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Chapter 1: What recent events prompted this emergency episode?
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Chapter 2: How did Wes Streeting's resignation impact the Labour Party?
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Welcome to The Rest of This Politics with me, Rory Stewart.
And me, Alastair Campbell. And we're talking about developments in the leadership of the Labour Party. We had the dreadful local election results recently since when there's been massive speculation about whether anybody might challenge Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party. Step forward this morning, Wes Streeting, Health Secretary,
resigning from the cabinet, saying in his letter of resignation that he no longer has the confidence in the prime minister and he wants a broad leadership debate to see who should follow him.
And then this evening, step forward, Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, lots of talk about which seat he might step into and step forward on his behalf, a young MP by the name of Joss Simons, who has stepped down from a seat in the Manchester area and And Andy Burnham says he wants to ask the national executive to let him be a candidate.
Let me try for foreign listeners just quickly, or any British listeners who, like me, have been doing other work today and haven't been following the ins and outs. Essentially, under the Labour Party rules, if an MP, sitting MP, gets enough MPs to back him... just over 80 MPs, they can trigger a leadership challenge to the sitting leader, who in this case is Keir Starmer.
And then the rules are that it goes to an alternative voting system where the electorate voting are Labour Party members and affiliated members, which I guess means members of trade unions or certain types of members of trade unions. And if nobody clears 50% of the first round, the candidates' votes are redistributed until somebody emerges as the winner.
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Chapter 3: What is Andy Burnham's potential strategy for leadership?
I get really angry about this and that you feel that this was the wrong decision and it's going to make a real mess. I guess the brutal question is, firstly, is it actually possible for Keir Starmer to survive now that Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham are doing this? Or are we just kind of we are where we are?
And however angry you are about it, Keir Starmer is very unlikely to be around in three, six months time.
Yeah. And by the way, let me say, I'm not, you know, I've always tried to put the case for Keir Starmer because I think he gets so much sort of stuff thrown at him. But I've never pretended that I think he's, you know, the bees knees as leader of the Labour Party or as prime minister. And, you know, the Labour person in me.
genuinely wants this government to do well and would like to see Labour win the next election if possible, because I think most governments need at least two terms to kind of make big change. So what I say about that is I think his chances of surviving long term are a lot slimmer than they were. There's no doubt about that, because the message that's being put out there is an awful lot of
Let's imagine he survives. We now know that there are literally dozens of MPs sitting there day after day after day after day thinking, I don't want him there. So even survival is a quite a tough place for Keir Starmer to be. So, you know, I think that his chances of surviving are pretty slim, to be honest.
What should he do then? Should he accept that? and say, well, that probably does mean that he needs to set a timetable for his resignation, which is what Theresa May did in 2019. Or does he take the John Major view, which I guess was 1995, which is, I'll fight this out. And yes, there's a lot of people who don't like me, but I can win this and I can take them into the next election.
I think that latter position is where he is in his mind right now. But I think a lot of that is driven just by sheer anger, this feeling that, you know, why is this all being thrown at me? Now, the answer to that is that's what happens in modern politics. You know, as you know, I'm in Germany.
There was literally an article in one of the broadsheet papers yesterday suggesting that Merz might have to call another general election after a year. Now, I don't think that's where they're going to go.
But I think that in modern times, with politics as brutal as it is, populism as viral as it is, social media as violent as it is, the sheer hatred that there is of high-profile public figures in the public is very, very hard. I think he still thinks that he is better than any of the options that are being put forward, certainly thinks that on foreign policy.
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Chapter 4: How does the Labour Party leadership challenge process work?
The economy's growing. The bond market's being a bit unfair, but actually, You know, there are things they failed to do, but they've not been dangerous, damaging politicians, and it could get a lot worse.
Certainly, if you're from the Tory party, you would worry that Angela Rayner would be much more left wing, that the kind of things that people are talking about in terms of cutting welfare spending. Well, let's look at Wes Streeting's little manifesto or what seems to be his manifesto. He seems to say, vote for me. I'm going to cut welfare spending. I'm going to strengthen democracy. defense.
I'm going to radically reform the NHS. I'm going to make life easier for businesses. I'm going to deregulate. So it's very much sounds like a sort of more business friendly free market version of Keir Starmer. And then Angela Rayner on the other side sounded in that a large thing that she put out a few days ago to be staking out a much more left wing position. Is that right? Roughly?
Yeah, and it'd be interesting to see, for example, whether if the leadership contest does go ahead and West Street does have the numbers, whether he will feel that he has to somehow inoculate himself against the charges that are already being put out there.
You've given the version on policy, but I saw one of the first things that happened yesterday when he left that 17-minute meeting with Keir Starmer. was a graph that was put out from somebody on the left basically. These are all the people that bought West Streeting. I mean, he's going to get a lot of attack from the left. He will be seen as the candidate of the right.
