The plot against Starmer could benefit...Starmer

This is a highly risky strategy, but it remains one of the few avenues for the Prime Minister to take if he wishes to survive daily Telegraph 12/11/25 link It is reported today that Keir Starmer will stand firm against any colleague who hopes to challenge him for the leadership of his party and the Government.

That’s fighting talk, and only gives credence to rumours that a challenge is indeed imminent. Every potential challenger is, naturally enough, spending a lot of time and effort denying that they are about to wield the knife: if Number 10 thought that defying demands for the Prime Minister’s resignation was going to calm things down, they know better now. Yet there are those who suspect that Starmer has initiated the John Major strategy of leadership. In 1995, Major’s Conservative government languished in the polls behind a Labour Party revitalised by Tony Blair’s leadership. Rumours swirled of plots to remove him, just as his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, had been usurped five years earlier. At last, frustrated and determined to draw a line under the plotting, Major defied his image of a boring journeyman politician and held a press conference to announce his resignation as Tory Party leader, sparking an early leadership election. Anyone who wanted to stand against him should “put up or shut up.” The tactic worked, sort of. His Welsh secretary, John Redwood, duly announced himself as a candidate and was defeated by a vote of Conservative MPs, leaving Major free from challenges for the rest of the parliament. Unfortunately for Starmer, the Major precedent, after that, is not helpful: Major went on to lose the 1997 general election in a Labour landslide. It is precisely that sort of political earthquake, one that threatens to sweep away many of the newly-elected Labour MPs who won in 2024, that the discontents in the party’s ranks wish to avoid. And few can see how to do so while Starmer remains leader. It is at least plausible that Starmer hopes to exploit rumours of discontent with his time as Prime Minister to revitalise his own leadership, by simultaneously smoking out the rebels and displaying to this party and the nation an element of steel that has not hitherto been obvious to them. If the malcontents back down, are demoted or even fired, if they retire to the shadows sullenly to lick their wounds, Starmer would emerge as a victor of sorts, revivified to the point where he might actually be able to survive the expected calamity of next May’s local and devolved elections. But it’s an incredibly high-risk tactic, every bit as vulnerable to disaster as Major’s own response was 30 years ago. And it is predicated on an assumption that there remains a large and solid base of support for Starmer in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). This is not at all certain. Starmer is not the experienced politician that Major was, and neither is he as familiar with his parliamentary troops. The Prime Minister is seen as both a distant figure who knows few of his back benchers, and also a political neophyte whose numerous misjudgments since gaining office have exposed his lack of experience of politics. That is a disastrous combination for any leader, especially in a party of Government that knows only too well that its 2024 landslide was built on the shifting sands of low voter enthusiasm and turnout. But risky or not, it remains one of the few avenues for Starmer to take if he wishes to survive as party leader and Prime Minister. The discontent is real, the plotting is real, the dislike of his leadership is real. He either faces it down or he succumbs to it.