Is it all over for Starmer?

Either he takes the fight to the right, or he goes

The collapse in popularity of Keir Starmer’s Labour government is giddying to watch. Its opinion poll rating is down to 20 per cent or thereabouts. Starmer is now less popular than Boris Johnson, who was the worst British prime minister since, well, take your pick, Neville Chamberlain, Lord North, whichever thane advised Æthelred the Unready.

Starmer is seen as a hapless and untrustworthy man, without the charisma to succeed in the new age of TikTok.

Labour MPs fear for their careers if nothing changes. They should fear for their country too. Trump’s acolyte Nigel Farage is ahead in the polls. Rather than moderating his policies as he approaches power, he is becoming ever more extreme, and is now promising to block the route migrants take to integrate into British life.

A little over a week ago, the jailbird Tommy Robinson led a protest of 100,000 or more through the streets of London. His team beamed in Elon Musk to address the largest far-right rally this country has seen since the 1930s.

Musk demanded the “dissolution of parliament” and a “change of government.” He cried that “violence is coming..,you either fight back or you die”.

These were better sentiments than he knew.

The question we face is can the centre-left fight back against a radical right inciting violence on the streets?

Or will it die?

I wanted to talk to Tom Baldwin about Labour’s crisis. He is Starmer’s biographer and knows him better than any other commentator. Tom also has significant political experience. He was Ed Miliband’s communications chief, when Ed was Labour leader, and ran the tragically doomed campaign to reverse Brexit.

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We focused on a tension that could tear the centre-left apart. Morgan McSweeney is Starmer’s supposedly Machiavellian adviser. I say “supposedly” because, if he were a true Machiavellian master of the dark arts, Labour would not be at its lowest poll rating ever.

McSweeney believes the next election will see a coalescing of all the UK’s progressive forces into a “Republican Front” against Farage. Liberal Britain will stand as one against the radical right as Republican France has rallied against Le Pen in multiple elections.

It sounds good in theory. But in practice, progressive Britain is splintered – in part because of the tactics of Starmer and McSweeney.

They drove away leftists, so now we have a reinvigorated Green party and possibly a new Corbyn party. Beyond them lie the Liberal Democrats and Scottish and Welsh nationalists.

All the other parties hate Labour – or find it electorally profitable to pretend to hate Labour. And vice versa. Given our electoral system it is perfectly possible that Farage or someone like him could come through the middle.

I began by asking whether the pressure on Starmer to step aside was now irresistible.