The Caretaker prime minister: Keir Starmer goes on, but for how much longer?

The Labour Party is waiting for Angela Rayner. What is Angela – “Angie”, to her friends - doing? What does she want? Does she still want to be prime minister? Rayner will speak for herself when she is ready, but until then, questions about the former deputy prime minister’s motivations and ambitions will continue to be asked by those who know her and those who don’t – because the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), in all its unruly disunity, is united on one point: Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership has entered its terminal phase.    

 As the Christmas parliamentary recess approaches, and after weeks of chaos and mismanagement, which included a reshuffle that alienated several notable former allies of the prime minister, Labour MPs are tired and increasingly conspiratorial. Parliament is febrile (when isn’t it these days?) with speculation about whether Rayner or Wes Streeting, the health secretary, will strike a deal to challenge Starmer together, or pursue separate leadership bids when they believe the time is right.

 Other, more unlikely contenders are also mentioned: Lucy Powell, the newly elected deputy leader; Louise Haigh, the new head of the Tribune group of soft left MPs; Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester; Ed Miliband, who has ruled himself out but is popular among the membership and would rather like to be the next chancellor; Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, and even Al Carns, the Aberdeen-born armed forces minister, a former Royal Marine decorated for service in Afghanistan. Carns is on the rise but untested in parliament, while Powell, Haigh and Miliband are politically aligned but would make way if Rayner signalled her intention to stand.

 “Angela can be prime minister now whenever she wants and it will be very difficult for anyone to beat her,” one influential minister told me. “What follows from that, if you’re not from the left, is: ‘God, do we really want to do it, even if it’s awful!’ She makes people nervous and that train of thought leads those who would otherwise be up for moving [against Starmer] back to the status quo.”

Rayner and Haigh are friends, and both resigned in humiliation from the cabinet: Haigh as transport secretary after it emerged she had previously pleaded guilty to fraud by false misrepresentation and Rayner as deputy prime minister and housing secretary after Laurie Magnus, the independent ethics adviser, ruled she breached ministerial standards by underpaying stamp duty on a flat in Hove, Sussex. When what the great novelist Joseph Conrad called the “psychological moment” arrives they will show no loyalty to Starmer because they believe he showed none to them.

It’s striking to hear Starmer being referred to by some of his own MPs as a “caretaker prime minister”: after all, he won a landslide victory in July last year. As a football fan, Starmer will be familiar with the role of a caretaker manager: the incumbent has been sacked, a successor is yet to arrive, and an interim figure steps in. For many of his MPs, Starmer is paradoxically both the incumbent and the caretaker: it’s not a question of if he goes, but when and who succeeds him. For now, he endures, though he insists he is doing far more than that, leading a transformational government on a scale comparable to Clement Attlee in 1945 and Margaret Thatcher in 1979. One wishes it were so.

Even once-loyal allies are now openly scathing about his inadequacies - from his failure to develop and articulate a clear governing project to his inability to build well-functioning teams. The government is defined by incoherence, as the budget debacle reinforced, and Starmer’s popularity has collapsed, with Labour at 14 per cent in a recent poll, trailing behind the Greens, the Conservatives and Reform UK.

“All roads lead to the May elections” is the received wisdom at Westminster yet Starmer’s authority is so weakened that another crisis could precipitate a direct challenge sooner. But why would a putative challenger want to lead Labour into the local and devolved elections when Labour MPs speak of the May elections as if they are already lost? Far better for Starmer to take the blame. Timing is therefore crucial, and one plausible outcome is that Starmer carries on for much longer than expected because of fear of who might follow him. Nor does Labour want to repeat the Conservative psychodrama of repeated changes of prime minister.   

This is the backdrop to the speculation at Westminster as even Tony Blair, who has not spoken to Starmer for a long while, expresses frustration about Labour’s “lurch to the left” after the budget and monitors the leadership contenders.

As Christmas approaches Labour is waiting for Rayner to decide. Will she, as one of her allies puts it, be “kingmaker”, backing Streeting, or contender? Is she prepared for the scrutiny and for the torrent of hostility?

Starmer ostentatiously praises Rayner in public even as she does not return his calls in private, and in his party conference speech in Liverpool, Streeting said Labour “wants her back and needs her back”. It seems everyone wants to be Angela’s friend.

Rayner herself is angry and wounded and she resents what she considers the intrusion into her family life. She feels condescended to and misunderstood but doesn’t want to be “a disruptor”. At the same time, she’s restless to return to frontline politics – once she has resolved her outstanding tax liabilities with HMRC, likely to be in the new year. Unlike Starmer, she is embedded in the wider labour movement and has multiple sources of power, from the trade union left to what one MP calls the “Tribune lot”, while also maintaining close ties to some of the early supporters of Labour Together. Her chief of staff, Nick Parrott, is a former head of operations at Unite. 

As for Starmer, peering out from behind his designer specs, he increasingly wears the bewildered expression of a man who simply cannot understand how it all went wrong so quickly. He relishes being prime minister, particularly the international diplomacy and summits with world leaders, and his closest aides insist - don’t laugh – that he leads the most stable government in Europe. It's true Labour’s huge majority allows it to remain in power until 2029, but Starmer’s position is perilous, and he knows it.  

For now, he carries on. Yet the early promise of his premiership has been sadly squandered, and for Starmer, as for any leader contemplating a sense of an ending, it is already a case of never glad confident morning again. Meanwhile, Labour waits for Rayner to make her move.