Want to watch the British government have a nervous breakdown? Turn on the news. This’ll go on for a while, so you should still be able to catch part of it.

How do I define a political nervous breakdown? The government collapses, and that means everything and also nothing, but it absorbs the country’s entire output of political energy.

The nothing part? The party that’s in power got into power by having a majority in Parliament–and the current one, Labour, has a big honkin’ majority. Once the government it put into place completes its slow-motion collapse, it will still have a majority. So nothing’s changed, right?

Sort of. The everything part is that the party’s (and government’s) leader will have gone to that place where former politicians go, which might be heaven, hell, Davos, or the boozer. Not being a former politician, I have no first-hand knowledge. Meanwhile, he (in this case he is a he) will have been replaced with someone else. From the same party. 

Does that change anything? It depends. The leader of any British  party has a lot of power in setting the party’s direction, policies, and tone, and when the party’s in power, he or she does ditto for the government and the country. So a different leader from a different strand of the party could take the country in a new direction. And a different leader from the same old strand could be a new face taking us in the same old direction.

Or we could all just head down to the boozer and drown our sorrows. Forget Davos. I’m pretty sure it won’t have us.

Since a lot of the complaints about the current prime minister, Keir Starmer, focus on his personality (or lack thereof) and his droning voice, a new face just might make a difference, but I’m more put off by his policies than his droning. On immigration, he’s trying to out-do the right wing (the Conservatives) and the farther right wing (Reform), accepting their argument that the country’s problem is that we have too many immigrants. Or any immigrants at all. Or the wrong kind of immigrants. It depends on which day you open the papers.

On civil liberties, he’s gone in the direction of shutting down protest. You can now get arrested for saying, “I support Palestine Action.” Which I did just say but in the context of not actually saying it so I should, in theory, be safe.

Listen, Starmer’s a lawyer. That would probably make sense to him. 

I could list half a dozen more complaints without stopping to exchange one breath for another but let’s just say that he’s from a strand of the Labour Party that’s abandoned its roots among working people and boy has he made that plain. 

 

How’d it come to this? 

In the last election, Labour gained that big honkin’ majority I mentioned and proceeded not to demonstrate that it was much different from the Conservatives they’d been elected to replace. I didn’t expect to love their policies but I did think they’d at least be competent, which would’ve been a relief after the chaotic last years of Conservative governments. They weren’t, though. So recently, when local elections were held, Labour lost its shirt, its tie, and everything but its banners, and it only held onto those because no one else wanted to be seen with them. 

For months–or did it only feel like months?–we’d been hearing speculation about whether Starmer would resign if the elections went badly, so once they did– 

Well, no, as it turned out he wouldn’t step down. He’d be the person, he repeated robotically, to lead the party into the next election. 

While his government crumbled around him.

 

How Labour deposes a leader

When a prime minister is deposed, dies in office, or is transmuted into a flock of butterflies and flitters out an open window, the country doesn’t have rules on how the next prime minister gets chosen. The party in power does that, because the prime minister isn’t just the head of the country but also the head of the biggest party in parliament, and in terms of process leading the party trumps leading the country. 

Don’t ask me. I’ve only lived here 20 years. Give me another 60 and I might make sense of it. 

So the party chooses the new leader according to its own rules. If it agrees to do that by holding a joust, that’s how it’ll happen.

Since the Labour Party’s in power, we’re going by Labour Party rules. The party can change them (of course), and did within living memory, but right now they say that 20% of the MPs (collectively called, just to confuse things, the parliamentary party) have to demand a new leader, and any challenger has to hand the party’s general secretary a list of supporters. Right now, the magic number of MPs is 81.

Ah, but the party’s leader can run in the contest without having a single supporter or handing over any list at all.

I’m tempted to start the next paragraph, “If a challenging MP holds 5 face cards representing all four suits…” but I’m afraid someone will believe me.

If the leader doesn’t resign–and as I write this Starmer’s still saying he won’t, remember–the battle’s likely to be long and awkward, while the country drifts on, carried forward by its own momentum. Or sideways. Who cares? We have a contest to settle.

We just watched–or in my case didn’t watch–the king’s speech, in which the king (or queen, but it’s king at the moment) opens parliament by reading out the government’s legislative plans. In the best of conditions it’s an odd exercise, in which a person wearing a crown and other improbable and symbolic clothing, reads a speech they didn’t write, consisting of proposed legislative changes they had no hand in drawing up. 

