Why It All Went Wrong For Starmer – And What's To Come With Burnham
Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer (Illustrations by Tracy Worrall)
14 min read
Sienna Rodgers reports on how Keir Starmer’s premiership was cut short and whether Labour believes Andy Burnham will fare any better
The mood in the Downing Street Rose Garden that night swung between grief and relief. For two years, they had been careful to avoid parties there, fearing echoes of the infamous lockdown gatherings under Boris Johnson. But it had been a long day in which everyone was on the verge of tears, and it was all going to be over soon anyway. There were crisps and many bottles of wine and lots of emotions. The atmosphere was that of a wake because, hours earlier, Keir Starmer had confirmed the inevitable: this was the end.
The Prime Minister was there for hours and hours, from the afternoon until the late evening, and Lady Starmer and the children joined too. He left “politician mode” behind and told the aides and loyal MPs assembled in the garden that he would never forget their support. “Vic and I made a decision,” a guest recalls him saying, “and you have stood by me, and I’ll never regret it.” Unusually, Victoria Starmer spoke next, thanking everyone for having their backs. The kids played on the trampoline.
Attendees felt bonded. After Taylor Swift and a lot of 90s rock, the compulsory Labour anthem Things Can Only Get Better was blasting, and they jumped and danced around as a group.
Spads distracted themselves from the thought that they could well be jobless in just a few weeks. Having lived in a state of perpetual anxiety for a year, at last they were acknowledging the project was over, though they could not believe they had reached this point so soon after entering government.
As with Starmer’s resignation speech outside No 10, Rachel Reeves did not show up. A source close to the Chancellor cautions against reading too much into her non-attendance on that difficult morning, and says later in the day Reeves was busy doing a bilateral with the new Defence Secretary followed by hosting small businesses.
But in Reeves’ absence, much of the chatter turned to her role in it all: they muttered that Keir had stood by her even as she cried on the frontbench, wondered when she would accept responsibility for her mistakes like he had done, and discussed her part in the “DIP” (Defence Investment Plan) saga that saw John Healey resign as defence secretary.
“People were laying into her,” a guest recalls. “Everyone names the winter fuel allowance thing as the beginning of the end, and she pushed it through. They were saying she made many, many mistakes, and Keir still stuck by her, but the absolute fatal blow at the end was John Healey, and that was Rachel’s fault, because she wouldn’t back down.”
A senior Labour source says: “Rachel was especially badly behaved during that period. Really obnoxious. Going into meetings of government where you have to talk about trade-offs, all in the context of DIP, and instead of looking at, ‘What is an absolute necessity, what can we change?’, she was sounding off and saying, ‘There is no money because of DIP and the PM is forcing me to do it.’”
It is evidence, they claim, that the partnership had broken down: “If you’d had a functioning PM-Chancellor relationship, Rachel would’ve said, ‘We know this is a priority and we’ve got to get it done.’”
Another cutting insider criticises her “terrible political judgement”, concluding: “Blair had Brown, Cameron had Osborne, and unfortunately Starmer had Reeves.”
Not everyone around the PM agrees. Starmer ally Baroness Chapman gets in touch with The House to praise Reeves as “respected on the world stage” and “taken seriously by finance ministers (almost all men), which is pretty impressive”. “Obviously also there’s the stuff she’s done to re-establish our economic credibility, getting interest rates down and good signs on growth before Hormuz. People who know her get to like her pretty quickly,” the peer adds.
Another minister close to Starmer rejects the characterisation of a breakdown in relations, saying: “The two of them have worked unbelievably closely, and over the last few weeks and months especially she’s been very supportive (when others, to put it politely, haven’t!).”
On the DIP, they add: “Those kinds of major decisions will always involve some back and forth from 10 and 11 but from what I saw it was always respectful and people trying to come to the right place on an incredibly difficult issue.”
Reeves did find the process very frustrating at times but the bottom line, allies say, is that she was asked by the PM to find billions outside of a fiscal event and she did so.
Either way, for most insiders, the DIP fiasco was the final straw for Starmer’s premiership.
“There was a feeling that when John stood down, the wheels were coming off,” says a Cabinet source. Some blame Reeves; others Ed Miliband, accusing him of intransigence over capital being taken out of the Desnz budget to fund increased defence spend.
