The Labour leader’s plans to give members less say over his successor seem motivated by a fear of the left
Keir Starmer’s approval ratings are significantly worse than those of Boris Johnson. Less than a third of Labour’s own voters think he is doing a good job, and more than six in 10 of all voters do not think he seems like a prime minister in waiting. This is a man sinking fast, in desperate need of a life raft. His last real opportunity to offer a compelling vision to a hostile nation arrives at the party’s upcoming conference. So it may seem baffling that Starmer has instead decided to focus on bitter internal party wrangling by reverting to the old rules for electing his successor, which will grant MPs far more say over who becomes the next Labour leader than grassroots party or trade union members.
When he informed his shadow cabinet of the plan to replace the “one member, one vote” rules with an “electoral college” system dominated by MPs, Starmer justified it on the basis that Labour needed to look outwards to potential voters rather than to its members. “If members had been listening to that meeting, they’d have cancelled their direct debits right there and then because what’s the bloody point,” one Labour figure attending the meeting told me. According to multiple sources, the architects of the proposed rule change include Starmer’s former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who ran Liz Kendall’s doomed leadership campaign in 2015; his former political secretary, Jenny Chapman; and political organising manager Matt Pound. They have privately justified the proposed change of rules as a way to prevent a Jeremy Corbyn-style successor.