Starmer was never meant to be Labour's prime minister his leadership was doomed from the start | Neal Lawson

"The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of rightwing faction fighters, was this: find a candidate on whom they could fake a continuation Corbynism project to win the leadership. Then kick the ladder away from the people who backed them and the promises they made. At the next general election, given the scale of the Tory majority after 2019, get Labour back in the ring with more MPs and then hand over to Streeting. The real grownups would then be in charge."

"But no one reckoned with Covid, Tory turmoil and the collapse of the SNP. Suddenly Keir Starmer wasn't going to just lead Labour to a better defeat and a springboard for victory next time. Against the odds, he was going to win. Just as Jeremy Corbyn was Labour's accidental leader in 2015, Starmer was the party's accidental prime minister in 2024."

"It was not a marriage made in heaven. Starmer and the Blairites made awkward bedfellows. Under their breath, the Blairites despised Starmer because he had aligned himself with the Corbyn project. While Streeting and Rachel Reeves stayed firmly on the outside, right up until the protracted Brexit negotiations that began in 2018, Starmer had remained loyal to the party leader, whom the Blairites loathed even more than him. But they needed Starmer as the only person who could break the grip of Corbynism."

A rightwing clique sought to present a faux continuation of Corbynism to win a leadership contest and then install Wes Streeting after electoral recovery. Unforeseen events — Covid, Tory turmoil and the SNP collapse — transformed Keir Starmer from a temporary steward into the victorious prime minister in 2024. The alliance between Starmer and the Blairites remained uneasy; Blairites privately resented his Corbyn association even as they relied on him to displace Corbynism. Starmer had remained loyal through protracted Brexit-era negotiations. The arrangement was intended as temporary and risked unraveling because neither Starmer nor the Blairites produced a coherent intellectual vision.

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