Throw Starmer under the bus

Lessons from Biden, and did Josh Simons redeem himself?

ask me your insider questions about the Labour party

It’s not just Starmer’s politics or policies that make me not want him as leader. I can’t stand the guy.

When Joe Biden stepped back to let Kamala Harris run, Matthew Yglesias wrote that praising him for it was a good strategy. The best way for a commentator to have a constructive influence on politics is to praise people when they do something good, especially if it is against their self-interest, and to criticise them when they act selfishly (Matt brings RBG not resigning from the Supreme Court as an example).

But ultimately, Biden should be criticised for delaying and dithering to resign. His main aim was to avert the Trumpian threat to American institutions, and in that, Matt tells us, he failed catastrophically.

The Original Sin

How are we then to judge the Starmer project?

The project’s aim was to make the Labour Party a party of government, extinguish the threat of Nigel Farage’s illiberalism and neutralise the far left.

How did it go?

The Starmer project has ushered in Labour’s historic unpopularity, after winning power on an extremely thinly spread majority. They did this by picking a figurehead, Keir Starmer, who lacked the political hinterland and human touch required of a Labour leader. His weaknesses were apparent to anyone with emotional intelligence and intellectual honesty.

I came across Starmer many times before he became leader, when I was working in Parliament during the Corbyn years, and I remember thinking I could never work for him. He came across as cold and impersonal. MPs often complained about how he was simply not interested in getting to know any of them. He probably wouldn't recognise some Labour backbenchers. He proved his coldness by throwing under the bus every single person he ever worked with, from Jeremy Corbyn¹, to literally all of his staffers both junior and senior from before he became leader, all the way to finally not hesitating to fire a civil servant for a situation (appointing Mandelson without passing security vetting) which was entirely out of his hands and entirely within Starmer’s own responsibility.

The Starmer project emboldened Nigel Farage’s narrative and allowed him to set the political agenda of what is most important to talk about. They did this by lacking a coherent media strategy and instead resorting to New Labour’s old tactics.

In the most inflammatory policy areas, like immigration, their media strategy focused on appeasing right-wing media and newspapers. It’s not that Labour voters consume none of these media- GB News had a Labour-voting majority audience as recently as 2024. But the immigration team proved they have a tin ear for politics and no strategic direction. Their goal should have been “pass immigration policy.” Instead, it was “get positive write-ups in the right-wing press, read by people who hate us.”

This was exemplified by Shabana Mahmood’s visit to Denmark, seen by some, mostly on the right, as a model for social democratic immigration controls, and by their informal briefing that they were even considering confiscating refugees’ jewellery to pay for their expenses. There was never such a plan, but someone on that team thought the controversy would divert attention from something else, presumably negative. In the end, the policy that grabbed headlines was free school meals. A policy which would have gone down very well with Labour voters, if only they weren’t suffering from PTSD after the rumours we’d be checking refugees’ ears for family heirlooms. If their goal was “pass immigration reform”, then the strategy should have focused squarely on positive bleeding heart liberal stories about how we have cut the asylum backlog by half. Now, these refugees are being helped into work and are assimilating into society. Then the thing brainless Labour spin doctors are afraid of would happen, right-wing rags would attack us, and guess what. The left would have to come to their rescue. The liberals and lefties alike would sit on TV panels and comment on headlines during paper reviews where they would be expected to *defend* Labour’s immigration policy. The right would continue hating us as they already do, because we won’t drown migrants with our bare hands, but there would be no rebellion on the scale we saw.

As it stands, the soft left of the party saw it as the distinguishing factor because they rightly realised it was ruining the “vibe” of the party. “Vibes” are not based on policy, but are even more important for winning elections. They are what get people out the door and comfortable, even proud, with identifying as a voter and member of a party. Immigration policy is always harsh on the immigrant, because the world is a cruel place like that, it doesn’t mean we can or should be advocating for open borders- a deeply cynical policy. But we will never be a party of people proud to treat any migrants harshly. British people will also never be Danes, which is why I love them so much. Their poetry, sensibility and moral righteousness, whether hypocritical or not, George Orwell knew, was what stopped them from giving in to the worst human compulsions.

By purging the party of its left flank and making it clear left-wingers are not welcome, the Starmer project created a Green Party on its left that has already won a historic by-election and has members who are increasingly both popular and visible. Most worryingly, smart and ambitious staffers from Corbyn’s Labour now work for the Greens.

The hubris began with the way Starmer treated Jeremy Corbyn, MPs from his faction, and staffers from his office. There was no need to kick Corbyn out of the party. Anyone with the small “c” conservative sensibilities the Starmer project tried to LARP, but never embodied, should have been horrified at the spectacle of trashing an old man in public who has dedicated his entire life to the party and who was twice elected leader by its members. Where I come from, we treat our elders and authority figures with respect, even when we vehemently disagree with them. Is it any wonder then that the public, primed by Starmer’s disrespect towards stewardship, didn’t hesitate to turn against him and the British institutions he represents?

