Labour and the Conservatives have always taken very different approaches to the business of changes of leadership. Tories care mainly about electability. Margaret Thatcher’s ideological legacy was adored by many Tories — and indeed still is. When they knifed her in 1990, her Cabinet were more concerned that the electorate had fallen out of love with her. Tellingly, John Major’s turn at the helm didn’t herald a decisive shift in ideology; he was simply a more acceptable face of Thatcherism for the Nineties.

When Labour looks for a new leader, though, it inevitably becomes an internal referendum on the political direction of the party. That helps explain the violent swing, say, from the Bennite Jeremy Corbyn to the centrist Keir Starmer that left the Labour faithful gasping for breath. But despite the bloodshed, modern political parties are not versions of Terry Pratchett’s Assassins’ Guild, where advancement comes through the elimination of rivals. Michael Heseltine’s proclamation that “he who wields the knife never wears the crown” has proven to be remarkably reliable. Either way, Starmer’s position is not new — but you don’t get the impression he’s relying much on the lessons of history.

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Starmer's weaponised incompetence

By Jonny Ball

Two years on from its famous landslide victory of 1945, Clement Attlee’s Labour government was already in bad shape. Chancellor Hugh Dalton was reportedly taking Benzedrine to keep going. Herbert Morrison, leader of the House of Commons, was recovering from a serious illness. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was drifting between office and hospital. Churchill had described Attlee as “a modest man with much to be modest about” — but he was clearly easy to underestimate. When Attlee’s internal enemies decided to oust him in 1947, their leader Stafford Cripps left his fateful meeting with the PM having accepted a new position as the Minister for Economic Affairs — a position created especially for him. In keeping his enemy close, Attlee took a somewhat different approach to Starmer, who first refused to meet with Wes Streeting, only to frostily dispatch him after 17 minutes of conversation the next day.

Hugh Gaitskell succeeded Attlee as Labour leader in 1955 but never became prime minister, dying suddenly in 1963. Harold Wilson took over and won the general election the following year, but before long the rumblings in his party about his leadership became too loud to ignore. By the late-Sixties, the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins seemed the most obvious choice to replace him.

Starmer claims his political hero is Wilson; Streeting has declared himself a Labour revisionist in the ideological mode of Jenkins and Anthony Crosland, who argued for reducing inequality, improving opportunities and dispensing with socialist dogma. Jenkins was admired by almost everyone who mattered in late-Sixties Britain, intelligent journalists, broadcasters, civil servants, captains of industry, and had a coterie of well-heeled and glamorous mistresses. He looked and sounded like the future. Wilson looked like the present, stretching out to infinity.

All Jenkins had to do was pick his moment — and the aftermath of the disastrous local elections of 1968 would have been ideal. He was egged on by his enthusiastic supporters, the Friends of Roy, whom Gerald Kaufman compared to a group of schoolchildren with a crush on the hockey mistress. But to his eternal regret, Jenkins failed to act. He later admitted that successful prime ministers generally possess “a seam of utter ruthlessness”, and wondered if perhaps he lacked it. Elsewhere, he observed that if you fired a shot at your enemy, you had better make sure they ended up dead. This is a conundrum that Streeting must have grappled with himself in recent days. As for Wilson, still the greatest Houdini figure in modern British politics, he governed on and off until 1976, by which time he had moved from a modernist belief in the “white heat of technology” to being more of a national headmaster figure, permanently disappointed with everyone.

Still, worse than failing to act is sending your foot-soldiers over the top and then failing to follow them yourself, creating only bitterness and resentment. A prime example was James Purnell resigning from the Cabinet to trigger a coup against Gordon Brown, only to find that his ally David Miliband had bottled it and failed to follow through with his own resignation. Purnell left British politics soon after: the Labour Party is not kind to failed assassins.

And there is another danger that Jenkins, who was at Bletchley Park during the war, would have appreciated more than most. This is the concept of political game theory — specifically, the tragedy of the first mover whose act will always benefit the second mover. The first mover bears all the costs while exposing themselves to a counter-strike, neatly explaining Heseltine’s famous quip, which he learned the hard way in his own doomed attempt to replace Magaret Thatcher. So while Jenkins could have mortally wounded Wilson with a challenge, in doing so, he may have allowed one of his rivals — whether Denis Healey, Jim Callaghan or Michael Foot — to take the prize and unite the party behind them. This was something the wily Wilson also knew, which was why he surrounded himself with a collection of powerful lieutenants, each the commandant of a different Labour faction. If one faction thought the other faction might triumph, that persuaded them to back the status quo instead. Another reason why David Miliband didn’t challenge Brown was because he thought the party might turn to Alan Johnson if Brown went, and not him.

