Miriam Cates: Starmer and Johnson are very different men, but their downfalls are very similar

Miriam Cates is the former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.

Among those of us who sat as Conservative MPs in the last parliament, the current political turmoil evokes a strong sense of deja-vu. The parallels between the Mandelson affair and the last weeks of Boris Johnson’s premiership are uncanny. Although Partygate and the Epstein files are worlds apart in terms of their seriousness, both scandals bolstered campaigns to oust sitting prime ministers with large parliamentary majorities.

Both Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer relied on powerful advisors who became lightning rods for  backbench discontent. Although Dominic Cummings resigned 18 months before Johnson’s demise, he played a similar role to Morgan McSweeney, who on Sunday was scapegoated for the Mandelson debacle and left Downing Street. In the run up to his departure, Johnson ‘revamped’ his Number 10 operation, losing key aides Dan Rosenfeld and Munira Mirza, and bringing in Guto Hari and Steve Barclay to ‘reboot’ his comms strategy. Similarly for Starmer, Tim Allen is out, standing down to allow “a new No 10 team to be built”.

The first signs of the end for Johnson – and perhaps for Starmer – began with being publicly undermined by a string of senior MPs calling publicly for their Party leader to step down. I will never forget watching David Davis rise to his feet in a packed House of Commons in January 2022 and implore Johnson “for the love of God man; go”. Clive Lewis’ scathing tweets about our current prime minister are somewhat less rousing.

In another parallel between the two cases, the beleaguered prime ministers’ Scottish deputies were among the first to break ranks. In January 2022, Ruth Davidson declared Johnson ‘unfit for office’; on Monday, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar called for Starmer to step down. Politicians north of the border are clearly ahead of the curve.

Ultimately, Johnson was toppled by a slew of ministers resigning en masse; so far Starmer’s cabinet is holding firm, although the support expressed in their tightly coordinated loyal social media posts seems neither heartfelt nor unconditional. And, just as then-chancellor Rishi Sunak was accused of starting a covert leadership campaign early in 2022, so Wes Streeting is thought to be on manoeuvers now.

After a well-received performance at the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting on Monday, Starmer seems safe for now – as did Johnson after he won (narrowly) a vote of no confidence in June 2022. Yet as it was for Johnson, this may yet be a temporary reprieve. Seven weeks after that vote, Johnson was gone, brought down by the fallout from accusations that Chris Pincher, the deputy chief whip drunkenly groped a man in the Carlton Club. For Starmer, any number of potential bumps in the road in the coming weeks may re-ignite the smoking embers of a coup.

If Sir Keir quits, whatever the immediate catalyst for his departure – poor by-election results, a badly received spring statement or perhaps another ministerial scandal – it will not be the true cause of his undoing, just as Johnson’s poor judgement in dithering over Chris Pincher was not the primary reason for his downfall. For both prime ministers, a leadership crisis followed a steady loss of confidence among their MPs that eroded their authority with each political hiccup.

Johnson and Starmer have a tendency to U-turn under pressure; sending backbenchers out to defend unpopular policies one day which are then reversed the next is a surefire way to lose support. But it’s not only U-turns that cause disaffection. Just like Johnson’s Tories in 2022, Starmer’s Labour MPs are watching the plunging polls with horror. I remember the unease in the House of Commons tea room when the Conservative vote share started to fall below 35 per cent in the final months of 2021. The Labour Party is now polling consistently below 20 per cent; backbenchers have every reason to panic. Poor polling convinces many MPs that they have nothing to lose – and everything to gain – by switching leaders.

Of course no two events in politics or history are identical. Just because Johnson was forced out, precipitating a slow and painful Tory demise doesn’t mean the same will happen to Sir Keir and Labour. But the fact that two prime ministers of such different characters, in different parties and under different circumstances, can face such similar situations may indicate that this state of affairs has more to do with our political system than the specific weaknesses of Starmer and Johnson.

We are living through a time of acute political instability. If Starmer premiership ends this year as predicted, he will make way for Britain’s seventh Prime Minister in a decade. The last time a Party leader won a majority at a general election and then went into the next election still as Prime Minister was in 2001, a quarter of a century ago. Of course there have been many periods of turmoil in our history, but the feverish nature of politics over the last 15 years or so feels unprecedented, and shows no signs of abating. Why?