One version of events attributes No 10’s distractedness to Miliband, even though, as a Labour MP puts it: “Why would Keir care about Ed resigning when he had already told him to his face that he should go and was part of the plotting?” The idea that the PM was too focused on Miliband to grasp the Healey danger is rejected by a source close to the Energy Secretary, who says his DIP settlement was finalised almost a week before Healey’s resignation so neither his approach nor fear of him quitting could have played a part. Miliband was not happy about the cuts, they say, but he had accepted them.
Crucially, though, too many thought the blame lay with Starmer himself. One of his key selling points to remaining core supporters was his record on security yet he allowed it to be severely damaged by the row. The lack of political decisiveness became clearer than ever at that moment, and the fight for Starmer to stay juddered to halt, with one loyalist recalling the question that came to mind: “What are we fighting for?”
The political gravity of the situation was not taken seriously: Starmer’s antennae for these things, Morgan McSweeney, was no longer chief of staff. Multiple sources say he did urge Starmer to proactively sack Miliband as well as Shabana Mahmood for disloyalty. But while McSweeney has continued to feed in ideas from a distance, a senior source points out, the intensity of No 10 is such that anyone who is not present day-to-day cannot wield much influence.
While recent events inflicted serious damage on Starmer’s remaining authority, the fundamental problems go back much further. Some say Covid, followed by the Conservative Party’s troubles, meant he faced too little scrutiny as opposition leader. Others point to a lack of preparation for government.
“Everyone thought there was a secret plan and there wasn’t. That had to be pulled together in government, which is what the ‘plan for change’ was. But that meant there was months of drift at the outset,” says James Lyons, who served for almost a year as one of Starmer’s numerous directors of communications.
The PM’s inability to hold onto key staff members – from comms and political directors to chiefs of staff, civil service policy leads and political leads – was another serious factor. He found it difficult, insiders report, to confront people. There was a general lack of discipline: he tended not to make demands of the Cabinet or hold them to account, so everyone was freewheeling with nothing holding the project together at the centre.
When a significant decision was taken that would be difficult for the parliamentary party to swallow, from the winter fuel allowance cut to the welfare cuts, Starmer’s hands-off approach to party management invited trouble. MPs often complained about his refusal to mix with them, until some efforts were made years in to hold more meetings, and even loyal troopers guessed he didn’t know their names let alone how they could contribute to the government’s work.
The rebellion that forced ministers to rip up a bill on the floor of the House was the death knell. “The winter fuel cuts were the government’s original sin, but what cast the Prime Minister into political purgatory was the welfare rebellion. He never reasserted his authority after that,” observes Lyons.
It was not only 2024 intake MPs who were left bruised. “I don’t blame Keir for this personally, but I felt his team at the very beginning made a major mistake in terms of ministerial appointments,” says Starmer ally and neighbouring MP Tulip Siddiq.
Although she was brought into government as a minister, she says of colleagues: “People who had worked their socks off in opposition weren’t made ministers but also were never thanked for their years of service.” New MPs being promoted immediately upon entering Parliament rubbed salt into those wounds.
At the most basic level, it is Starmer’s lack of politics that was widely perceived to be the real problem.
“It’s a horrible way to end your time leading the party,” a sympathetic and loyal MP says of Starmer’s announcement. “But fundamentally he just wasn’t a political politician. He was quite snippy about it all, like being nice to people in the tea rooms. Well, we’ve got a parliamentary democracy – not a presidential one.”
The same Cabinet source quoted earlier sums up the persistent concern Labour people have had throughout the leader’s tenure: “Keir is not really a political animal. In the end, that’s where it’s fallen through. He hasn’t been prepared to say, ‘Enemies are attacking me from within and I’m going to fight back’ – and really mean it.”
Enter Andy Burnham, the King of the North who has arrived in the South to take the crown following an overwhelming victory in a ‘proof of concept’ by-election.
He may project a soft image – all fluttering eyelashes, big smiles and oodles of charm. But his coup has shown a level of ruthless efficiency that is surprising from someone who failed to be selected for the last by-election opportunity in Manchester after barely organising for it. Louise Haigh and Anneliese Midgley as his Westminster enforcers have played a key role in the transformation of his operation.
The prospect of rivals for the top job has faded away. Wes Streeting bowed out immediately upon Burnham’s return. Darren Jones, the ambitious chief secretary to Starmer, ruled himself out of the running after generating some speculation widely assumed to be aimed mostly at securing leverage in job negotiations.
