What Labour members need to hear from our leader today

The immediate audience for the Prime Minister’s statement today will be parliamentarians who will be listening intently to every word. The other audience will be the country – most of whom will hear what is clipped for the TV and radio news and shared through their social media of choice.

Every other newsletter dropping in your inbox will focus on those two audiences. But LabourList has a very specific job, and today we need to talk about a group who are a subset of both those groups – Labour members.

Keir Starmer is quite right when he says that the right priorities for a political party are “country first, party second.” In a democracy it is the only way to govern responsibly. But, as I have said before, second place is not nothing and in our system the Prime Minister is also the leader of a political party. That may be too much of a job for anyone, but that is the job he accepted when he ran for Leader of the Labour Party.

READ MORE: Peter Mandelson’s spectre returns to haunt the Prime Minister

It so happens that the Parliamentary Labour Party meets every Monday night. The PM doesn’t always attend, but he absolutely should tonight. Not because these are the people who will ultimately decide whether he should be challenged for the leadership or not, but because they are the people most closely led by him and therefore most acutely let down when there is a failure in that leadership. He will need to not just demonstrate in the Commons that he can put in a strong performance as a leader. He will need to be clear with his colleagues what that will look and feel like to them. He will need to give them something to reassure despondent campaigners as they enter the exhausting last stretch before May 7th.

Starmer’s fury at not being told that Mandelson had failed vetting is understandable. But I hope that over the weekend he has managed to turn that anger into something more productive – into a story about what his leadership will look like going forward: how it will be more engaged, more focused and more in line with the passionate beliefs and values that bring Labour members to the doorsteps, fighting incredibly uphill battles in council seats across England and for Holyrood in Scotland and the Senedd in Wales.

We need to hear that the same man who so forensically went after Boris Johnson over his lack of probity will bring that same moral clarity to his own side and that he understands that failings are not the remit of underlings, but that the buck stops with him. Taking acceptance of that would be – in fact – a show of unexpected strength at this time.

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There will need to be substance in that story. Starmer is often criticised for not having a vision – today he will need not just a narrative of how things will improve, but a genuine and achievable  sense of how he is going to take the party and the country there. He can’t just use the phrase ‘Labour values’ as a touchstone. He will need to explain what he means by it and how his interpretation will inform not just Labour’s policy in government, but the way we conduct our politics too.

Talk of a leadership contest was receding before the Guardian’s bombshell on Thursday. The Iran war (which Starmer is widely perceived to have handled well) had rejigged many people’s priorities. And a contest would not be without extraordinary difficulties and pitfalls. Labour members are more than aware of how ridiculous the Tories made themselves look chopping and changing so constantly. There is a real awareness among MPs that if they do make a decision to replace Starmer, then that choice will be leader (and hopefully PM) for a long time to come. That adds significant jeopardy to any decision. 

Polling for Labour in May has been dire for a long time. It may be that this sense of inevitability means that those who might wish to challenge Starmer will not find that the trauma of a poor result is enough to tip the balance to do so.

Over the weekend I spoke to a range of Labour members, candidates and MPs. The response was mixed – and it’s certainly not the case that all were calling for Starmer to go. But there was a widespread sense of despondency about where we are and whether we can get out of the mess it was universally accepted we are in.

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So today, the PM needs to be clear that simply surviving in government is not enough. Living to fight another day isn’t enough. 

To calm the nerves, hurt and upset, Starmer is going to need to put in the performance of a lifetime twice today. First to the country and Parliament. Second to the party. Again – right order, but both matter. For someone whose performances have been of variable quality – sometimes excellent, sometimes significantly under par – this is a big ask. But on this occasion he cannot give his Labour Party audience his second best.