An obvious culprit is the rise of the smartphone, social media and instant messaging. The sheer quantity of information that can now be exchanged, and the ease and instantaneity of communication, have made it vastly easier for MPs to communicate their complaints and opinions with their colleagues  – and with journalists – than in the past. When secret plotting involved arranging to meet unseen in dark corridors at pre-arranged times in the Palace of Westminster, there were practical barriers to arranging a mutiny.

Continuous political updates on Twitter (X) allow MPs to take the political temperature every five minutes, rather than once a day while reading the newspaper over their tea room porridge. Instant communications have sped up time; politics now operates in permanent crisis mode, with overstimulated journalists and MPs living on adrenaline, conditioned to react rather than respond to events.

More frequent polling has also made it difficult for MPs to take a longer view of the political cycle. Since 2016, reforms to polling methods have made predictions far more accurate. A few consecutive surveys that show your party is falling in popularity can no longer be dismissed, and with the constant stream of new data, MPs track the polls like a doctor tracks a critical patient’s heart beat – every fluctuation seems to demand a drastic intervention.

But technology is not the only factor driving dissatisfaction with leaders. We are living through a major political realignment, where previously consensus issues like the necessity of strong borders, what it means to be British, and the importance of providing for yourself and your family are now highly contested. The splits on these issues do not always fall along traditional left-right lines, and so have fractured both Labour and Conservative parties. Although both Johnson and Starmer won large parliamentary majorities, neither prime minister ever had a true majority when it came to political direction. I’m not sure Boris ever knew his own mind on the subject of the welfare state, but had he tried to cut benefits he would have found his party just as split as Starmer’s.

The impotence of government has also played a role in discontent. Blairite reforms stripped power away from both parliament and the executive. The inability of ministers to get a grip on immigration or house building owes more to rule by quango than to the incompetence of our leaders. MPs may express discontent over the ‘direction of travel’, but there is nothing quick that prime ministers can do to fix things, instead resorting to ‘resets’ and meaningless talk about ‘values’.

There has also been a growing trend to play the man not the ball, with opposition parties and the press putting pressure on individuals to resign after mistakes, in much the same way as football managers are told to quit after a few bad performances. In the last parliament, Starmer, Angela Rayner et al made a habit of calling for scalps on an almost weekly basis. Now Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives have taken up where Labour left off, demanding the resignations of Reeves, Rayner, Mandelson and now Starmer.

His Majesty’s Opposition of course exists to challenge the government of the day, but, to me at least, it is unclear how it is in the national interest to continually undermine the position of those in elected office, especially when there are no clear preferable alternatives. If Starmer goes, he may well be replaced by someone far to the left of him; the reaction of the markets would cause genuine pain to voters.

The current political turmoil looks set to continue for some time, and it can’t all be blamed on technology and tactics. Underlying the discontent in both Parliament and the country is a sense that Britain is in decline and that not even a government with a large majority can rescue our country. The public must shoulder some responsibility for our political paralysis; the kinds of painful reforms that are necessary to save Britain – on tax, immigration, energy and planning – are unlikely to command majority support. Most voters – and possibly many MPs – still want lower taxes and higher public spending, something that no prime minister can hope to deliver.

But politicians are to blame too. Johnson and Starmer, like many of their MPs, seem to have no motivating purpose other than ‘managing’ the country well. When ‘management’ fails, it is unsurprising that neither backbenchers nor ministers are able to hold their nerve.

So how do we escape the vortex of political instability? There is no hope to be found in the left of politics; the few individuals who might understand how to rebuild our society and economy are isolated and have insufficient support within their movements.

The answers lie on the right, and as we approach the next election, conservatives in both Reform and the Conservative Party must prepare a radical and detailed programme for government, including repealing Tony Blair’s assault on democratic power. And both parties – and their leaders – must define and communicate a vision for Britain that goes beyond good management, inspiring patriotism and preparing the public for the kind of hardship that will be inevitable if we are going to turn the country around. Stable leadership is still possible; but not for at least three more long years.