‘He doesn’t engage’: Why Labour’s backbenchers are turning on Starmer! B
While the Prime Minister may have spent years preparing for power, the result now he’s there is The Rookie Errors Show
You can tell how important people are by how fast they whizz past you. There goes Yvette Cooper, changing jackets, mid-stride. There is David Lammy shouting from an escalator. There is Wes Streeting making a quick speech and then being quickly ushered out, onto his next reception presumably.
The rest of us are somehow less purposeful. Sure Labour conference is always full of young men in new suits who adore a lanyard and a name badge but most folk mill around, trying to work out where the action is and mostly feeling they are missing it.
Were you at the LGBT Disco? Did you see Emily Thornberry go Brat? Whoever imagined Anas Sarwar would be DJing at the TikTok party? “This is one for the ladies!” he said as he played TLC’s No Scrubs. Why, said others, is TikTok sponsoring a do at Labour?
Who can say? I did weird stuff there myself. I even sat in the hall and listened to some of the speeches. Who really does that when it’s all on telly anyway? At least telly cuts out the boring lists of motions, the arcane rigmarole of party conference.
The thing is, I like to see these people in the flesh, put my finger in the air and see which way the wind is blowing. In Liverpool this meant being mostly wet and windswept. There was no mistaking the love for Big Ange Rayner but there was also no mistaking an undercurrent of disappointment from many.
The new backbenchers are finding their way, not quite sure of their place, full of high ideals but in some ways already compromised. Does anyone really become a Labour MP to cut the winter fuel allowance? Of course there was going to be a rebellion on this and of course it would be ignored. Such is the power of a big majority.
But that is only part of the reason for what, it became clear in Liverpool, is already a complete disconnect between Starmer, the cabinet and the backbenches. Starmer floats above the Party with little connection to it. This is why Rayner matters, the umbilical cord to the Labour body politic.
The newer MPs are both excited and nervous about how much to say about anything. They are, quite frankly, flummoxed by the whiffs of scandal over donations and freebies. Most of them gawp at the idea of VIP seats at football matches and Taylor Swift concerts, such gilded perks a world away from the circles in which they move.
If sleaze sows the seeds of backbench disaffection, No 10’s autocratic instincts fertilise them. Sure it may be the usual union bosses and Corbynite leftovers who rebel. John McDonnell and Rebecca Long-Bailey, for example, were among seven MPs suspended for supporting a move calling for the abolition of the UK’s two child benefit cap.
But this is a policy once described by Rayner herself as “obscene”. Today, though, No 10’s draconian discipline signals no tolerance for disagreement. And if backbenchers have no sway with the front bench, then they end up feeling pretty demoralised. At least they would like a token discussion, but there is little chance even of that.
One MP who has been vocal about being frozen out is Rosie Duffield, who is passionate about the benefit cap being removed and, until recently, thought the front bench was too. “Every member of the cabinet has stood up at some point and made a comment against the two child limit,” she says.
“And suddenly we are in government and we don’t have the money to do anything about it? It’s so fundamental to who we are! This is one of the things that makes you think, why am I in the Labour Party? What’s the purpose of the Labour Party?”
Starmer has shockingly little to do with the backbenchers. Duffield says: “He just doesn’t engage.” I hear this a few times, that he behaves like a politician but is “not actually interested in politics”.
While queuing for another sandwich buffet with delegates, it rings true. We are all in a bubble but the leadership is somewhere altogether different.
Many on the backbenches who don’t want to be named blame this isolation and tone deafness on “the lads” around the leader. For them, “the lads” would have seen nothing wrong with donations. But they are horrified.
So while Starmer may have spent years preparing for power, the result now he is there is The Rookie Errors Show: poor speeches, bad jokes, ill-judged donations.
And the biggest issue is soul. Where is the soul of the party? I did not feel it at Liverpool. Starmer’s backbenchers know what they want the answer to be: “It’s supposed to be about what you put into the system, not what you get out,” says one, thinking bitterly of those freebie seats to rock concerts and football matches.
Instead there is a strange sense of apology and arrogance. And that speaks of anything but surefootedness.
