock. A surprisingly inventive social media video from the Tories depicted the number adorning the famous black door of 10 Downing Street as a countdown. Ten, nine, eight… Little did they know that an hour later the news broke that Scottish Labour Leader Anas Sarwar was to call for Keir Starmer’s head. Metaphorically of course. Seven, six, five…

The events of the last 36 hours have sealed the fate of this Prime Minister. Belated and half hearted tweets of support from Cabinet ministers may stem the bleeding for now, but they will not save the patient.

Keir Starmer is now a dead man walking, leading a zombie government. What little authority remained has vanished and nobody seriously believes he can now govern as anything more than a caretaker. The question is when, not if, the Prime Minister goes.

But what sealed his fate? It wasn’t the opportunism of Anas Sarwar. It wasn’t the loss of Communications Director Tim Allan. Keir Starmer’s premiership died on Sunday with the loss of the man behind the entire Starmer project, Morgan McSweeney.

Just as Liz Truss was well and truly doomed from the moment she jettisoned her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, McSweeney made the Starmer project and his fate is intricately intertwined with that of the Prime Minister.

It was Morgan McSweeney who alighted upon the visionless empty vessel of the then Shadow Brexit Secretary as his man to con the Labour Party membership with a left wing leadership pitch, to then pivot to the Blairite Labour Right and win a general election.

It was Morgan McSweeney who conducted secret and financially undeclared polling of the Labour membership to ensure Keir Starmer won the leadership. It was Morgan McSweeney who developed the “Ming Vase” strategy of saying remarkably little, being as inoffensive as possible, standing on a paper thin manifesto, and winning the 2024 election by default.

It was also Morgan McSweeney who took control of Downing Street operations, forced out Sue Gray, and centralised power in a way that left the Prime Minister dangerously exposed once his fixer-in-chief was gone.

The control room is empty, and the Prime Minister is stuck unable to change the track himself

The marvellously insightful book Get In by Gabrial Pogrund and Patrick Maguire revealed how one member of Starmer’s inner circle described his political operation, citing the driverless Docklands Light Railway. “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.” Now the driverless train chugs on, with no direction. The control room is empty, and the Prime Minister is stuck unable to change the track himself.

The great irony is that the McSweeney project, built on ruthless discipline and message control, has unravelled in a fog of chaos and recrimination. The Ming Vase has long since shattered, and there is no strategist left to sweep up the porcelain. Tick tock.

Most damning for the country is the Prime Minister now has zero authority to get anything done. If that wasn’t clear by the disability benefit reform rebellion — when the Parliamentary Labour Party forbade the Chancellor from increasing benefits spending by a mere (and apparently austere) £13bn more rather than the projected £18bn — it certainly is now.

Monday’s desperate ring round from Number 10 eventually saw all of the Cabinet endorse the Prime Minister stay in his job for now, the lowest of low bars. And yet, for a period of twenty four hours there was radio silence as potential candidates saw the writing on the wall and weighed up their options.

For Wes Streeting, his own associations with a man some have termed as his political mentor have been an albatross around his neck. Peter Mandelson had led to a flurry of deleted tweets in recent days; Streeting would rather this not be the scandal that does for his boss, less it does for him too.

Angela Rayner has yet to pay back her stamp duty tax debt, but will no doubt be devising expedited payment. It was after all, her intervention last Wednesday that forced another Government U-turn (I’ve seriously lost count now) on the total release of the government’s Peter-Files.

Shabana Mahmood was the last Cabinet Minister to declare her support for the Prime Minister. By a stroke of luck, she was speaking in the House of Commons just as the pressure to post was becoming an issue of job security.

Indeed, the sheer amount of time we had to wait for the herd to move in the direction of the Prime Minister tells us more than the direction in which it moved. Personally, my central forecast for when we get the inevitable Cabinet resignation that will kick off the contest to put this Prime Minister out of his misery remains 8th May. That is not to say, however, that there aren’t moments of severe danger for Sir Keir before then.

Anas Sarwar might well have looked silly, like a 21st Century Duke of York (no, not that one), marching up to the top of the hill only to realise no one has followed him. But in the long run his remarkable intervention may well turn from pathetic to prophetic.

It was five years ago to the day last Thursday, that a strident parish councillor shouted down a laptop webcam into not only an extraordinary zoom meeting, but also a moment of memetic history, “you have no authority here Jackie Weaver!” Five years later the same could be said of our powerless Prime Minister.

Without his closest aids, with his Cabinet sharpening their knives, and now having suffered the first figure in the Labour leadership to call for his ousting, there are only two words left to write. Tick tock.