Abuse of Power Comes as no Surprise

Like Biden, who boasted he could have beaten Trump in his post-election interviews, Starmer shows no remorse for his abysmal personal failings. The truth is, Starmer repeatedly lied to his party and country, all in service of his own career. “Party over country,” we like to say in Labour when our enemies do something that helps them electorally but damages the country. For Starmer, it is “party over country and Starmer over party.”

Since before the locals, cabinet ministers like Ed Miliband have been trying to level with Starmer to set a timeline for his departure. We knew that Labour would tank the local elections, lose Wales and Scotland and a bunch of mayoralties, which they did. Starmer refused to budge even after the results came out. He was counting on internal polling that showed he would beat any leadership candidate, bar Andy Burnham, in a leadership challenge. That’s because the Labour Party membership is notoriously prudish, especially since the post-2020 purges and the hundreds of thousands of members who tore their membership cards in disgust. The party is allergic to regicide, unlike the Tories, who would have gotten rid of two different leaders before breakfast had they found themselves in a similar situation.

Despite all that, his national polling is abysmal. So he is using a toothless membership base to stay put. In itself, this should not have been reassuring, given that polls ask members to imagine a hypothetical leadership scenario, in which many of them might think, “I don’t want a leadership election, I don’t like shaking the boat, better the devil you know.” That all can change incredibly fast if you start campaigning.

All the current psychodrama could have been avoided if Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) had acted like the party steward it is supposed to be, and not Keir Starmer’s career advisory. Three months ago, when Andy Burnham first announced he wanted to contest the Gorton by-election, they blocked him on the spurious grounds that it would be too costly for the party and the country to have a by-election for the Manchester mayoralty. Excuse me? Since when do we put off elections because of cost?

The result was that the Greens found a literal unicorn to contest the seat. Hannah Spencer is warm, personable and a female plumber (!). Labour came third, despite the party repeatedly gaslighting members and voters about the election being a two-horse race between Reform and Labour. The damage to Labour goes far beyond losing one Parliamentary seat. Hannah is a massive asset to the Greens. It has been proven that the Greens can win by-elections by banding with Independents (and Your Party, Corbyn’s offshoot) even when the seat is not a demographically natural fit for the Greens.

But then the Labour Together scandals hit, and I started reading Paul Holden’s book ‘The Fraud,’ which describes the fraudulent leadership campaign of the Starmer project. You may disagree with the conclusions of the book, but I am a big girl and can make up my own mind, especially as I lived through a lot of the things it describes.

It was around that time that I decided to run for the NEC myself- to drain the swamp. The inner circle of the Starmer project used the party’s processes to ruthlessly purge their factional enemies, which until then they pretended were their comrades. I was horrified with how young members of staff from Corbyn’s office and elderly left wing members were treated. To give you just one example that made me scream into my pillow at the things that happened in my own party, ostensibly in my own name, a non-Jewish guy, who is still a member, created a fake Jewish-sounding persona, registered him as a member and reported hundreds of people from pro-Corbyn Facebook groups. I am by no means contesting that many if not most of these posts were genuinely anti-Semitic, but what gave me pause was the testimony from elderly Holocaust survivors who were reported and told by the party to submit themselves to anti-semitism sensitivity training. Can you imagine the karmic hubris of being a non-Jewish young man, pretending to be Jewish, and trying to kick out of the party a Holocaust survivor because he holds opinions on Zionism that are not in line with what the Jewish majority? For me as a Christian, there is no hell that burns hot enough for such behaviour.

Why could they not just let them be? Why the need to drag these older members through mud? If we accept that our right leaning voters have problematic views but that does not make them bad people, why not extend the same generosity to our left-wing voters? Why accept that a right wing older person may have concerns about immigration despite not being an evil racist, but not that a left wing older person has concerns about Israel without meaning they hate Jews. Both of these groups did not grow up as digital natives, or in the times of Political Correctness being a sackable offence. What’s more, they thought McCarthyism was behind them in the land of the free that once was Britain too.

The Prodigal Son

Anyhoo, with all that hubris burdening my conscience, I started feeling paranoid about the dark triad concentration in my party. When the full scale of Mandelson stuff hit I was out of my mind. I lost my sleep. It seemed to me I have no future in the Labour Party unless I can work and appease a bunch of corrupt, ruthless bastards.

I started typing like there is no tomorrow. My tweets, LabourList and New Statesman columns all turned savage. Then the DMs and the hostile messages by Labour Karens started. Labour Karen are members from the Master Faction of the party who manipulate procedure to nullify their enemy. They hope to be rewarded with a safe seat by the powers that be, hence enjoy doing their disciplining in public the most.

“How dare you Stella! You are so ungrateful to Morgan for saving our party.” (literal message i received)

My blood went cold. Are these sociopaths going to come for me next? I was useful to them while I was willing to go on GBnews and bat for their shitshow but some of them are confused. I am not in the Labour Party because to be a careerist stooge who will parrot any old line if it means I die a Baroness Tsantekidou. I am in the Labour Party because I am a socialist you bloody sell-outs.

The biggest mistake Kamala Harris made was not to draw a clear line between herself and Biden.

Now Andy Burnham needs to put up a fight with Starmer that draws blood. People need catharsis.

For me, that started with Josh Simons pulling the trigger.

