Things could hardly be worse for Sir Keir Starmer. The nightmare by-election result in Gorton and Denton has shaken Labour to its core. The party had held the seat for more than a century but was pushed into third place. The humiliation has triggered emergency meetings and frantic damage control, but no clear solutions. None are likely to appear while Starmer remains in charge. The man is no leader.
The PM’s reputation for integrity has been shredded by sleaze and scandal. He can’t make a decision without waving the white flag. How many U-turns are there now? Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen? The policy body count climbs by the day. Starmer keeps feeding half-baked ideas into the Westminster meat grinder and sees them shot to pieces. Their life expectancy is shorter than a Putin recruit on the Ukrainian front. With war on Iran set to trigger another inflationary surge, is problems are about to get worse. Any hopes of Labour support holding up in May are evaporating fast.
Labour MPs are up in arms. The only reason they haven’t removed him is that nobody obvious is waiting in the wings. Do Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham or heaven help us Ed Miliband offer the leadership this country desperately needs? I don’t think so.
For months, Labour obsessed over the electoral threat from Nigel Farage’s resurgent Reform UK. Senior figures attacked him relentlessly. It turns out they were looking in the wrong direction.
Farage didn’t win Gorton and Denton, although it was always going to be a tough seat for Reform. Instead, Zack Polanski’s Green Party stormed it. Having tasted Labour blood, Polanski wants more. And he’s not the only one fired up. Starmer faces a squeeze from a coalition, and it isn’t on the right.
In Gorton and Denton, Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party and George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain stepped aside for the Greens, allowing the radical vote to gather around a single hard-left candidate. The result was a stunning upset.
Election experts say the formula could be repeated across the country, with Corbyn, Galloway and Polanski launching a furious assault on the Labour vote. Starmer could lose dozens of councils, including in his own backyard.
Incredibly, they believe Starmer has failed not because he’s drifted too far to the left and is in hock to radical Islamists, but because he’s too right wing. Activists and frustrated younger voters are concentrated in inner cities, and are preparing to seize Labour’s council strongholds.
Young people have reason to be angry. They can’t find jobs, are buried in student debt and can only dream of getting onto the housing ladder. Radical ideas flourish in that environment, even if their solutions would destroy the economy and make everything even worse.
If the war in Iran drags on and pushes prices higher, young people will only get more radical.
Even without winning power, a Polanski-Corbyn-Galloway axis could drag Starmer’s party further left as he tries to claw back support. Starmer spent months taking pot shots at Farage. He was watching the wrong man. The real battle is on his own left flank.
If he turns his fire on Polanski, Corbyn and Galloway, Farage will exploit the chaos from the other side. Either way, the outlook for Starmer looks bleak. Shot down by both sides.
