The pomp of the address was a splendid backdrop to a full-blown political crisis in the U.K.
The pomp of the address was a splendid backdrop to a full-blown political crisis in the U.K.
Y esterday, Britain presented what is becoming its latest unique contribution to the history of constitutional development — namely, the pageantry of unsolved crises. It was the occasion, known long in advance, when the sovereign delivers what is known as the Gracious Speech outlining his government’s legislative program in the House of Lords to an assembly that includes his ministers, opposition leaders, peers, and MPs of all parties with the most important VIPs, namely the prime minster and ministers, unseated in the humble petitioning position of standing throughout at the bar (i.e., edge) of the House.
Everybody listened with suitable humility as King Charles III listed all the plans his government intended to implement in the next twelve months. Opposition MPs often complain that his formal recital of controversial policies may create the impression that the king personally approves of all that “my government” will do.
That is almost always a needless anxiety. It was especially so on Wednesday because the Gracious Speech contained a great deal more rhetoric than actual solid policies — or at least did so far more than is usually the case.
Almost the biggest event in it was the omission of the widely condemned legislation that would have paid billions of pounds to the pro-Chinese government of Mauritius to take the Chagos Islands — with their strategically vital U.S.–U.K. air force base — off the U.K.’s hands. This omission, however, was effectively confirming a decision made by President Donald Trump in Washington, who had withdrawn U.S. support for the Chagos deal rather than one taken by Prime Minister Keir Starmer in London. And almost everyone in London except Starmer and his attorney general (and fellow “human-rights-lawyer” Lord Richard Hermer) will be relieved by that news.
But if we’re talking loss of power and influence in the world, Starmer was looking at a far bigger case of that. As the prime minister listened to King Charles reading out his government’s detailed but largely bombastic list of ambitious promises, both king and prime minister had to wonder if they still had a government to back it up. Just before the ceremony began, his minister for health, Wes Streeting, had announced that he would resign from the cabinet and challenge Starmer for the leadership of the Labour Party (and thus in effect for the prime ministership). More than 100 MPs had already called for Starmer to resign. As many or more have bowed to pressure from the whips to declare support. Other cabinet ministers have refused to express loyalty to Starmer. In short, the pageantry was a splendid backdrop to a full-blown political crisis, the possible fall of the Starmer government and its likely replacement by a less “managerial” and more left-wing one.
The roots of this crisis are plain. Last week’s local elections for the governing Labour Party were stratospherically terrible even by the (high) standards for catastrophe of the two “traditional” main parties of British government in recent years. Labour lost more than 1,496 councilors in England, was pushed into third-party status in its old stronghold of Wales, and was reduced to 17 seats in the Scottish Assembly (where the winning number is 65) in a humiliating tie with Reform. There were no bright spots whatever for Starmer’s party in these results.
Compared to that collapse, Reform UK won 1,453 seats (+1,451). The Tories won 801 seats, (-563). The Liberal Democrats won 844 seats (+155). The Green Party won 587 seats, (+411). Independent candidates won 212 seats (+34) and the Residents’ Association won 36 seats (-31).
Those results look even worse when Professor Will Jennings and the Sky News election team translated them into what they call a national equivalent vote to estimate the share of votes each party would get in a general election. Their estimate is 15 percent for Labour, compared to 27 percent for Reform, 20 percent for the Tories, and just above 14 percent for both the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. Their estimates show extraordinary reversals for all the parties in the period 2021–2026, but most dramatically since Labour was elected two years ago. Reform rises from nothing to first place with 27 percent of the vote. The major parties’ share of the vote in 2021 has been halved in 2026, the Tories’ share falling from 40 percent to 20 percent, putting them in second place, and Labour falling from 30 percent to 15 percent, putting it in third place, just three points ahead of the Greens and the Lib Dems.
How would those projections translate into parliamentary seats? With all the usual caveats, elections expert Michael Thresher calculated that they would produce a hung Parliament with no single party able to pass the threshold of 326 seats required for an overall majority. But Reform would be the largest party with 284 seats, and Labour would lose 192 seats — almost two-thirds of its existing parliamentary party — and end up with only 110 MPs or one-fifth of the House of Commons.
