THE MACHINE EATS ITS OWN
Almost ten years ago to the day, in the last week of June 2016, the Parliamentary Labour Party staged a slow-motion execution. They called it the chicken coup. One by one, over the course of a single rolling day and the days that followed, shadow ministers resigned in a choreographed cascade designed to make Jeremy Corbyn’s position impossible, less than a year after the membership had handed him the largest mandate in the party’s history. The trick of it was the choreography. No single resignation needed to be the fatal one. Each departing minister could simply point at the others and say the situation had become untenable.
One of those ministers was Keir Starmer. His resignation letter, dated 27 June 2016, did not even pretend to a principle. It said, in plain terms, that because so many of his colleagues had already gone, it was “simply untenable” to carry on. He resigned because the herd was running. He stuck the knife in, then gestured at the other knives to explain his own.
History, as they say, has a nasty way of slapping you in the face. Because this week, almost exactly ten years later, Keir Starmer is the one standing where Corbyn stood, watching his own Cabinet perform the identical arithmetic on him. The conversations with donors, the soundings among union leaders, the weekend at Chequers spent counting who has gone and who is about to: this is the chicken coup played back to its own author, note for note. Et tu, Brute is not a line you get to use twice in the same career and expect sympathy the second time.
And there is one detail that makes the irony complete. The man now positioned to inherit the crown, Andy Burnham, was in that same shadow cabinet in 2016, and he refused to resign. He said openly that a civil war in the party was a bad idea and kept his knife sheathed. The man who would not wield the blade in 2016 is now the beneficiary of it in 2026. The man who wielded it is the one bleeding.
A CORONATION IN SEARCH OF A MANDATE
Sentiment aside, the mechanics are what matter, and the mechanics tell a damning story about the state of the party. Burnham did not rise through Labour’s ranks to mount this challenge. Until eleven days ago he was not even in Parliament. He was Mayor of Greater Manchester, and to get him into a position to take the leadership a sitting MP, Josh Simons, had to resign his seat in Makerfield and hand it over, triggering a by-election so that Burnham could be issued a route back into the Commons like a man being buzzed through a security door.
Hold that fact still for a moment, because it is the whole story in miniature. Labour holds the largest Commons majority in a generation, won barely two years ago. It has more than four hundred MPs, a full Cabinet, a minister groomed and media-trained for every department of state. And when the moment came to ask “who among us can lead”, the machine looked along its own benches, found nothing it trusted, and went outside Parliament to fetch a man who had to have a seat manufactured for him before he could even qualify.
That is the deficit nobody in Westminster will name. Not an economic deficit, though the country has one of those too. A deficit of leadership material, inside the very supermajority the public handed Labour to govern with.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A FIGHT AND A FIX
So the question becomes how Burnham arrives, and here the party faces a choice that exposes precisely what it believes about democracy when democracy is inconvenient.
A leadership challenge requires the support of 20 per cent of Labour MPs, roughly 81 names, to force a contest while the leader is still in post. If Starmer resigns first, a vacancy opens, and candidates must still clear that same threshold. Starmer has said for weeks that he will fight rather than walk. Burnham’s people would much prefer he did not get the chance.
The reason is simple. A forced contest is public, bloody, and slow, but whoever wins it emerges with a mandate that cannot be challenged afterwards. A managed resignation, by contrast, lets Burnham glide into Downing Street having been elected by nobody beyond the voters of one Greater Manchester constituency eleven days earlier. The membership never consulted. The contest never held. The crown simply passed, hand to hand, in a quiet room.
Labour spent the dog days of the last Tory government raging against exactly this. Sunak entered Number 10 without facing the public as leader. Truss was installed by a contest decided by around 170,000 Conservative members, and lasted forty-nine days. Labour called both a democratic outrage, and it was right to. If Burnham now arrives the same way, only with the membership cut out altogether rather than merely small, the charge of hypocrisy will not need to be manufactured by Reform or the Tories. The public will arrive at it unassisted. YouGov already finds the country split almost down the middle on whether Starmer should simply stand aside, even as a majority think Burnham should be free to challenge him. Voters can tell a fight from a fix, and what they are being offered this week has the unmistakable shape of the second.
