Nesrine Malik, The Guardian.
Briefing wars, toxic infighting, paranoid office politics: we’ve seen it all before. And once again, the drama at No 10 has absolutely nothing to do with us.
Sorry, what just happened? Before we hurtle on to the next instalment of Labour government drama, let’s pause for a second to recap. So Keir Starmer’s allies briefed against Wes Streeting accusing him of plotting a leadership challenge, then Streeting denied the claims, and Starmer apologised for them, before belatedly claiming the briefing had not come from Downing Street at all. A claim so implausible that a government source said journalists “must have all been tricked by several impostors posing as No 10 staff”.
If this sounds farcical, vaguely embarrassing for all concerned and massively irrelevant to your life, you would be right. But in between the first chapter and the last (or perhaps the penultimate, given the aftershocks still reverberating through No 10), the episode acted as a masterclass in the patterns that define the stakes of British politics and characterise the stakeholders. It is also a portent of the future.
First, crisis: a government and leader in a death spiral. Second, a high-drama episode centred on personnel, chiefs of staff and cabinet ministers. Third, the emergence of a leadership contender who starts to be described in salvationary terms. Fourth, back to the first. Sound familiar?
Meanwhile, those involved are imbued by observers with a sense of cunning: once the briefings emerged, so did the game analysis. What’s the play? Is Morgan McSweeney, Downing Street’s chief of staff, the person rumoured to be behind it all, launching a preemptive move to flush out Starmer challengers? Is Starmer conspiring with him, or is he a hapless prince trapped in a high tower by his consiglieres? Is Streeting playing a blinder by keeping his cards close to his chest and cracking on with authoritative dismissal of the “nonsense” and the “toxic culture” in No 10? Here I must employ some restraint and not simply just type in capital letters: maybe there is no play? Have we learned nothing?
Maybe this is simply a bunch of people motivated by paranoid office politics and, like all who work in high-pressure environments, act on impulse, based on age-old grudges? “Question is,” asked the Sunday Times Whitehall editor, “what intelligence, or, short of that, political analysis prompted the decision to flush out Streeting?” This is a good and normal question, but perhaps the obvious point, if no one can answer it, is that there is none? Perhaps an inner circle that has plotted and purged its way into power is simply under duress and defaulting to its safe space.
You would think that the public descent of Dominic Cummings from the Mekon, master of the dark arts, to an addled angry poster ranting against “the NPC class” would have instilled some healthy scepticism regarding Downing Street svengalis. But here we are. And on that: no one is coming to save this government. Definitely not Streeting, who, like all whose fortunes start to rise as the polls start to tank, is little more than someone whose style and affect are more palatable than the incumbent’s. Which, when that incumbent is Starmer, isn’t hard. This is Rishi Sunak syndrome: a prime minister whose momentum was secured, as far as I can tell, by a single good speech which prompted the BBC to render him as Superman in a hastily deleted video. Streeting is in this honeymoon phase. His post-briefing performance has already been described as a “masterclass” delivered with “great humour: streetwise: serious intent: and deadly”.
We are now in phase three of proceedings, where a sort of defibrillator by way of describing someone into viability is powered up. Because let’s face it, can you cope with four more years of grim Labour decline amid the bewildering rise of Reform ghouls and chaotic leftwing party launches? The stabilisation of government, or at least the semblance of some sort of high action, provides a temporary reprieve and injects some possibility. The problem is that none of this has any connection whatsoever to the real world. Streeting, our new political behemoth, was voted back in on a dramatically slashed majority of just over 500 votes, and is leading an NHS reform process blasted as “chaotic and incoherent” by the Institute for Government.
He is the quintessential demonstration of the “wide but thin” 2024 Labour victory. If he (or anybody else, for that matter) were to become prime minister, the externally applied electric shock would not stop an eventual lapse into narcosis. Because the problem is this Labour government, in which Streeting is only a more compelling character with just as few ideas, competencies or materially defining projects. The tail of the briefing fiasco will be analyses that sharpen the difference between contenders and incumbents – Streeting’s new outspokenness on Gaza and racism, for example – but these are all ultimately distinctions without a difference, as far as the direction of government is concerned.
Or should I say lack of direction: a sort of general drift in which the party has made pragmatism the end, not the means. “Every day,” Streeting is reported to have once told a shadow cabinet meeting, “we should drag a sacred cow of our party to the town market place and slaughter it until we are up to our knees in blood.” The electorate can see none of the material virtues of that under a government that presides over a persistent cost of living crisis and rising food prices, yet claims that it is “illegal immigration” that is “tearing our country apart”. Still, I’m sure that as people’s minds boggle at their grocery bill they can be comforted by the thought of an asylum seeker possibly being stripped of their valuables to pay for processing costs, and reassured by Streeting sounding like a really effective communicator on the Today programme because he “speaks plainly” and can crack a Traitors joke.
The government has entered its musical chairs era. The premise of this, we will be told is that the fish rots from the head down, and so the top must be replaced. The pattern will repeat, and each time it does events will stray further and further from the real world. This is a terminal symptom of failure. The moment a party turns on itself, when personalities replace politics, when sordid media briefings and grievances are litigated in public to poison an already dark public mood, it is a sure indication that the public have become bystanders to the endgame of a political drama that was always about power, not governance. It is the beginning of a final act that will go on for far too long, because, as with all patterns, history begins again every time. Reenactments of an end, never a new beginning.