Military man and 2024 intake MP Al Carns is still keeping his name in the mix at the time of writing, but it is hard to find anyone who seriously thinks he could reach the threshold of 81 MP nominations to trigger a full contest. Why would so many choose to be on a “please don’t give me a job” list? And no women are willing to put themselves forward for a challenge that Labour’s history tells us would be both painful and pointless.
The bar some colleagues set for Burnham to clear was high: he needed to not just beat Reform but do better than Reform and Restore combined. In the end, he smashed that target with an absolute majority share of the vote. Those Labour MPs stubbornly sceptical about his talents now compare the Makerfield result to Jeremy Corbyn winning in Islington: it was proof he is popular in Manchester, they argue, not that he can beat Nigel Farage anywhere.
Even so, most have decided a coronation is for the best. As Lyons, formerly of Starmer’s No 10, puts it: “Andy comes in with far more experience than many Labour leaders into Downing Street, and I think a contest would be a catastrophe for the Labour Party that would see all the contenders get dragged to the left with no time to make their way back to the centre by the time they landed in No 10, which is what normally happens.”
Many Burnham backers are invigorated by his ascent. Worryingly, though, one Labour MP has noticed a “weird acceptance” in other parts of the parliamentary party that regularly changing leaders has become routine. On the day of Burnham’s swearing-in, MPs “were like, ‘Yeah, he won’t last very long. In two years, there’ll be a snap election and he’ll be gone,’” they say.
A proponent of electoral reform, one insider says Burnham is already benefiting from a form of proportional representation in the PLP: for big chunks of it, on the right and left, he is their second-preference candidate. They were too worried about handing the reins to the other side to put forward their ideal pick.
The hope among these slightly or very disgruntled Labour people is that Burnham will lead a “government of all the talents” and put pluralism at the heart of his project – in stark contrast to the Starmer-McSweeney operation.
Luke Hurst is national co-ordinator of the Mainstream group that launched last year, which has brought the soft and harder left together in support of a Burnham leadership. “It fundamentally does not have purpose,” he says of the Starmer government. “It never did, other than some vague platitudes about change. There was only an internal purpose, which was rooting out dissent.”
Hurst trusts Burnham will take lessons from their failure: “The way Keir Starmer has run the party has damaged the output of the government, and I think there’s a cautionary tale there for Andy. He has to learn not just how to be a prime minister but how to be a leader of the Labour Party.
“The centralisation of power and decision-making with, essentially, a boys’ club at the top of the party, the sidelining of the unions, members and socialist societies, and severing of the party from civil society, has just meant that the government hasn’t had the resources to do what it said it wanted to do in a really complex, challenging moment.”
Neal Lawson, director of Compass and an ally of Burnham, puts the same criticism of Starmer’s methods in stronger terms. “It was sold by Morgan as Corbynism without Corbyn. They were obviously lying through their teeth, and did completely the opposite: junk the people, junk the policy, turn it on a sixpence, refashion the Labour Party from the top down in a narrow, brittle, bloodless way. It was always going to end in catastrophe, which is what’s happened.”
The tensions within the Burnham coalition are already pulling at the seams, however. The Socialist Campaign Group is just happy “the boot is no longer on their throat”, as one source puts it, but the soft left had higher expectations than merely a loosening of the whip.
Confirmation that longtime friend and former Blairite minister James Purnell will be his chief of staff has unnerved parts of the soft left contingent. (Purnell is currently leading staff recruitment for Burnham’s No 10, The House understands.) If the new PM also chooses a figure from the Labour right such as Wes Streeting or Pat McFadden as his chancellor over Miliband, the radicalism they expected appears to be over before it’s all begun.
The argument for Miliband goes like this: Burnham must lead a bolder government that takes bolder action on the economy, and a lot of nonsense is spouted about Miliband considering he spent years in the Treasury and has headed up a successful economic growth department that has shown he knows how to deliver.
The counter-arguments are many: Miliband would destabilise the markets, anger key trade unions who oppose his net-zero agenda, and provide the lobby with endless stories about No 11 being the real centre of power. “It would be creating a monster,” says one detractor.
A senior Labour source in Starmer’s government reckons the proposed ‘kumbaya’ approach will end in tears. “It’s dangerous to have so many factions feeding in because Labour factionalism is toxic,” they say. “You take the lid off it and it’s a nightmare because you can’t get the lid back on. It’s a Pandora’s Box of shit.”
