Stuck with Starmer

Another week has rolled by and Keir Starmer is still Prime Minister. The Peter Mandelson affair grinds on, with a vote of inquiry into whether Starmer misled the Commons has been tabled by the Tories, and now ministers will spend their Monday evening ringing round the PLP to ensure they vote the right way. And the overwhelming majority of them will. After all this parliamentary party has happily voted for cuts to disability payments, so they're unlikely to find fault with the administrative procedures surrounding the affair. Tuesday also brings us Morgan McSweeney's appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee, which may entail more squirming and discomfiture. All of which is about muddying Starmer's responsibility for appointing Mandelson in the first place.

You've got to ask how much longer can the farce of this premiership stagger on for. Over the weekend, Starmer said the next election would be between Labour and Reform and he's the man to lead that campaign. He went on to say that the "patriotic values of tolerance, decency, live and let live, diversity, are under challenge like we’ve never seen before." He should know,. His government is at the forefront of stirring the pot.

Unfortunately, Starmer's manifest unsuitability and dishonesty is something Labour are stuck with. Such are the consequences of the party's Faustian pact with the Mandelson-led, and City-funded coterie who Starmer played front man for. The election victory was brought at the price of stripping the party of the remnants of its social democratic soul, and now all the electorate can see is something abominable. A veritable picture of Dorian Gray without the witty prose. The question about who would replace Starmer is as unresolved now as it was when the NEC blocked Andy Burnham from standing in Gorton and Denton. MPs, despairing at Starmer, are now apparently warming to the King of the North's seizing the Iron Throne. Yet the path back remains as convoluted as ever. Meanwhile, Wes Streeting is still damaged goods because of his Mandelson associations and oligarch-friendly politics. And Angela Rayner is still waiting for her tax issues to go away. Matters are so bad that Ed Miliband's name continues to float around the lobby gossip columns.

I'm almost reminded of that weird moment in British politics when Theresa May's position had completely disintegrated but, at the same time, because none of her rivals wanted to inherit the tough job of negotiating a Brexit deal and selling it to a deeply divided Tory party, she was afforded a strange but time-limited autonomy independent of the warring factions. A very weak sort of Bonapartism. But I said almost reminded. In all essentials, Starmer and his possible successors are on the same page politically. Streeting offers no change at all, the same dead-eyed joyless politics that treat the interests of the rich as sacrosanct. Rayner and Burnham offer more character and less racism, but that's their lot. Most of the PLP and ever-so-wise commentators think change means dumping Starmer and getting someone else in, but this just isn't going to cut it. Nothing less than a political turn around and a complete reinvention in office will do, but with these heirs apparent and this PLP? It's would be a kindness to book them into a Swiss clinic now.

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