Keir Starmer enjoyed a brief holiday after the failure of any of his potential challengers to make a move to replace him in the aftermath of the Mandelson Saga. Without the prospect of an immediate challenger, and world events moving in a direction that Starmer, by virtue of his caution, benefits from, he seemed — ever so slightly — to have won some grace from the British public for his reaction to the Israeli-American ‘Operation Epic Fury’ strikes on Iran, gaining one whole percentage point in the polls since 28 February.
Last week, that holiday ended. ‘Big Ange’ emerged from that hole in Hove she had been hiding in. To Mainstream — the Burnham-associated grouping of the Labour ‘soft left’ — Rayner declared that Starmer’s government is ‘running out of time’, that the public’s view is that Labour now ‘represents the establishment’, and that the ‘very survival of the Labour Party is at stake’. She also spoke about her desire to see major constitutional revisions, and, weirdly, created a hypothetical that immigration reforms that sound a bit like those proposed by Shabhana Mahmood, rather than Mahmood’s own, ‘would be un-British’. Leaving aside the possibility of Rayner having a rather low verbal IQ, this suggests a reluctance — for now — to attack the Government directly, and indicates that the announcement of an immediate leadership challenge is unlikely. But at the same time, there is one outstanding phrase: ‘Are we ready for this fight?’ Who is ‘we’?
There is, of course, a lot of doubt about Rayner’s suitability to lead at all, with a pervasive sense her leadership would be ‘a one stop trip to the IMF’. Rayner has increasingly been treated with scepticism even by those sympathetic to her wider faction. Dissenting voices in the party are contingency planning to bring things to a head on the question of the leadership after the local elections in May, and to refashion the party structure after the NEC elections later in the year. In advance of this, Rayner has clearly been trying to gain sensible credits — even giving a speech to City investors and BNP Paribas (being paid a handsome five-figure fee, going some way to pay down her £40,000 of unpaid stamp duty) — and is now signalling that she is ‘adamant’ about sticking to the pledges in the 2024 Manifesto. The Manifesto is now apparently something of a Rorschach test, with investors seeing ‘fiscal rules’ and the ‘radical-wing-of-the-soft-left’ (to steal from the New Statesman) seeing ‘good vibes only’. Whether these efforts will leave Rayner as the most credible alternative to Starmer is yet to be seen, but for now the point is that she is trying to make the case.
There is, however, a distinct possibility that none of this contingency planning will ever have to be put into motion. Developments in No. 10, which we will detail below, could produce a curious dynamic in which the Labour ‘soft left’ — and backbenchers more generally — can strongarm the government into giving them almost whatever they want, whilst (crucially) retaining the City-whisperer Rachel Reeves and thus averting an immediate strike of the so-called Bond Vigilantes. This would, in fact, be entirely desirable if one leaves aside hurt feelings and the bad blood that has built up over the past eighteen months or so, though this is a factor that should never be underrated in politics.
An ongoing backbench rebellion that has only slowly gained momentum amongst Labour MPs, led by Tony Vaughan (flagged as one of the worst newly-elected Labour MPs by Pimlico Journal immediately after the election, he also introduced Rayner at the Mainstream event), has been the demand that MPs have a vote on the Home Office’s plans for ILR. If such a vote takes place and Mahmood’s proposals are scrapped or substantially watered down, she would, of course, face no choice but to resign, and has said as much publicly. While Mahmood has argued that this is strictly a question for the Home Secretary and the Home Office alone, this rebellion and Rayner’s intervention have come during a longer process in which Starmer’s government has already softened the language on the reforms substantially and has been seeking to reset its relationship with its MPs and ‘the left’ more generally.
As George Spencer and I discussed in a piece following Morgan McSweeney’s departure, any chance of left-reformism was confirmed dead with the demise of ‘McSweeneyism’, for which immigration reform (it is worth noting that the retroactive ILR reforms were first proposed under Yvette Cooper as Home Secretary, and not Blue Labourite Mahmood) has been the cornerstone, the central issue on which traditional Labour voters in the old ‘Red Wall’ have become most sceptical of the left in general.
After McSweeney’s departure, the government has made little effort to announce a big public ‘relaunch’ detailing a strategy and changed priorities — perhaps because there have already been three attempts which all fell flat in 2024 and 2025 — and has instead taken a ‘business as usual’ tone with the public. To an outside observer, this public posture might look weak, with the decision not to reshuffle or remove the Cabinet Minister closest to being openly disloyal during the Mandelson saga: Wes Streeting.
The reaction does make some sense internally, and the fourth go at Starmerism represents something more significant than all of the other resets, including the ‘Phase Two’ stage, which brought Mahmood into the Home Office last September. In response to the PIP rebellion last year and long-standing charges that Labour MPs felt ‘unheard’, it was with Phase Two itself that the government began to make substantial overtures to placate backbench opinion. With the addendum that the government still had its priorities, the last quarter of 2025 saw major reworks of the No. 10 Policy Unit, apparently indicative of the ‘hippy-bashing’, anti-progressive culture of the McSweeney era.
Fortnightly meetings are now held between the No. 10 Policy Unit and the PLP to address their tense relationship, and working groups of MPs have been established on specific issues. More ‘policy roundtables’ will be held between ministers, SpAds, and Labour select committee members, and a slew of changes that intend to change both the process and ‘culture’ of No. 10 have been promised. Now that McSweeney is gone and Mahmood is isolated (and likely to follow), given signs pointing to major concessions on the hundred-strong rebellion on ILR and refugee status, the true inauguration of the ‘Reign of the Backbenchers’ may be imminent.
Where will all of this restructuring lead? Well, way back in October of last year, still back in Phase Two, we learned how some of the wonks in the unit are thinking. Labour’s Top Minds got together and bashed out a note to distribute amongst themselves: ‘Project Home Turf’. What was the Wiley Webbite scheme?
The proverbial Red Pill of The Project was that the reason for the Labour government’s abysmal record in communication, and therefore its ratings, has thus far been that they have been playing on ‘away’ ground — immigration, law and order, defence and the economy. Instead, they should have played defence-attack on ‘home turf’ — the NHS, schools, bennies, and housing. The big idea here is that on ‘away’ issues, the best thing is to ‘neutralise’ them (that is to say, move on) and talk about their ‘home’ ones. Apparently, ‘managing the economy’ is now a right-wing issue, and Labour should simply give up even talking about growth. What was delivered as Reeves’ ‘Budget for Growth’ should instead have been sold as the ‘Budget for the NHS’.
Hippy-bashing stuff indeed. Needless to say, if this were somehow missed by Labour MPs, the idea that the economy framed on its own is always going to be a losing issue for Labour is — as friendly advice — perhaps a sure-fire way to lose what credibility remains with voters who are not on benefits, working for the public sector, or deluded recent graduates. Of course, I am being facetious, and this plan is equally a recognition that, for now, they should be holding on as tightly as possible to those groups and give up any serious claim to govern in the national interest. Perhaps Polanski and his ilk might think that this is Tough Stuff, but everyone knows that the wider British public does actually care if their standard of living continues to fall (or rises) independently of the level of NHS cheerleading that goes along with it. What can at least be said in its defence is that it is definitely the kind of thing that rebellious Labour MPs would probably lap up. There is plenty of common ground between the two camps after all!