THE HOPEFULS WHO WILL SURFACE FOR SHOW
A managed coronation, of course, requires that everybody else with ambitions agrees to stand down quietly. That is unlikely to hold, and the moment the seal breaks, the others will surface, exactly as they did in 2016.
Wes Streeting has already declared he will run if there is a contest, and claims to hold the 81 names he would need, though both Starmer’s and Burnham’s camps think his support is soft. Streeting and Burnham reportedly held a secret meeting after the by-election, where they agreed Starmer should be given time to go. Aides deny any backroom deal, which is the kind of denial that tends to confirm the thing it denies. The widespread reading in Westminster is that Streeting is in “Save Wes” mode, manoeuvring for a good Cabinet job rather than the top one.
He will not be the only face that appears. Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary, is already positioning herself as a power broker over the terms of Starmer’s exit. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is rumoured to be weighing a late gesture toward the left. And then there is Angela Rayner, the former deputy leader, around whom any “it is time for a woman to lead” framing inevitably gathers. Then there is the new kid on the block, Al Carns, the action hero fit for combat. Some of these will run. Some will let their names circulate purely to extract a price, a department, a promotion, a seat at the table of the next regime. That is the tell. In a healthy party, contenders run because they believe they should lead. In this one, they surface to be bought off.
The 2016 parallel holds here too. Once the coup against Corbyn was under way, Angela Eagle and Owen Smith stepped forward to give the stitch-up the costume of a contest. The faces change. The choreography does not.
GIVE BURNHAM HIS DUE, THEN LOOK CLOSER
None of this is to pretend the case for Burnham is empty, because it is not, and fairness demands it be stated plainly before it is tested.
In Manchester he took the buses back into public control, the first English region to reverse Thatcher’s deregulation, and the Bee Network actually runs. His rough sleeping scheme put roofs over heads while Westminster offered sympathy and statements. He stood against Downing Street during the pandemic and earned the title King of the North without the help of a press office. A genuine devolver, his defenders say, a man who has governed against the centre and might now govern from it. It is the strongest argument available to him.
It still does not hold, and the reason it does not hold is the reason this whole affair should trouble you. Governing a devolved authority with a ring-fenced budget is the one corner of British politics where the Treasury’s grip and the party whip cannot quite reach. It is governing in the one place the machine does not fully control. Westminster is the opposite: it is the machine’s home ground, and Burnham is arriving on it not as an insurgent who beat the machine, but as the candidate the machine itself reached out and selected, on its own timetable, through its own manufactured door. The King of the North is being invited south on the establishment’s terms, to do the establishment’s job. Whatever else that is, it is not a challenge to the system. It is the system, choosing its next operator.
THE BILL, AND WHO PAYS IT…
And the country is being asked to fund the audition. Burnham’s move into Parliament automatically vacated the Greater Manchester mayoralty, triggering a fresh by-election to replace him, expected to cost in the region of £4.7 million, with a poll set for the end of July. During a cost of living crisis that has not eased its grip on a single household in Makerfield or anywhere else, Labour’s internal collapse now carries a seven-figure public price tag. Not one of the figures currently haggling over the order of succession has thought it worth a mention.
That silence is the most honest thing about them. A political class rearranging itself behind closed doors, reaching outside Parliament for a leader it could not find within, billing the public for the disruption, and calling the result renewal.
THE MACHINE NEVER LOVED ANYONE – IT JUST EATS ITS OWN
By the time you read this, Starmer may already have set out his departure, or he may have dug in for a few more bruising days. Either is possible, and anyone claiming to know the precise hour is guessing.
What is not in doubt is the shape of it. Ten years ago Keir Starmer helped teach his party that a leader could be removed not by argument but by choreography, not by the members who chose him but by the colleagues who tired of him. He is about to discover that the lesson was learned. The machine he rode to power, the machine that disciplined the left, expelled its awkward voices and reduced its membership to an audience, has turned its attention to him. It does not love him either. It never loved anyone. It only ever asked one question of a leader, the same question it is asking now: are you still useful.
Burnham’s answer, for the moment, is yes. He should enjoy it while it lasts. The machine that is about to crown him is the same machine that ate the last three men who sat on the throne, and it has never once gone hungry for long.
Ten years ago, Keir Starmer took part in a coup. This week, he finds out his party was taking notes... Et tu, Brute.
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