Starmer leadership chaos is turning into a crisis

ONE REASON KEIR Starmer’s Labour Party won the 2024 UK election was his promise to restore calm after a decade of Tory carnage. Speaking outside 10 Downing Street on the morning after victory, he vowed to “deliver change, restore service and respect for politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives and unite our country”.

- STEPHEN MIHM

Those words sound hollow today. His “Starmtroopers’—the posse of centrist loyalists around the prime minister—have just stamped pretty hard on his health secretary, Wes Streeting, delivering a volley of extraordinary anonymous briefings to the media designed to kill off an alleged plot by the young pretender to topple their man.

Emboldened by the fiasco—and by some of the most inept press briefings since Comical Ali in Iraq—he’s urging Starmer to sack those responsible. However the prime minister responds, he needs to use this last chance to reset his ailing administration.

Instead of helping Starmer, the hysterical overreaction of his apparent allies to what would have been better treated as a nonlethal threat points to a leader who’s losing his grip. It’s a gift to his equally beleaguered Conservative counterpart, Kemi Badenoch. Why has the government “descended into civil war instead of fixing the economy?” she demanded of Starmer at Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions. A reasonable question as the country steels itself for a brutal budget in a couple of weeks. Labour’s more serious challengers on the left and right, the Greens and Reform UK, will be salivating too.