There will be a candidate of the left, be that Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband has made clear that if there isn't one, then he would be prepared to stand. And then Keir Starmer, I guess, would, if he stood in those circumstances, would project himself as the candidate of the centre.
One small thing there. You just said Ed Miliband might stand. And that again for... most listeners, I think will be absolutely staggeringly astonishing. I mean, this is the guy who managed to manoeuvre his way into being Labour leader in 2010. From the point of view of you and me and many others, David Miliband, his brother, would have been a better choice. Took Labour to defeat in 2015.
Seemed, we thought, not really, whatever his merits are as a man, not quite to have the full capacity to be Labour leader. I mean, can Labour seriously be thinking of sort of jumping back 16 years and trying Ed Miliband again?
Well, I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm simply saying that I know that he is of a mindset that if they continue to block Andy Burnham, and if none of the others manage to rise up to get sufficient support to take on West Streeting, then he would do it. In other words, the point I'm making is that he's been –
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Chapter 5: What advantages does Keir Starmer have in retaining leadership?
as opposed to, you're trying to make my life better, it's lethal. And I really worry for the Labour Party that this, you know, no party has a divine right to exist.
So there's that, there's a huge existential threat, which is it could end up like the Socialist Party in France, or I'm very worried about the direction the Conservative Party's going. It's possible our two big parties could be in real trouble. We might be entering a five-party system where they shrink and vanish. There's another thing I don't quite get.
How is it possible for anyone on the right, like Wes Streeting, to win with Labour Party members? I mean, isn't that the same problem that I had running against Boris Johnson, which is broadly speaking in 2019 when I was running? The Tory party wanted somebody on the right of Tory politics, and it was all very well. You know, people used to make a joke that I was the...
the Tory party leader that everybody wanted except for the Tory party members. I mean, isn't that the problem with Wes Streeting? It's all very well that people like me love him, but how's he going to get the votes of the Labour Party members if he's running against Angela Rayner or Ed Miliband or Andy Burnham?
He'll be thinking a similar version of what you thought you thought. And, you know, if you think about it, go back to your time in that challenge. You were coming from almost from not a standing start, but you were in a way the least known of the main names going into that. And yet you did manage to.
I think he'll be hoping that he can project himself in a way that people say, say what you like about him, that guy's a winner. That's what I think he will be trying to do. And maybe portray the others as being all about the politics, as it were. But, you know, the fact is he's been in politics all his life. We talked to him on Leading not long ago.
In fact, I think I'm right in saying that all of the people who are being mentioned are including Angela Rayner, who we've got on the podcast this week in our Gen Z series. All of the ones that are being talked about, we have interviewed on Leedy. But when we interviewed Wes Streeting, did you have a sense then of where he was politically?
Did you feel that the way that he's projected himself now is what you imagined him to be?
What I got on that was somebody who was a good talker, I was surprisingly relaxed, was interesting about his Christian faith and his background, was very funny about his family background, was convincing, I thought, on the NHS and the kind of reforms he wanted to bring through in the NHS. But it's so difficult for an outsider to answer the question.
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Chapter 6: What are the risks for Andy Burnham in pursuing leadership?
countenance that I don't know you see in other governments we look at the Norwegian government at the moment you've got you've got my friend Jonas who's the prime minister and you've got Stoltenberg who's who's the former minister who's a former prime minister so it's not a guy I think you've I think you David Cameron David Cameron very recently Alec Alec Douglas Hume Tory prime minister has been willing to do exactly so I think you've cheered me up quite a lot there I've got to say Roy you took the mickey out of my nice dinner and
And Fiona and I booked into this hotel and we discovered that on this site was the 2007 G8 summit. So Putin was here and Tony was here and Sarkozy was here and Merkel was here. But the bloody Wi-Fi has been an absolute nightmare. Yeah. So, you know, Germany, Vorsprung durch Technik, they've gone backwards, I would say, because I can't believe Vladimir Putin put up with choppy Wi-Fi.
Well, thank you very much, Alistair. And we've just had confirmation as we're recording that Keir Starmer said he won't block Andy Burnham. So we can assume that... Andy Burnham will now come forward and try to take the seat. So much more to cover.
And I guess we'll be returning to this many, many times over the next few weeks, because I fear we're likely to have a new Labour leader in place by the summer.
I think we're definitely going to have a contest. And I think that's sensible that Keir Starmer said we can't block him twice. Be very interesting to see the extent to which, I mean, does Keir Starmer go and campaign for Andy Burnham in a by-election?
No.
Yeah, if I was Andy Berman, I'd be encouraging Keir Starmer to stay as far away from my by-election as possible.
Maybe, but my point is he'll get asked about the thing the whole time and I'll have to say he's a great friend of mine and blah, blah, blah. I mean, my big plea to all of them is try very, very hard insofar as you possibly can not to just make this a gigantic soap opera and never, ever, ever forget the watching general public.
Good. All right, Alistair. Have a great evening.
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