Ditching Starmer would be a gift to Farage: don’t do it

Speculation about the future of Kier Stamer as Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party seems to be reaching fever pitch. Every day there is another story about who is lining up to challenge him, followed quickly with the inevitable stories about the Stop Streeting, Stop Rayner, Stop Burnham campaigns.

My message to the Labour Party is simple: Stop. Now.

I have spent many evenings over the last few weeks knocking on doors in support of my Liberal Democrat colleagues here in Brentwood. What has become very apparent this week is that Reform’s message about voting for them to get Starmer out is landing. It is no good pointing out that these are local elections and that Reform have next to nothing to say about Brentwood and Essex in their leaflets, let alone a hint of a coherent policy. It is all about getting Starmer out.

If Labour do as badly as predicted and hit the panic button, they will hand Farage his biggest victory since the Brexit referendum. That would be insane.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the calmer minds that prevailed at the end of the 1960s when Labour took a similar hammering at the polls to the one expected to engulf them next week. That’s what is needed now. A knee-jerk eviction of Starmer from 10 Downing Street is not what the country needs. Not least because we are in danger of making the job of Prime Minister look impossible if we have to find our seventh Prime Minister in a little over a decade.

Of course, people in the Labour Party and the country are entitled to ask whether Starmer is capable of plotting a course out of the mess his government’s endless U-turns have created and give this government – with its massive majority – a sense of direction and purpose that serves the country’s needs in such stressful times. 

Those are legitimate questions but they should be posed when the electoral dust from next week’s polls has settled. No-one would be more delighted than Farage if leading Labour figures press the panic button and ditch the Prime Minister in repsosne to poor results next week.

The one thing the country definitely does need is to bring any closer the doom-laden prospect of a Reform government with its vile, divisive, hate-driven politics.