For those who don’t know who Josh Simons is, he became a central character in the Morgan McSweeney/Labour Together debacle. He was the director of Labour Together, who commissioned a consulting firm to investigate journalists who were looking into Labour Together’s initially undeclared funding. The investigation was seen as deeply unethical because it basically looked like it was threatening to smear journalists for doing their job.

I noticed Josh a few years ago, when he was often getting flak for making off-the-cuff statements on TV that the press always picked up and got him into trouble. I immediately empathised. He was later picked on for going to Harvard and Cambridge, which again is one of my bugbears.

So an interesting thing that happens when you start writing about *people* in politics your social interactions change. Those who have less to lose start admiring you, and telling you as much. Youths and less senior staffers treat you like a rockstar at Labour conference. They ask for selfies outside the Red Lion and they flatter you with tales about how your substack posts light up their group chats.

If you have something to lose however, because you are a senior staffer, whose boss I write about, or a politician yourself, then you may treat my presence in your vicinity like the plague. That’s especially if you are lacking the discernment to place me correctly on the political spectrum, so feel anxious about whether you measure up to my expectations. If you are good with comms, you know Labour influencers like myself will comment about you whether you talk to me or not, so you may as well give me something positive to defend you with if and when the time comes.

Which is why I was surprised when Josh Simons DMed me to tell me he’s been following my writing for a while and we should get a coffee. He follows me on x, where I have been tweeting like I am waging a holy war on whom I thought were his bandmates. My experience with British people tells me he’d avoid me, would be scared I’d write about him. But then I met him and I realised why he wasn't. And why he got so far, so fast.

Mofo has the X factor. Can't describe it apart from has a bit of Obama in him. Can see why journos lap him up. He was accepting of everything I said even when I was being controversial to test him. I could tell he was mirroring, but he did it so naturally and warmly that I didn't mind. Or we genuinely have very similar politics and I am suffering from post-Labour Together PTSD.

I found him good natured and positive. Like he assumed others have good intentions about him, a quality that first endeared me to Emily Thornberry.

Unlike most politicians I know, he was not defensive. I told him he needs to redeem himself, and especially when it comes to how the left of the party was treated. Rather than telling me to fuck off for the audacity, and also for re-writing his career narrative, he agreed with me when I said that some people use anti-semitism opportunistically for their career. But he explained to me, his experience of it started when he was working at Corbyn’s office and despite not seeing being Jewish as part of his political identity it basically became his defining feature when Seumas Milnes made him the designated Jewish community policy guy. Tensions ensued. Josh submitted his evidence to the first enquiry into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and then left for the US to do his PhD in Harvard while the main intra-party warfare was going on. The Corbynites rightly had him tagged as a possible spy for the Blairites, but those I asked also seem to find him kinda nice?

People who know him from later years described him to me as a very smart psychopath. So for the week after we first met I was watching him like a hawk, braced for the possibility he may pull a Machiavellian move and I would be feasting on his corpse with all the other hacks.

When he published a piece on the Sunday Times calling for the PM to resign after the local elections, I was spiritually aligned with the conspiracy theorists on Twitter who said he did it to force a competition before Burnham has enough time to return to Parliament, so that former Labour Together figurehead Shabana Mahmood- whose media SpAd is Josh’s brother- can launch her leadership challenge instead. It was an unlikely scenario given she would never pass the members ballot, but as we have already established it is my profession to be paranoid.

“If Shabana announces she’s running tomorrow, you will look like a sociopath.” I texted him.

Many MPs would have ignored my provocation. He responded immediately. Clever, clever man.

We met again in the presence of other soft lefties, which further reassured me of his sincerity. But what I didn’t expect was that Josh would offer up his own Parliamentary career to put the nail on the coffin of Starmer’s no10 one.

For months the #StarmerOut flank of the party has been looking for an MP willing to resign so that Burnham can return to Parliament and challenge the PM to a leadership race. When no other graying MP was willing to take early retirement, Simons stepped in, to step down.

I don’t know how to convey to my American audience how bad-ass this is. The guy is 32, he has his whole career ahead of him. You can be cynical and imagine the twisted favours he will expect in return, but I think I have seen enough to make my character judgment, for now anyway.

Josh is not a psychopath. He is a rockstar. The lion I have been calling for in my LabourList columns.

Like all rockstars, he loves the thrill. And, like all rock stars, in its pursue he has been reckless towards others. I am not naive to think he will not be so again. A tabloid article followed a couple of days after his announcement, briefed by sources close to the action to make him sound like a strategic genius. But this is the business we are all in, including myself, writing as I do. So, let them without sin cast the first stone.

So, going back to Yglesia’s lesson: criticise the bad behaviour. Reward the good.

Simons, off the naughty bench.

Starmer, OUT!

1. It's worth reading the full write up of exactly how Starmer framed Corbyn to expell him. Most people have a muddled understanding of it because of the aggressive briefings. It was because he said that while anti-semitism in the Labour party absolutely exists, and accepted the findings of the report, anti-semitism was overstated during his leadership tenure for factional purposes. Something which the ECHR report itself stated was perfectly acceptable.