Political Betting: When Will Starmer Go?

Political Betting is a new weekly column by Mark Littlewood aimed at people who like gambling on politics.

All reasonable signs point to the Starmer premiership coming to an end in relatively short order. This isn’t a matter of Westminster-watchers and psephologists interpreting complex and intricate signals. The signs are in gigantic neon lights beaming the message that the PM is finished – anyone with eyes can see it.

And yet here he still is. Sitting it out. Riding it out. Refusing to budge.

What, then, finally makes the teetering Jenga tower collapse? Which block needs to be removed to allow the laws of political gravity to do their work?

The median position of most commentators for months now has been that the May 7th elections will be so apocalyptic for Labour as to make action unavoidable. It is worth sketching out the anticipated scale of the tsunami likely to hit Labour at the polls next week – it is not going merely to be bad. It will be truly devastating.

Labour will slip to third place in the Welsh Senedd elections, a contest it has dominated for a century. The party may even end up behind Reform in Scotland.

Across England, it stands to lose more than two thirds – and possibly as many as three quarters – of all the seats it’s defending. To put that in historical context, losing around 50% of incumbent councillors has typically been considered an absolute bloodbath.

The dwindling platoon of Starmer loyalists will try to cling to a statistic showing them still controlling around 20 of the councils holding elections – but this will only be because these areas elect in thirds and the current Labour majority may be impregnable even to a total wipeout in this year’s electoral cycle.

Mapping Thursday’s results onto a future General Election will show Labour not merely heading for defeat but possibly returning fewer than 100 MPs to the House of Commons. The word ‘existential’ is ludicrously overused in contemporary political discourse, but in this instance it will be wholly appropriate. Labour’s continued existence as a major political party will hang by a thread.

It would make smart political sense to blame the catastrophe on the scandal-ridden Starmer who, polls show, is about as popular with the electorate as herpes.

So far, so straightforward.

The tricky bit is what happens next.

No one wants to be the next Anas Sarwar. Back in February, the beleaguered Scottish Labour Leader thought he had read the room over the Mandelson affair. He leapt over the barricades and demanded the Prime Minister‘s resignation. Within minutes he realised he was alone in no man’s land, his colleagues still bunkered down in the trenches.

When the herd moves, it moves – but being the one person who starts the stampede requires luck, judgement and a following wind, or it can go horribly wrong.

The first thing to look for as the election results come in is whether the public pronouncements of Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband and Wes Streeting look co-ordinated – or at least strike the same rebellious note. If so, a move against Starmer is imminent and he may be forced to resign within days.

Unless an uncharacteristic bout of self-reflection leads Starmer to fall on his sword, we will probably need two of three factors to come into play to bring about his removal from No. 10.

The first is that it becomes abundantly clear there are at least 80 Labour MPs willing to force a vote of no confidence in the PM and that he would be almost certain to lose it.

The second is that sufficient members of his Cabinet make plain that he should quit and that they will refuse to continue serving under him.

The third – which might of itself be sufficient but is not obviously open to political influence – is that his wife, Victoria, tells him it is time to go.

Barring desperate appeals to the PM’s spouse, those in Labour’s ranks determined to see Starmer ousted need to ensure that the first two factors come together in the week beginning May 11th. If they fail to do so, this zombie Prime Minister could stagger on indefinitely. The window to remove him is wide open – but it will probably slam shut by the end of May.

Starmer loyalists will hope that a quirk in the political timetable might create problems for the plotters. Between now and July 16th, there are only 36 scheduled Parliamentary sitting days. This, they will hope, limits the time and space available for mischief to be whipped up in the corridors of Westminster.

On the flip side, it means that being landed with a lame-duck Prime Minister for the two or so months it would take to run a full leadership campaign is less of an issue. Those who like gossip revel in the intrigue of plans being hatched in London SW1; more serious plotters, however, tend to prefer the discretion of making plans away from the Westminster spotlight.

The bookies’ odds – a two in three chance that Starmer is removed this year – represent reasonably good value. Even so, the rebels face three obstacles.

The first is the absence of any obvious successor. The only candidate with reasonable public approval ratings, Burnham, would need to find a Parliamentary seat. There was some evidence he might have prevailed in the Gorton and Denton by-election had he been allowed to stand, but the idea of anything describable as a ‘safe Labour seat’ following the May 7th elections seems fanciful – as does his likelihood of securing clearance from Labour’s ruling NEC. One also needs to consider how a by-election with Burnham as candidate could play out: the message would presumably be: ‘Vote Labour to get rid of our Labour Prime Minister.’ It might just work, but it is deeply unorthodox.

The second obstacle – and a further mark against Burnham – is the shortage of time. If Starmer makes it through to party conference, he has every chance of surviving until 2029. This is why I consider the odds of 4/1 that he is ousted in 2027, or 14/1 in 2028, to be poor value. If the Mandelson fiasco and a set of election results amounting to the worst in living memory are insufficient to merit a coup, what sort of event will prompt the pulling of the trigger in the autumn or beyond?

The third is Labour’s astonishing historical track record of failing to remove useless leaders. It couldn’t get rid of Jeremy Corbyn despite barely 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party being willing to work with him. It failed to prevent Michael Foot leading it to electoral disaster in 1983. The efforts to rid itself of Gordon Brown before the 2010 election were a fiasco.

All of this means that we could have the mother and father of all messes on our hands from the middle of May: different factions firing the starting pistol at different times – an uncoordinated pile-on rather than a surgical strike.

In such circumstances, a long-odds bet might be an attractive option. Given the flaws of the current front-runners, the party may begrudgingly settle on a unity candidate on some sort of ‘stability’ ticket – a Pat McFadden or a Hilary Benn, for example. That is not the most likely outcome, but the odds on some of the rank outsiders are attractive.

I expect Starmer to be out by the end of the summer. If he survives beyond that, he will probably make it to the next election. The list of those who could follow him is, in truth, a long one – and those currently some way down it are worthy of serious study.

Mark Littlewood is a former director of the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Director of PopCon.