A successful challenger must perform three functions at once. They must reassure markets and elites; they must excite activists and MPs; and they must appear plausible to ordinary voters. That combination is exceptionally rare. Tony Blair certainly managed it. Jenkins only managed two out of three (he was probably too patrician to appeal to regular voters, especially as the Sixties started swinging). And Streeting perhaps manages two or even three as well. He is one of the few figures in the current Cabinet whom Labour MPs can plausibly imagine facing Nigel Farage across a television studio without visibly shrinking. He is fluent, a self-declared revisionist, emotionally direct in the modern political style with a powerful backstory. But Labour history is not especially kind to obvious heirs, even when they look much more likely to be successful. The party distrusts naked ambition on almost theological grounds because surely true Left-wingers would want to put the common good first.

So, a politician seeking the leadership must appear ready without appearing too eager. The advice that Brown always tried to give himself was to do a good job, and not look like he was actively plotting against Blair, simply being available when a vacancy arose. A wise dictum — albeit one that fell apart as his desire to enter No. 10 rose to almost pathological levels. In 2006, his ally Tom Watson launched the so-called “curry house” plot against Blair. However, in what became a running joke in Westminster, the conspirators’ attempts to keep the meeting secret spectacularly failed after they signed the restaurant’s visitors’ book, which was then leaked to the BBC.

Brown finally inherited the premiership in June 2007, after years of subterranean warfare — though not before Labour briefly descended into the sort of factional farce that only Labour can produce. Michael Meacher and John McDonnell maneuvered against Brown simultaneously, prompting one weary figure to remark that “the left hand doesn’t know what the far-left hand is doing”. But even that was not as peculiar as Barry Gardiner flying home from Dubai to run for leader, only to throw in the towel upon landing.

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How to topple a Labour leader

By Richard Johnson

Coups fail when ministers hesitate, factions freelance, allies leak against one another, and everybody assumes someone else has counted the numbers properly. Most failed Labour coups begin in perfect agreement that the party leader is intolerable — only to end with catastrophic disagreement about who should replace him. Starmer’s saving grace is that those calling for his replacement have yet to choose their champion. In the coming days Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham might all join the contest — assuming Burnham can find a seat in time. If Starmer chooses to stay and fight, he may ultimately survive a bruising leadership challenge simply because his enemies can’t shape their forces into a single fatal implement.

As the clouds of dissatisfaction swirl about him, Starmer seemingly faces a choice. He could adopt a wait-and-see approach; or he could use Attlee’s method of coopting rivals into allies. Yet, instead, his experience as a former prosecutor seems to be governing his actions. He blocked Burnham from standing in Gorton and Denton (even turning up to vote against in person); suspended the whip from MPs who sided with the SNP over the two-child benefit cap; and insisted that Rayner resign over her tax problems. Now that those seem to be resolved in any case, wouldn’t it have been better to have kept her inside the tent? Lawyer first, politician second, this purge-and-eliminate approach looks more like something out of the Neil Kinnock playbook than anything else.

Through the Eighties, Kinnock played an enormously important part in preparing Labour for a return to power. That meant he had to be ruthless in purging the hard-Left — as in his landmark 1985 conference speech, where he railed against the hard-Left militant faction in Liverpool. The rest of the party knew that the radicals were harming their electoral chances, and so were prepared to back Kinnock all the way.

Starmer has followed the Kinnock approach, albeit without the conditions to make it work. Notably, he lacks an external threat that the grassroots feel they need protecting from. The Conservatives have collapsed, and though the Greens and Reform are both a source of deep anxiety, they’ve yet to prove themselves as potent parliamentary forces. Besides, whoever ends up leading the party three months from now, the next election is still years away. The purge-and-eliminate strategy hardly seems wise in the circumstances. Maybe Heseltine’s dictum will need to be rewritten for Starmer. The leader who wields the knife loses the crown.

I have met men who still long for their wives, when the separation has been longer than the marriage. I have met old Bolsheviks who kept rehearsing Trotsky’s actions after Stalin’s death, believing the Soviet Union would still be with us, and thriving if only he had returned two days earlier to Moscow. I have even met New Labour believers who think that if David Miliband had defeated his brother, then Brexit would never have happened and Labour would be in power, at the vanguard of a renewed EU.

When I listen to such claims, an old Yiddish phrase comes to mind, which is translated as: “If Grandma had wheels she’d be a trolly”. The conversation always ends in a kind of faraway silence. I find it hard to know what to say, while the person thinks about what to do next; whether to send a birthday card, write a letter to the Morning Star, renew their efforts to support Keir Starmer.

Sometimes the ship has sailed and it is never coming back to port. It has a new crew and a new cargo, a new trading route and a new flag. Yet they still believe that, someday, their ship will return; they stand at the dock, staring out to sea but always walk back home alone.

Sometimes things change, an era changes, and there is no going back. For institutions, for nations, as well as for people, this is hard to accept. For Britain and the United States, the Iranian Revolution is such a phenomenon. It was all going so well, and it is hard to accept that it will never go well again.

Muhammad Ali said that the first rule of boxing is that you never get knocked out by a punch you see coming. It is also the first rule of politics. And no-one predicted the form of the the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Both London and Washington did predict an imminent threat to the rule of the Shah, but from the Left, through a coalition between disaffected workers and intellectuals supported by the Soviet Union and led, within Iran, by the Tudeh Party. That is not what happened.

