A change of Labour leader is the wrong answer – the party’s troubles go much deeper

Keir Starmer is beset by speculation that he will face a leadership challenge if Labour loses the Batley and Spen by-election, writes John Rentoul

Keir Starmer, left, with Andy Burnham, centre, and Angela Rayner on the campaign trail in April (Getty)

Keir Starmer’s people have ingeniously briefed that they thought Labour might just win the Batley and Spen by-election. It raised Labour morale, possibly encouraging supporters to turn out to vote in the constituency, but above all it meant that journalists spent some time debating whether it could possibly be true or not.

Every minute that journalists spent engaging in pointless speculation about whether Labour really could hold the seat was a minute in which they were not engaging in pointless speculation about a challenge to Starmer’s leadership.

But it remains the case that for the official opposition to prevent the government gaining a second seat in this parliament would be a sensational by-election upset to rank with Orpington, Hamilton, Bermondsey and Bradford West – which tells us a lot about the current state of politics.

So let us engage instead in pointless speculation about the Labour leadership. An early challenge to Starmer is unlikely because you cannot beat somebody with nobody – an adage favoured by Nick Brown, the Labour chief whip who stepped down from his post after the last by-election defeat in Hartlepool in May. There is no plausible candidate to replace Starmer who would obviously do a better job.

What is more, the party rule book makes it hard for such a candidate to emerge suddenly from the primordial soup of talent. Leaders with some profile among party members, such as Andy Burnham, mayor of Manchester, and Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, are not eligible to stand for leader because they are not members of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

The finding of yesterday’s poll of party members by YouGov, therefore, that 69 per cent of them think Burnham would be a better leader than Starmer, is more a measure of a vague yearning for greener grass than a plan of action.

The rules also make it hard for MPs to organise against the incumbent leader. They require 40 MPs to nominate an alternative candidate. That is, 40 of them have to nominate the same candidate: it is no use 40 in total nominating candidates from the right, left and centre of the party. The Conservative Party has different rules: the first stage of a Tory leadership contest is triggered by 55 MPs (15 per cent of the total, rather than 20 per cent in Labour’s case) demanding a vote of confidence. Those 55 do not have to say who they want instead of Boris Johnson; and if they succeed in securing a vote of confidence, they still don’t. That vote would be for or against the leader. In the Tory party, you can beat somebody with nobody.

The question in the Labour Party, therefore, is whether there is a single MP who can muster the public support of 39 of their colleagues to stand against Starmer. Diane Abbott admitted at the weekend that the Corbynites do not have a candidate. The thing which makes Starmer “safe”, she told my colleague Ashley Cowburn, “is the question of who we would replace him with: there’s no resolution on that, whether from the left or from the erstwhile Blairites.”

Even if the Socialist Campaign Group had a candidate, it has only 32 Labour MPs on its books. Many of its members might back Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, in preference to Starmer, even though in the baffling theology of Labour betrayalism she is a “Blairite” because she praises New Labour’s Sure Start scheme.

But I don’t think that Rayner would find enough support from other MPs outside the Socialist Campaign Group to be able to stand. That is not going to stop her and her aggressive media operation from pushing in that general direction, but that seems to be about positioning her for a longer timetable than tomorrow.

One striking finding of the YouGov poll was that only 12 per cent of Labour members said they would vote for her if Starmer stepped down, compared with 35 per cent for Yvette Cooper and 13 per cent for Lisa Nandy. Those are not the sort of numbers that would persuade Labour MPs that it was worth risking their seats on a new leader.

Only 42 per cent of the general public say they have even heard of Rayner. She is a forceful character who may yet come to the fore as the bearer of an authentic Labour message – but it is not yet clear to enough Labour MPs, who are still the gatekeepers of a leadership election, that a change of leader is the answer to the party’s problems.

Not this week, anyway.