2 hours ago
1
Keir Starmer is now the only person to have lost more comms chiefs than Meghan and Harry. After yet another day of drama, we kept hearing that the prime minister would be pressing the reset button. Not again! Starmer’s reset button is like the OK button on your TV remote – worn blank through overuse. He has pressed that thing more often than you’ve decided another 44 minutes of a crap thriller is somehow less of an effort than getting yourself to bed. Anyway, next episode in five, four, three …
Fine. One more.
The inciting incident for yesterday’s deranged chapter was another comms chief leaving, followed by an objectively hilarious call for Starmer’s resignation by the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, that accidentally forced Labour’s big guns to swing publicly behind Starmer. That said, you couldn’t claim the cabinet came off as one big happy family, with a minister briefing darkly: “We’ve all been made to tweet.” Buck up, Cruz. Think of Sarwar as the Labour family’s Brooklyn Beckham, the latter having notably observed last month that “Family ‘love’ is decided by how much you post on social media”.
Anyway, having seen off Sarwar’s desiccated power move, Starmer supposedly crushed it at Monday evening’s gathering of the parliamentary Labour party. Entering the meeting room, the PM is reported to have got a standing ovation that lasted 37 seconds. But don’t set too much store by a standing ovation. At the Cannes film festival, you can get double that even for a documentary claiming that every single Cannes film festival attender is a necrophiliac bestialist. A fired-up Starmer apparently told his parliamentary colleagues: “I have won every fight I’ve ever been in.” The prime minister is now seeking a match-up with either Jake Paul or Tommy Fury.
He can butch it up all he likes, but the Peter Mandelson revelations have exposed Starmer as an alleged fallen nice guy and dubious ally to women. He’s kind of the Justin Baldoni of Westminster. Who’s the Blake Lively in all this? I desperately want to quit this analogy but find it impossible when Wes Streeting keeps claiming that he is being covertly briefed against by Starmer’s team. If these dark arts start to impact unit sales of Wes’s affordable haircare line it may be time to go nuclear.
In fact, maybe that was what was already happening late yesterday afternoon, when Streeting went full drama, claiming Downing Street was briefing against him, then releasing his own messages with Mandelson. Do people now leak their own messages? It’s so hard to keep up with the sheer naffness of our politics, particularly given Streeting’s other sighting was during a media appearance where he explained people needed to “give Keir the chance [to turn it around]”.
Elsewhere, it emerged that Angela Rayner is doing all she can to get HMRC to hurry up and conclude its review of her tax affairs – so maddening when one has to spend more than five seconds in the political wilderness. We also learned that a partly constructed website claiming to launch Rayner’s leadership campaign, created by the same company that does her official parliamentary website, briefly went live in January before being instantly pulled. A Rayner ally described it as a “false flag” operation. So, like Operation Himmler, but a website. Any other news? Oh yes, another cabinet secretary is on the way out – the third in eight years for a job that used to be all about stability.
When he took office, Starmer stood outside No 10 promising “to restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives”. Yet his government has trodden on people like the Serengeti wildebeest migration – a million cock-ups and U-turns stampeding over a squashed Britain for 19 months, with absolutely no sign of let-up. Even the attempts to defend his record sound like satire. Yesterday, allies sent round a rallying note explaining that the government was delivering “on many areas of incremental change”. The trouble is it delivers like Evri. Your incremental change has been left in a safe place. Not your safe place, obviously, but somewhere you may never find.
Arguably, the most intriguing line of defence yesterday came from two cabinet ministers, Shabana Mahmood and Bridget Phillipson. “Labour governments don’t come along often,” said Mahmood. After a day like yesterday, I can’t imagine why. Phillipson went on to wibble: “Change is hard. Government isn’t easy.” Really? Many will be able to live without the pronouncements of the cabinet sounding like tactical self-care posts from an influencer who promoted a dodgy meme coin and is now on a sober-curious journey. No idea where we’ll get to by the end of the week at this rate. The chancellor explaining that “it’s OK not to feel OK”? Anas Sarwar declaring “I’ve had to teach myself to hold myself in the moment”?
That said, it wasn’t a massively edifying day for the news media, much of which could probably do with stepping away from the news as a wellness exercise. A mad world it may be, yet Chris Mason seemed somewhat overexcited by the idea that his audience wanted to see him as the White Rabbit. Next time you see the BBC’s political editor on screen, imagine every report he presents being prefaced with the words: “Oh my paws and whiskers!” It works better that way.
As for the many branches of what could happen next, Theresa May showed us that governing as a wounded meme was possible for at least two years, while some of the suggestions should a sudden replacement for Starmer be required are genuinely insane. Take the people suggesting that enough MPs could probably rally round John Healey as a unity candidate. Sorry, but what? And, indeed, who? At the last measure (Q4 2025), a mere 36% of the public said they recognised John Healey. I hate to break it to Labour’s delulu-is-the-solulu power brokers, but after this rolling horror show, assuming the British people would be totally cool with some guy the vast majority of them have literally never heard of being anointed their prime minister may be a piss-take too far.
The fact is the UK is on its sixth prime minister in 10 years, and at least teetering near breaking the glass on a seventh. We’ve had more CEOs in a decade than a failing 00s telecoms firm. We’re basically Yahoo. Or maybe it’s worse. Maybe we’re one of those countries that even the neocons refused to invade because there was no figure that any meaningful number of the local populace would coalesce around. It’s all very last-days-of-the-frying-pan. As for Labour’s next destination? Heard it’s somewhere hot.
-
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
