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2 days ago
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Labour MPs have said they believe Keir Starmer’s leadership is safe until at least the May elections, after a budget that avoided any major damaging measures but which few MPs believe will revive the party’s fortunes.
More than a dozen previously loyal MPs told the Guardian they did not believe the budget would shift the fundamentals required for the party to beat Reform. “It only delays what is inevitable,” one minister said.
On Wednesday night in the Commons after the budget, many of the cabinet did the rounds chatting to MPs, including the health secretary and the prime minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, a tacit declaration of peace after the fallout from a week of furious briefing about Streeting’s leadership ambitions from allies of Starmer.
Those close to Starmer were adamant he would never have walked away had the budget fuelled more criticism of his leadership. “The idea he’d walk away if somebody said the budget hadn’t landed well is nonsense,” a senior No 10 source said.
MPs said they had been “love bombed” in the run-up to the budget when Rachel Reeves met more than 100 MPs individually, name-checking many of them in her budget speech.
“Everyone is getting photo ops and invites to Chequers,” said one MP. “The budget doesn’t change the fundamentals that they are one crap decision away from catastrophe.”
A number of MPs on the party’s right, however, said they were deeply unnerved by the budget, with one calling it “focused on the bond markets and the backbenches” and not on ordinary voters, who would feel their incomes considerably squeezed in order to pay for additional headroom, the welfare U-turn and the two-child benefit cap.
“It’s a tactical victory, the political and economic trends are all still heading in the wrong direction and it’s not going to turn any of that around,” one senior Labour figure said. “There simply isn’t a wider economic or political story that gives you any idea where we’re going or what this is for, beyond survival.
“I don’t think it kills challenges stone dead. And it would be better to try to find a way to do it before May.”
Streeting, who has robustly denied any leadership plotting, has been noticed by MPs to be spending time publicly defending key figures on the party’s soft left, including Lucy Powell, the new deputy leader with whom he had previously privately clashed.
Streeting has also publicly praised Angela Rayner, his main potential rival for any future leadership, sparking rumours of a potential pact.
One frontbencher said he believed that in any future contest, Streeting would attempt to collect more votes from the party’s left, after having been more outspoken on anti-racism, Gaza and the need to fight harder against Reform.
They said they believed Streeting would reach the threshold of 80 MPs, as would the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, should she decide to run. But any candidate from the soft-left group of MPs would likely eat into the vote of both, although there is no obvious person, aside from Rayner – who is in two minds about whether she should be a candidate.
The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, who has been mentioned as a potential candidate, is considered by most allies to be highly unlikely to run. “He would want to be a kingmaker if he could,” said one MP close to the former Labour leader.
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The Tribune group of soft-left MPs, which has been revived by the former cabinet minister Louise Haigh and the former whip Vicky Foxcroft, welcomed much of the budget, especially the lifting of the two-child benefit cap, but MPs aligned with the group said they expected its lobbying efforts would now focus on living standards.
Those around Keir Starmer know that next May’s local elections pose an even greater challenge to the prime minister’s hopes of staying in office. “If the budget is a dangerous moment, then the local elections are perilous,” one senior Downing Street figure said.
Discussions are already under way in No 10 – led by Miliband’s 2015 campaign manager Spencer Livermore – about how to limit the damage in what is widely expected to be a disastrous set of results.
There are fears Labour will be badly hit in thousands of council races across England, including London, and could lose Wales to Reform UK and slip into third place behind the SNP and Reform in Scotland, where at one stage the party was tipped for power.
“We’ve got to have enough of a story to talk about a win, even if the results overall are terrible,” the No 10 figure added. “If we can find some indicative places where we’ve done well against the Greens or Reform, for example, then we can argue that there’s a route to doing that nationally.”
Some MPs, particularly those in Wales and Scotland, think that is thin gruel. “Morgan is more positive than most about how we’ll do north of the border but it’s difficult not to worry when you look at the polls,” one said.
“We need to make sure the contest is about who leads Scotland at Holyrood, who will transform public services here, not about what Scottish voters think about Keir, because otherwise we’re stuffed.”
