Forget the Country, Save the Party.

Keir Starmer’s leadership rivals promise to prove the Farage populists right. Changing the prime minister does not address Britain’s problems.

The most effective, and toxic, charge laid by far right populists is that political elites are in it only for themselves. Behind lofty rhetoric about change and opportunity, the organising impulses of the ruling classes are entitlement and privilege. Threatened by the anti-migrant extremists of Nigel Farage’s Reform, Britain’s governing Labour party is set on proving them to be right.

The certain thing to be said about the proposed defenestration of the present prime minister is that it is not directed to answering tough questions about Britain’s future. Andy Burnham, the leading pretender for Keir Starmer’s crown, began his leadership campaign with a promise to “save” the Labour party. Nothing here about addressing the nation’s ills. But then Burnham’s long career in Labour politics (he has twice failed in bids to be leader) has been shaped by one unwavering ambition - to be popular.

Even after the Tory post-Brexit psychodrama of five prime ministers in nine years, making sense of the convulsions engulfing Starmer’s administration is a struggle. Abroad, Westminster’s addiction to political regicide is cause for mystification and mockery. This is a government, panicking Labour MPs have forgotten, that won a majority of 174 only two years ago and need not face the electorate again until 2029.

Never mind. The opinion polls are dire for the government and Starmer is more unpopular than his party. So madness prevails. Such is its cynicism that the attempt to bundle Starmer out of office sees Burnham, the Labour mayor of Manchester, throwing overboard his allegiance to that city’s Labour voters in pursuit of a Labour seat at Westminster from which to bring down a Labour prime minister. “Vote Reform. Get Starmer Out”, declared the placards of Farage’s party in this month’s English local elections. Burnham has adapted the slogan as his own.

Starmer’s premiership is not definitively over, but it hangs by the thinnest of threads. Wes Streeting fired the starting gun by resigning from the cabinet. Like Burnham, the health secretary has long struggled to contain his ambitions.

The two hail from different wings of the party - Streeting is the standard bearer of its revisionist right, Burnham, at least in his latest guise, puts himself on the “soft” or pragmatic left. What unites them is the shared sense of entitlement. They should be prime minister. Once upon a time Labour politicians defined Conservative politics as no more than a fight about snouts in the trough. Now they joined them.

What’s inexplicable for those who imagined the politics in Britain would return to being a serious business after the chaos of the Tory years is that neither of the leading contenders - nor indeed other possible candidates such as Angela Rainham or Ed Miliband - is proposing a fundamental change of political course.

Bringing down the prime minister used to be a serious business. Margaret Thatcher was thrown out by her party because she had taken Britain to the margins of Europe. Boris Johnson suffered the same fate because he was shown to be a serial liar who had held parties in Downing Street during the Covid lockdown. Liz Truss’s brief tenure ended when she blew up the market for British government debt. Starmer’s capital crime is unpopularity as witnessed by the heavy Labour losses in the local elections.

Many of the riticisms of his leadership style have merit. He is indecisive. He lacks the easy bonhomie that makes an easy connection with votes. There have been some serious missteps. These things matter. But former Labour supporters have not been rushing into the arms of Reform or embracing the snake oil soak-the-rich populism of the far left Green party because of managerial shortcomings in No 10.

A serious critique of Starmer’s government would say instead that, even with an impregnable majority, it has lacked resolve. It has failed to confront the nation with the obvious truth that change is neither easy or instant. Pulling Britain out of economic stagnation, striking the right balance between the demands of badly neglected public services and tolerable levels of taxation, and rebuilding investment is the work of decade. It requires hard, and yes, unpopular, trade-offs - the more so in a world darkened by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The instinct of ministers and Labour MPs has instead been to retreat at the first shots, to surrender to the latest bad headlines. Unsurprisingly the voters have given it no credit. Starmer must take his share of the blame, but so also must those who refuse to admit that effective government demands patience and resilience.

As Manchester mayor Burnham he has ridden the populist tide against the Westminster elite that he now proposes to join. He is a political chameleon. His record as a minister in Gordon Brown’s government was one of risk aversion and indecision - the traits most criticised in Starmer. The Financial Times correspondent Jennifer Williams has followed his career closely. As she observes in an illuminating recent profile: “Andy wants to be loved and avoids making difficult decisions.”

His prime ministerial prospectus is true to form. The government would tilt leftwards, he tells the Labour backbench MPs who have never liked Starmer’s centrism. He would to increase public investment and look for the state to take more control of the nation’s public utilities. He wants a fairer deal for less affluent Northern regions. He is keen on a proportional voting system. Missing are any clear commitments to match the change in mood music.

Streeting says he wants the contest to be about policy rather than personalities. But a change of political direction? The central charge in his resignation letter is that in place of a governing vision Starmer has presided over a vacuum. Striking is the absence of an explanation as to how he would fill it. Warm words about closer engagement with the European Union and reform of public services are not enough.

The truth is that there are no quick fixes - no easy way to marry real market constraints on national borrowing and debt with the demands for resources of failing state services, the unpopularity of high taxes, and the threats to the nation’s security of the might-is-right world into which the western order has collapsed. Britain still has many strengths. But it faces a long slog back to sustainable prosperity. To pretend otherwise is simply to mimic the populists. But then perhaps that is what the prime ministers’ enemies intend?