Keir Starmer’s cabinet is rebelling – what took them so long?

Led by Angela Rayner, several cabinet ministers have broken ranks on the chancellor’s demand for swingeing budget cuts – and the only winner from this early breakdown of party discipline will be the prime minister, says John Rentoul

According to Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, “we’ve all had conversations – meetings, correspondence – as part of the usual Budget process”.

As the minister on media duty, it was her job to hose down reports of the cabinet at war. She and No 10 insist that this is “the normal way of doing things”.

And they are quite right that negotiating departmental spending is always difficult, involving a lot of internal meetings and memos, as the Treasury insists that departments can do more with less and departments argue back that the world will end if they are forced to make the cuts demanded.

What is not supposed to be the normal way of doing things is for ministers in spending departments to leak information to journalists about the negotiations.

So it is significant that Bloomberg reported that several cabinet ministers had written formally to the prime minister to protest about the cuts Rachel Reeves is asking them to make. The Times has identified three of them as Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister in charge of housing, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, and Louise Haigh, the transport secretary.

This is not the behaviour of a disciplined government, united by the need to take tough decisions to restore the public finances. It seems more like the behaviour of a government that got itself elected on a promise not to raise taxes, discovered that it would have to raise taxes, and then discovered that even then it wouldn’t be able to do many of the things that it had expected to do.

What is worse is that it implies either or both of two things. One, that ministers think they are more likely to get what they want by going public with their demands. Two, that ministers think that their standing in the party is enhanced by being known as having resisted Reeves’s “austerity”.

Keir Starmer is entitled to be impatient with both those assumptions. He made it crystal clear during the election campaign that the public finances were in such a state that Labour would face difficult choices if it formed a government. That was why he refused to promise to raise the two-child limit on benefits, before the election and afterwards.

As for ministers playing to the “higher public spending” gallery in the Labour Party, he might have expected a bit of loyalty, especially as he has just delivered the party’s second-biggest election victory.

Sadly, politics has always been thus. When Phillipson said this was the “normal way of doing things”, she spoke truer than she meant: the normal way is for ministers to leak, brief against their enemies and undermine the prime minister if they think it will advance their interests.

It is perfectly normal, too, for this kind of manoeuvring to start straight after great election victories. Some of Clement Attlee’s rivalrous colleagues sought to oust him immediately after his 1945 election win. Within weeks of Tony Blair’s victory in 1997, Gordon Brown was demanding a date for the handover of power.

Starmer is fortunate in that, although he does not have much of a passionate supporters’ club in the Labour Party, neither do any of his potential successors.

Rayner is the most Brown-like figure in Starmer’s cabinet. She would like his job and thinks she could do it better than he – just watch her face during yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions – but the party is nowhere near the stage where it would contemplate change.

Rayner and her allies may have overplayed their hand by appealing over Reeves’s head to the prime minister: that simply forces Starmer to back his chancellor. And by going semi-public, the revolting cabinet ministers have made Reeves’s case for the limited tax rises she will propose in the Budget. If the cuts are as bad as Rayner, Mahmood and Haigh say they are, then anyone complaining about higher taxes would have to say where even deeper spending cuts should fall.

Starmer and Reeves are under siege, but they will just have to play politics in return – by winning the argument.