Protest votes shouldn’t topple prime ministers

If a Labour prime minister leads his party into the worst set of elections possibly ever, should he be allowed to carry on? The answer is less obvious than it might appear, according to The Independent.

For sure, a disaster is approaching this week. As the latest calculations from Professor Sir John Curtice and other psephological experts suggest, the Labour Party is likely to have one of the worst nights in its long electoral history, and no one is seriously doubting it. Whatever the eventual outcome in seats won and control in local councils, and the prospect of humiliation in the national elections in Scotland and Wales, if Labour’s share of the vote reflects its standing in the opinion polls, say 19 per cent, then this week will indeed be historic for the party.

Even if the results are widely expected to be dire, there will be extreme peril for the Labour leader and the usual febrile mood that overcomes Westminster at such times. There is no shortage of speculation swirling around Sir Keir Starmer’s future at the moment, and it will reach tornado proportions of intensity by the weekend.

Yet there is still a case for Sir Keir. To adapt Labour’s own dreamy theme tune from previous confident campaigns, things could quite conceivably get (even) worse rather than better for the party under the most likely replacements for the prime minister. It doesn’t take such a great feat of imagination to see why a nightmare might follow such a fall.

In the first place, the decision on the premiership will rest with Labour Party members, just as it did with the Conservative Party’s small and unrepresentative grassroots in 2019, when they selected Boris Johnson, and in 2022, when, just as disastrously, they opted for Liz Truss. That is a lesson from history. Labour’s activist base may be commendably more progressive in outlook and liberally pro-European in their instincts, but they are no more blessed with wisdom or necessarily in touch with the wider electorate than their reactionary counterparts on the right.

At the moment, they are a “soft left” corpus, and would be likely to choose someone made in their own image: Ed Miliband, Angela Rayner or Andy Burnham. None, for one thing, would necessarily command the broadest support of the parliamentary party, nor, more crucially, that of the British people. It is hard to see any of them holding the international stage, which is the one thing Sir Keir has done and made the one correct big call: not to go to war.

It is one thing in a parliamentary system for an elected prime minister to be replaced, preferably voluntarily, by a successor endorsed by MPs with a popular mandate, as happened for Labour when James Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson some 50 years ago. It is far less democratically sound for this to be done by a relatively tiny number of activists at odds with the electorate. It didn’t end well for the Conservatives, and it would not do so for Labour now.

As Prof Curtice reminds us, there is no clear successor to Sir Keir. There would be no smooth transition to a coronation, as when Gordon Brown quietly usurped Tony Blair in the 2007 palace coup. A leadership contest would necessarily be divisive and only serve to advertise Labour’s weakness and add to its disarray. Not all of the contenders would serve under various others if they won, and if they won, some would sack or demote their rivals. A balanced “dream ticket” is not going to emerge. Even if it were to, problems remain.