Regarding Keir Starmer’s political health, there are three distinct and contradictory medical opinions. One says he is already dead, pending certification by the coroner and subsequent autopsy. Another says he is in a vegetative state from which it is almost impossible to recover, and only the family’s resignation and authorization to disconnect life support remain. And the last is that he has suffered a deep trauma and is in critical condition, and – although difficult – he is strong and it cannot be completely ruled out that he will wake from the coma, recover, and return to normal life.
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For politics enthusiasts, today has been one of those days that make you shiver and give you goosebumps. It had everything, just like a cold spring day in London when it rained, hailed, and the sun came out. On one hand, the pomp and circumstance of the opening of the new legislature by King Charles III in Parliament, with crown and robes from another era, carriages, horses, and a ceremony dating back to the 17th century. On the other, the harshest intrigues of power, maneuvers, betrayals, conspiracies, alliances, and backstabbing. With the prime minister’s position at stake.
It all started early in the morning, you could say with a king and a coffee. While the monarch was preparing in his chambers at Buckingham Palace for the brief carriage ride, with military escort and cavalry, to Westminster Palace to read the speech prepared by the Government to open the legislature according to tradition, Starmer was receiving the Health Minister, Wes Streeting, at Downing Street.
Streeting is not just any minister; he aspires to Starmer’s position and has been pulling strings to take it from him, a process that has accelerated in recent days after the disaster of the local and regional elections. The prime minister had refused to see him the day before, but yesterday he made room in his schedule before heading to the Commons.
Whatever they had to say to each other, it ended in sixteen minutes like the rosary at dawn. Maybe Streeting asked Starmer what strategy he has to get out of the crisis, and the leader’s response was unsatisfactory. Maybe Starmer reproached him for conspiring and told him to stop for the good of the country and the party. The fact is that a little later the Health Minister’s allies began to say he will challenge the leadership and announce it very soon, perhaps today.
As Lenin said referring to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen. This last week, in Great Britain, has concentrated events that had been brewing for some time without anything apparently happening. The pressure cooker has exploded with the overwhelming victory of the far right in the English local elections and the loss of power in Wales by Labour for the first time in a century.
Starmer received Health Minister Wes Streeting this morning, who questions his continuity at the head of the Government
Starmer started the day more optimistic than in previous days, after 110 MPs signed a letter asking him to stay, believing that the worst was already over. Dies another day is the title of a film in the 007 agent series in which Bond is betrayed and taken prisoner in North Korea, but after months of captivity he plots his revenge and neutralizes a sinister plot. That same, dies another day, is what the prime minister told himself looking in the mirror to shave. Numantine resistance. Survive today, and tomorrow will be another day.
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In the film, James Bond has as enemies a North Korean colonel and a diamond baron, and in the British political movie Starmer faces his Health Minister, former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, if no others arise.
In recent days Streeting (from the party’s right wing, protected by Blair and friend of Mandelson, an obstacle to his ambitions) has been sending banderilleros and picadors (MPs, secretaries of state) into the arena, asking them to resign to weaken Starmer and leave the bull ready to be killed. He has to decide whether or not to go all in. His window is limited, before Burnham gets a seat in the Commons, the obstacle preventing the most popular politician in the country from presenting his candidacy.
While Streeting was plucking the daisy and saying through other voices that yes, he will resign as Health Minister today and propose the duel, in Westminster Palace the king’s bodyguards symbolically checked for explosives in the palace’s basements, a tradition in the opening ceremony of the legislature since 1605 when a group of Catholic dissidents unsuccessfully tried to blow up the building with King James I, his family, and much of the aristocracy inside. Part of the pageantry and tradition is that an MP stays as a “hostage” in Buckingham Palace to ensure the monarch returns safe and sound.
But in this case, the hostage of events (and of the MPs of his own Party) is Starmer himself, who does not know if he will be prime minister to try to pass the 37 laws the king announced on his behalf for the coming months, on all kinds of issues (housing, digital ID card, immigration restriction, increased defense spending, national security, cost of living, road construction, health reform, education, police and justice, airport expansion, a tourist tax, ticket resale ban, nationalization of blast furnaces…).
In the legislature opening ceremony, a representative of the Lords tries to enter the Commons and is slammed the door in his face. Today it is Starmer who finds that his colleagues want to lock him in and punish him for the arrogance of saying after the electoral debacle, in the purest Florentino Pérez style, that he intends to be prime minister for no less than a decade and that they will only drag him out of Downing Street at gunpoint. His obsession with the legal process, incrementalism (gradual advances), technocracy, and control of the institutional machinery, without any charisma to season it, arouses not only antipathy but unusual hatred, both among voters and many politicians.
Today will be the moment of truth whether Streeting draws his revolver or not. Meanwhile, as during Franco’s agony, we wait for the usual medical team’s reports to know if the patient is still alive. Former premier Stanley Baldwin used to say that the British leader’s position is the loneliest in the world. Live to die another day.
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