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One way to flush out a leadership challenger, according to Gordon Brown’s one-time enforcer, is to push them over the edge.
In his chronicle of his time at the centre of power, Damian McBride wrote that the New Labour darling David Miliband had a “tendency to treat rebellion like a reluctant bather inching his way into the sea at Skegness”.
“It made sense to push him right in at the outset, on the grounds that he’d run straight back to his towel, and not try again for at least six months,” McBride wrote.
Some insiders believe this was the strategy behind an extraordinary decision by Keir Starmer’s closest allies to accuse Wes Streeting of leading an advanced plot to replace him as prime minister.
The flaw in that plan – obvious to all who have had even fleeting contact with Streeting – is that far from reluctantly dipping his toe in, the health secretary embraces any chance to position himself for the leadership with the confidence and fervour of an Olympic diver.
The extraordinary briefing war at the top of government has thrown the spotlight at the personal relationships between three of its most senior figures: Starmer, his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and Streeting, the man who many in Labour believe will be their next prime minister.
The conventional wisdom in Westminster has long been that Starmer was a vehicle for McSweeney’s political project to wrest control of the Labour party away from the hard left – making the leader a Neil Kinnock-type figure who would eventually hand the keys to the castle to Streeting.
Others argue even if this were once true – and not everyone agrees it was – Starmer and McSweeney are now inseparable and their success or failure mutually assured. At every critical juncture, the prime minister has stuck resolutely by his closest adviser at the expense of other senior aides and ministers.
But developments in the last few months have driven a rift between Starmer and McSweeney, to the extent that many are now questioning how long the No 10 chief of staff can last. Fairly or not, he has become something of a bogeyman for a number of ministers and MPs who blame him for bad decisions and question his judgment and ability to run the government.
The decision to launch a full-frontal attack on Streeting hours before he was due to embark on a morning broadcast round is the latest case in point. The health secretary gave an assured performance in which he said those briefing against him had spent too much time watching Celebrity Traitors – and should switch over to Countryfile. Labour MPs and aides are united in thinking Streeting has emerged in a stronger position than before.
As one government aide put it: “From a ‘strategic big brain’ point of view – how did you think this was going to go? That Wes Streeting, of all people, would crumble on the morning round and make meek pledges of loyalty and be seen as a duplicitous snake by the PLP [parliamentary Labour party]? They’ve just given him the best positioning he could hope for [by saying], ‘let’s take the battle with Wes where he is weakest, on breakfast television’.”
A former government aide added: “It’s like an elephant picking a fight with a shark and choosing to do it in the middle of the ocean.”
There are competing theories about when Starmer’s strategists decided to go over the edge and denounce plots against him, with some pointing to the early November leaving drinks of a senior aide, Matt Faulding, as a “fever pitch” moment for leadership speculation.
Allies of the prime minister have been on high alert for a number of weeks, voicing concerns that any challenge would worsen an already perilous economic situation and that any successor to Starmer would inevitably tack to the left and damage relations with Donald Trump and the EU. Labour MPs have scoffed at many of these arguments.
What is clear is that mounting fears of an imminent challenge were shared with the prime minister over the weekend, and that there was a coordinated decision to smoke out any challenge.
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Now several senior strategists argue that the intention was never to put the entire onus on Streeting, but to make it clear that Starmer had plenty of fight in him. From the outside, however, it looked like a paranoid overreaction.
Some have even speculated that the move was designed by McSweeney to benefit Streeting – but this theory is given short shrift by insiders. One well-placed senior official who has worked alongside McSweeney said: “I never ever heard Morgan have a good word to say about Wes. He thought he was all mouth (promises about the NHS) and no trousers (zero delivery ability).”
Other key figures who have worked with both McSweeney and Streeting say they are not cut from the same cloth. “I always felt Morgan politically wasn’t with Wes, although he was with Peter Mandelson – and Mandelson wanted Wes,” said a senior Labour aide. “Wes has always been more classically Blairite than Morgan has,” a frontbencher said.
The same frontbencher speculated that when push comes to shove, “Morgan will be more loyal to Keir than Keir will be to Morgan”. In recent months Starmer has made some interventions to defend his chief of staff, including at cabinet – but there are signs the relationship between them is no longer what it was.
A No 10 source said relations had faltered since Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech, which he has since publicly resiled from. The prime minister is said to have been shaken by criticism from close friends outside politics about the language he used, which MPs said echoed Enoch Powell.
This was the point, it is said, when Starmer became convinced he had been badly advised – and McSweeney’s team were the ones who had pushed for tougher language on immigration.
Starmer has since expressed frustration internally at what he sees as an inability by his aides to protect him from scandals, such as over Jeffrey Epstein’s close relationship with Mandelson – whose appointment as US ambassador was championed by McSweeney.
“Many people have tried to drive a wedge between Keir and Morgan and it has always failed,” one No 10 source said. “But this feels different.”
