OPINION: Keir Starmer is facing a rebellion on Brexit – but is this just the beginning?
Whose after Starmers job? (Image: Getty)
Picture Sir Keir Starmer in his Downing Street study, nursing a mug of terribly sensible tea, when the news arrives. Wesley, his Health Secretary, his safe pair of hands, his loyal lieutenant, has gone rogue on Europe. He has only gone and called for a “deeper trading relationship” with the continent. A sneaky sidestep back into the EU customs union dangled like forbidden fruit over the airwaves.
One imagines the Prime Minister’s jaw tightening. The glasses were adjusted, and the tea set was set down. The boy who never quite made head boy at school has finally reached the top. And now? Mutiny in the Cabinet room just days before Christmas.
But there is a delicious irony in this. 10 years ago, when MPs were cheekily asked by a television broadcaster who would be Prime Minister in a decade, most coyly pointed elsewhere. But not Wes Streeting. Oh no. Mr Streeting squarely pointed to himself. The sheer brass neck of it all.
And while Sir Keir would claim the crown through dogged determination and the spectacular implosion of everyone else around him, Mr Streeting, it seems, never quite abandoned that youthful certainty. Now, with the Prime Minister’s approval ratings doing an impressive impression of a lead balloon, the Health Secretary appears to be road-testing his leadership credentials. Starting, apparently, with the one issue guaranteed to send the genteel metropolitan types into a tizzy and Labour backbenchers into hissing fits.
The EU customs union. Those three words that still make grown-up politicians weep into their constituency correspondence and seriously consider sacking off the carols this year and shutting the curtains.
Sir Keir has spent months performing an elaborate dance around Brexit — not too close and not too far. We all know he has never forgiven people for voting to tear us away from Brussels, but he has been oh-so-coy about it. Sir Keir does not want to upset the Red Wall voters who lent him their trust, or the Remainers who never quite forgave him for not fighting harder in the first place.
It is the political equivalent of trying to please everyone at a dinner party by bringing neither wine nor soft drinks, but low-alcohol beer that nobody actually wants or asked for.
Enter Mr Streeting, stage left, with the subtlety of a bulldozer through a china shop.
But who else is sharpening their knives in the ministerial corridor? David Lammy, the former Foreign Secretary, not ‘enjoying’ the Justice brief, having spent more time abroad than some airline pilots, surely he knows his way around a leadership campaign?
Then there is Lucy Powell. Deputy Leader Powell, with her own mandate from the party membership. Once ousted, now back with a vengeance and her own democratic legitimacy. The woman who has been there, done that, and got the consolation prize. She knows how quickly fortunes can turn in Westminster. She has watched leaders rise and fall like soufflés in an earthquake.
The question is not whether others in the Cabinet harbour ambitions. Of course they do. Politicians without ambition are like fish without water, technically possible but somewhat missing the point. The question is when the first drops of blood in the water will bring the others circling.
Sir Keir must be wondering which meeting will prove his last supper. Which colleague, smiling over the Cabinet table, is mentally measuring the curtains in No 10? Who will be next to discover a sudden urge to “clarify” Government policy in a direction the Prime Minister never quite intended?
For now, he soldiers on, projecting that trademark air of pained competence. But somewhere in Westminster, you can almost hear the sound of leadership pitches being drafted, focus groups being convened, and loyal supporters being quietly sounded out.
The boy who finally became head boy is discovering what every prefect learns eventually. The badge might be yours. But keeping it? That is another matter entirely.