The spectre of Mohammad Mossadegh and the 1953 coup, orchestrated by the CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, held them in its thrall. Mossadegh was an aristocratic liberal nationalist who wanted to nationalise Iranian oil. At the time, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the predecessor of BP, held a monopoly of oil production in Iran and signed a deal which only gave 19% to Iranians. It was effectively a nationalised industry and the profits were vital to post-war reconstruction. The NHS was founded on the assumption of continued revenue streams from Iran.

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All hail Good King Boris

By Maurice Glasman

The Labour Government of 1945 was extremely opposed to to Iranian nationalisation, while pursuing it vigorously at home. Colonial double standards. Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison and Clement Attlee all took a hostile view of Mossadegh and supported the Shah as the instrument of maintaining the status quo. Eisenhower agreed and Kermit and his muppet show was unleashed; Mossadegh was deposed and condemned to a life of internal exile.

That is the lost moment of Iranian history, the great “what if?” What if we had supported Mossadegh rather than depose him? What if Iran had grown into a liberal democracy?

This is the question that haunts the minds of our diplomats because what happened was completely different: an Iranian Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini and the imposition of an eternal form of clerical domination, “the rule of the jurists” — and there’s no way out.

The coming Iranian presidential elections on Friday indicate and express the doomed eternity of stasis that the revolution created. The inevitable winner will be Ebrahim Raisi, a mass-murdering apparatchik who was part of the four-man team responsible for the public executions of up to 30,000 Leftists in a few months in 1988 for the crimes of atheism and apostasy.

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Roger Scruton still gives me strength

By Maurice Glasman

He will be elected on a turnout of less than 30%. Most Iranians understand that the power lies not with the President, but in the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, which controls the Revolutionary Guard, the media channels, the clerics and foreign policy.

In other words, there is a double system. These elections are for a government that will pretend to govern while the real power lies elsewhere. Just look at the country’s vaccine programme, which has inoculated only 2% of the population. The Health Ministry fully participated in Covax to receive vaccines, and yet Khamenei announced a ban on both British and American jabs on the grounds that they were “likely designed to contaminate foreign nations”, leaving the Chinese vaccine and Sputnik as the only options. One is useless and the other is scarce.

The office of the Supreme Leader also vets who can stand for office, and they rejected all candidates from outside the revolutionary vanguard. The former reforming President, Mohammad Khatami, set up an “Association of Combatant Clerics” and put forward fourteen candidates, but each was rejected.

Iranian foreign policy is based on building proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the militias in Iraq, Hamas in Palestine, the Houthis in Yemen. And it’s the same at home. These elections are just proxy politics, the candidates represent the regime, not the people.

I sat through the first three-hour debate between the approved candidates. They were not allowed to discuss Covid, vaccines, sanctions, power cuts, sinking ships or burning factories. It reminded me of Brezhnev-era Soviet plenaries, where all the candidates agreed that the achievements of the Revolution were eternal, but the enemies of socialism were still sabotaging the project, particularly the Government.

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America and Iran need each other

By David Patrikarakos

This time, it’s the unprecedented form of Shia theocracy invented by Khomeini that must be preserved. When I was in Najaf in 2018, the historic home of Shia religious authority, I met with two senior ayatollahs and many clerics, all of whom rejected the Iranian system as hostile to the teaching and practices of the Shia Muslim faith. In Iraq, a year later, I witnessed the assassinations of protestors by Iranian-backed militias. Tens of thousands of Shia protestors in Baghdad sang “Iran Iran, go away” every night. They are still there; still shooting them.

At that time in November 2019 demonstrations against the regime exploded all over Iran, so the Government turned off the internet and shot the protestors. Any remaining political prisoners were recently transferred to the violent offenders section of the prison. They won’t last long.

And yet Western diplomats still believe that it is possible to negotiate with the government, to normalise relationships, to go back to 1953 and do the right thing this time. The first foreign policy act of the Biden Presidency was to re-engage with Iran and revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, lifting sanctions on proxies and renewing the distinction between hardliners and “moderates”. This is not a distinction that is believed in by the Iranian people as reflected in the overwhelming majority who will boycott the election. The Biden approach still assumes that they are negotiating with Mossadegh when the truth is otherwise.

The Iranian Left have been utterly routed and the middle class lurk in North Tehran, playing cat and mouse with the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, over how much hair women can show in public. And yet the yearning of Iranians for something better and different cannot be stilled. It remains a crime in Iran to speak to others about Jesus or to claim that you have a relationship with him. And yet, the number of Christians there is now estimated to be close to a million.

There is a network of underground churches. Bibles are smuggled in and passed from hand to hand. The numbers continue to grow. It seems that for thousands of Iranians the only way to get rid of this regime is to change your religion. That is the long story in Iran. The desert church is lighting its candles for the prince of light once more.