Wilful detachment from so much of what defines politics explains the reliance on McSweeney, whose strength in opposition was controlling party machinery and deploying it with ruthless efficiency. But the methods that worked in the run-up to July 2024 are not relevant to the challenge of running a country. The government isn’t a giant constituency party to be captured by a well-organised clique, then purged of irksome, wrong-thinking members.
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It is the sound of failure to define Starmerism as anything more than a sequence of tactics for clinging on, warning that this is as good as it gets, betting that enough people will dread the thought of Nigel Farage in Downing Street to give Labour a second term. It is the defence of painful policy compromise as the means to an end, where the destination is just a labyrinth of endless means.
It is hard to summon loyalty to such a cause. And most Labour MPs have tried. They have stuck with the party line, defended it on the doorstep, obeyed the whips, believed assurances that their concerns were heard, feasted on crumbs of improvement in the prime minister’s performances, and been made to feel like mugs for extending so much benefit of the doubt. Not mutinous by disposition, they see mutiny as the only option left.
Regicide is fraught with risk, but is it riskier than pretending that the current ruler has answers to big questions that he never even names? Edgar’s law invites caution in ousting a sitting prime minister. The replacement could always be worse. But in the closing lines of King Lear, Edgar also articulates the quality so craved by Labour MPs in a future leader because it is painfully absent in the present one. “The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