This time it was odder than usual, since the government in question wasn’t likely to be around to do anything on the list, but given that the speech follows a ceremony in which a bunch of sober-looking guards in Tudor (I think) dress check a non-existent cellar for explosives that haven’t been there back in 1605–

Lewis Carroll would’ve been right at home.

But never mind that. In fact, never mind the king’s speech. It’s a coincidence that it happened to coincide with the leadership joust. 

Once one or more challengers have the backing of enough MPs, party members get to vote, and the test is multiple choice. They can vote for a first choice, a second choice, and so on until the entire flock of butterflies has been accounted for. The second choice will be counted if a voter’s first choice doesn’t get enough votes to go on and if no candidate has more than 50% of the vote. And so on until a candidate staggers across the finish line.

Do I need to remind you that only one candidate can have more than 50% of the vote?

It’s a great system that can end up with a candidate no one particularly likes getting the most votes because a lot of people marginally preferred them to someone they liked even less. Every system has its little snags. 

What happens, then, if the prime minister is re-elected on the strength of second and third choices but the parliamentary party agrees that all the juice has already been squeezed out of him or her? 

As it happens, there’s another way to eject a prime minister: if he or she doesn’t have the support of the cabinet or of the majority of the MPs, their time is up. It was a series of cabinet resignations that finally put an end to Boris Johnson’s prime ministerial sideshow. I wouldn’t rule out that happening to Starmer.

So we’ve now ejected a prime minister, which solves one problem, but the party still needs a replacement part or the vehicle of state won’t run.

 

So who might replace Starmer?

A handful of Labour MPs have stepped forward to challenge him. Sort of. While everyone else hemmed and hawed in the immediate aftermath of Labour’s disaster in the local elections, one said she didn’t want to be prime minister but somebody had to get the party started, so she turned on the music and, yes indeed, people started dancing. Or to be more literal about it, said they’d run. Once they did, she faded into the background and I’ve managed to forget her name, which is a shame since what she did took guts.

The clearest early challenge came from Wes Streeting, who was the minister for health until he resigned and announced his candidacy. He’s from the right of the party and hasn’t pulled together enough backers to trigger a contest–yet. Another couple of MPs said they’d run if needed but weren’t signing up supporters. Yet. 

The problem is that none of those people have much backing in either the party or the real world, where the electorate, and more to the point in this stage of the contest, the party members, live. The one person who does have that backing? That’s Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, who’s from the left of the party (or as the papers have it, the soft left). The problem is that he’s not eligible. To be prime minister, you have to be an MP. He tried to become an MP a while back, but Starmer scented a challenge to his leadership (you didn’t need a highly educated sniffer to pick up on that) and blocked his chance to run. 

Is there a way for Burnham to be prime minister anyway? Um, well, since the UK has an unwritten constitution (I know, I know), it’s tempting to come up with possibilities, but basically, probably, almost certainly, no. One thick strand of that unwritten constitution is made up of precedent and another strand is what’s written down in important places. They all say no. Or they seem to. It’s hard to tell with unwritten stuff, or even stuff that’s written when no one has an absolute list of which documents count. But the experts all say no, he couldn’t be parachuted into the House of Lords. No, he couldn’t sit as a temporary MP. And no, he couldn’t dress up in a bear suit and sneak in the back door. He has to wait until his number’s called, like everybody else. Or more accurately, he has to find a way to become an MP at a time when MPs aren’t up for election.

The way to do that is for some MP to step down, triggering a by-election–a kind of off-season election. Then Burnham has to run and to win the election. And that would have to happen before the leadership contest takes place. As I write this, he’s found someone willing to step down and there will be a by-election, but it’ll be in a constituency where Reform, the new party on the more-extreme-than-it-seems right, did well in the local elections, so Burnham can’t just coast in. He’ll have a fight on his hands.

Expect Reform to pour in a lot of money. They’ve got funding from a crypto-gazillionaire or two, so this should be an expensive race. And to complicate things, it looks like Burnham will be challenged from the left by the Greens, splitting the leftwing vote. 

And there’s one more problem: it takes five or six weeks to set up and run a by-election. What would happen if the oust-Starmer movement starts rolling downhill before Burnham can declare his challenge?

Burnham would be left at the top of the hill, fuming, that’s what, but it doesn’t look like that’ll happen. Streeting’s been clear about wanting Burnham in the race, as have the other challengers to Starmer’s leadership–the ones who aren’t quite challengers yet. The hope seems to be that they can dump their leader without splitting the party in the process.