Naturally enough, two-thirds of current Labour MPs feel personally threatened by these figures, and the other 110 MPs are not exactly jubilant either. And they place the blame squarely on the prime minister. Admittedly — with the exception of his popular Ukraine policy — his entire prime ministerial career has looked like a succession of pratfalls, blunders, and unforced errors almost since the moment he walked into Downing Street. What makes these failures all the more fatal is that his personality exudes a kind of disapproving, humorless respectability that makes observers want to see him walk into a lamppost in an attempt to avoid a trapdoor. He is himself now a kind of old-fashioned music hall joke whose mere name uttered at random gets a laugh.
Nonetheless, ministers too played into this hapless impression on most other issues. They seemed collectively almost reckless in making a series of political blunders alienating one group of supporters after another. A short list of avoidable follies would include cutting winter fuel subsidies for the elderly in order to provide the Treasury with a tiny percentage cut in spending but a high cost in popularity with a key voting constituency; imposing a tax on private education to force “marginal” parents to choose state schools, only to discover that they had no places for their children and so more spending on state education would be needed; removing favorable “non-dom” tax status from high-income expats with the result that millionaires started leaving Britain in large numbers and the status had to be partly restored; and not least the budgetary decision to remove a traditionally lower rate of inheritance tax on farms (because the regular rate would force family farms into bankruptcy), which provoked stout British farmers into behaving like French ones and driving their tractors into Whitehall to protest.
Notice, however, that this short list is confined to mistakes and errors that arose in serious financial and budgetary planning by ministers and officials. Since then, we have had the additional upsurge of public disquiet, anger even, over the government’s foot-dragging over a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, the Mandelson affair, and the growing anxiety over the failure to spend more on defense while pursuing a forward strategy over Ukraine.
All in all, the entire Starmer government is seen as a failure, even though it has a parliamentary majority large enough to survive until the next general election in three years’ time and desperate enough to implement almost any survivalist strategy. That may explain the eerie contradiction between the general enthusiasm to overthrow Starmer and the odd reluctance of the challengers to enter the lists. Of the three most publicized names: Angela Rayner seems uncertain about whether she wants the top job or would prefer instead to be a powerful No. 2 to another contender, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham; Burnham is not currently in Parliament and accordingly urges Labour MPs not to dismiss Starmer until he gets there (which, given the recent local election results, may be never); and Wes Streeting had been hesitating on the brink of a declaration so long that all factions were beginning to mock him. Now that he’s finally jumped, Starmer loyalists raise hands in horror and cry, “He’s embarrassing the king.” Which old-fashioned conservatives may find oddly reassuring.
Less reassuring are some of the policies listed in the king’s speech and likely to be picked up by whoever wins the poisoned chalice of the Labour leadership. Labour’s various factions disagree, of course, but the balance of power within the party has plainly shifted with the final shriveling of Blairism because of Mandelson, the discrediting of Starmerite “managerialism” as a result of the still-prevailing Omnishambles, and the defection of working-class voters to the Reform Party over Brexit and the grooming gangs scandal. Labour is now the party of the public-sector middle-class intelligentsia. Its client constituencies are either recipients of welfare spending or its administrators. And their interests and their convictions will push it toward more spending, more taxation, as much borrowing as the market will bear, and further passage toward the delusion of a safe bureaucratic harbor in the European Union. That implies the leadership of the left’s Ed Miliband, the Sage of Net Zero, or — perhaps worse — his appointment as chancellor of the exchequer as part of a deal with any of the three contenders named above.
Labour’s future clashes will therefore be with (a) the markets, and (b) the voters. The markets won’t like Labour’s tax-and-spending policies, to which one Labour MP has already responded with, “Well, they’ll just have to bear it.” Given that the costs to the British government of borrowing just rose to a 28-year high, that policy sounds to me like a combination of boomerang and of the universal nuclear Doomsday Machine from Dr. Strangelove. As for the voters, they won’t like Labour attempts to get around Brexit quietly and in the dark without actually repealing it — and that would require another referendum. On which, finally, I quote The Spectator’s political correspondent (and author of several books on Brexit), Tim Shipman, who tweeted to any new No campaign his suggestion for a snappy response: “‘Tell them again’ looks like the easiest win in political history to me. The Rejoin terms would be so abject that, whatever the polls say now, many 2016 Remainers would vote to stay out.”
But an election is three years away. Until then, as Tom Paine said, we pity the plumage and forget the dying bird.