On Monday evening Sir Keir Starmer will come back to earth with a bang.
From the pomp and ceremony of his Lancaster House summit with Ursula von der Leyen, the prime minister will make his way to parliament to be confronted by his own mutinous MPs.
Starmer may have signed
three trade deals in a week and unveiled a sweeping package of migration control measures but for many of the prime minister’s backbenchers this is slightly missing the point.
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After Labour’s disastrous local election results they are in a state of ferment over planned welfare cuts, the public backlash over
scrapping winter fuel payments and the broader direction of the government. They want Starmer to tell them how he plans to turn things around.
Starmer is reported to be looking again at the winter fuel payment in a move that could increase the £11,500 income threshold over which pensioners are no longer eligible for the allowance despite denials from Downing Street.
At a meeting last week MPs were unimpressed — to put it mildly — when a senior Downing Street aide told them that Starmer’s premiership remains a “work in progress”.
Claire Reynolds, who is in charge of liaising with the parliamentary party, showed them private polling that indicated Labour did badly because
Reform UK mobilised non-voters while Labour voters at the last election stayed at home.
“They are our people and they are pissed off,” she is reported to have said.
For many MPs this is an understatement. They are increasingly concerned that despite Starmer’s success on the international stage he is making basic political errors at home.
In particular they are infuriated by the government’s
planned welfare cuts, which they fear could prove even more toxic among their voters than winter fuel payments.
A letter signed by more than 100 MPs was sent to the chief whip on Tuesday, making explicit they were “prepared not to support” the welfare reform bill, which is set to come before the Commons in the second week in June.
The total number of MPs is as high as 170, rebels believe, including several ministerial aides who have said they are prepared to resign. Of these, about 60 privately say they will vote against — the rest say they want to abstain.
It means that for the first time in Starmer’s premiership there is a realistic prospect the government faces defeat, despite its landslide majority.
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Government whips are keeping a spreadsheet of names of MPs willing to rebel over cuts to welfare as the list has steadily grown. One senior government source said: “I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about this shit.”
The only saving grace — described as “potentially the flailings of a drowning person as they come up for air one last time” — is that those in No 10 believe MPs are trying to be constructive with suggestions of changes that could be made.
The problem is that the government is unwilling to move. The prime minister was clear that the government believes that the welfare reforms are essential. He goes further in an interview with The Times, arguing that the government has “got to do” the reforms and that if people can work they should work.
There are broader concerns about the operation of No 10.
Starmer used his trip to Albania to announce plans to sign overseas returns hubs that would see failed asylum seekers sent abroad.
The announcement has been long in the making, and there have been months of preparations behind the scenes. Starmer believes that while they are not a “silver bullet” the plans could work and
overcome the legal difficulties that bedevilled the Conservative Party’s Rwanda scheme.
There was a problem, however. Just a few hours later the prime minister held a joint press conference with Edi Rama, the Albanian prime minister, who was very clear that
Britain would not be allowed to host a return centre in his country.
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Albania has allowed Italy to build two migration detention centres, but Rama said that no other deals would be done. Albania’s relationship with Italy, he said, was like a marriage and he would remain loyal to it. While there was “love” for Britain and other countries, they were not held in the same esteem.
In the meantime the small boats issue shows no signs of going away. The levels of illegal migration are already at record levels for the first five months of this year. One senior official said it was “fanciful” to think that they would come down this year, with the government’s “smash the gangs” policies unlikely to have a bearing on numbers until next year. Given the pressure that Labour MPs are under from Reform the prospect of declining numbers at some point next year offers little comfort.
They will be particularly spooked by a council by-election in the bellwether city of Stoke on Trent — which Labour won back from the Tories at the last election.
But on Thursday night Labour’s vote plummeted by 22 per cent, while Reform took the seat with 58 per cent of the vote.
How does Starmer turn it round? The prime minister has ruled out a reshuffle any time soon — it is expected to be after the summer at the earliest — with one senior figure saying that claims that Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, and
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, will be sacked in June are “bollocks”.
Starmer is said to have privately texted Phillipson to assure her she is safe in her job.
Instead the prime minister believes there is little to do but focus on delivery. The welfare cuts will be painful — but they will free up money for other areas of public services.
The NHS is showing some small signs of improvement and later this summer Starmer will unveil his ten-year plan which is designed to show voters — and staff — how he will achieve a more fundamental turnaround of a health service that has been struggling for a decade.
He will also keep relentlessly focusing on economic growth — of which the trade deals with
India,
the US and Europe are critical. He hopes that the signal these send to international investors will help boost the economy and allow Labour to break out of the circle of rising taxes and spending constraint that has characterised British politics since Covid.
Politically he also plans to treat Nigel Farage and Reform as the real opposition. The Tories, he believes, are irrelevant. His disdain was all too clear at
prime minister’s questions, where there was a significant gear shift. “A once great political party is sliding into braindead oblivion,” he said.
As a result Starmer is currently working out how best to use a debating chamber designed for two sides to face off to target a third party. Prime minister’s questions could become an increasingly awkward spectacle, with Starmer’s comments tacitly directed at the five Reform MPs sitting towards the back of the chamber.
The prime minister’s attacks have so far focused on Farage’s historic comments about
Vladimir Putin. Starmer has accused Farage of “fawning” over Putin, but there is little evidence that the barbs are having an effect. As a result he is planning to return to first principles, with attacks on the economy and the NHS.
Farage has said he wants to raise the tax-free personal allowance from £12,500 to £20,000, something Starmer argues would mean tens of billions of pounds less for the NHS.
Farage, he claims, wants to sell out the NHS — something Farage categorically denies. He is also willing to have a face to face TV debate with Farage. “Bring it on,” one ally said.
Over in the Conservative Party Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, is attempting to shore up her party. Her success in securing a £2 million donation from
Jez San, a video game tycoon, has alleviated some of the immediate financial pressure but politically she is struggling to make any inroads in the polls.
Badenoch has drafted her husband, Hamish, to help raise funds for the party. He is acting as a “proxy” for his wife during meetings with donors, having recently left Deutsche Bank. The role is unpaid.
But there are significant challenges ahead. CCHQ is said to have privately warned that as many as a fifth of Tory councillors who are standing in the local elections next year could defect to Reform or go independent. The claim was rejected by Tory sources.
For now, as they try to turn things around, both Starmer and
Badenoch have time on their side with the next election still at least three years away.
But the clock is ticking and unless both Labour and Tory MPs start to see progress the noises off will only get louder.
