LONDON — Boris Johnson once said that “when the herd moves, it moves.” Keir Starmer is trying to stop it trampling him alive.
The British prime minister’s legislative agenda for the year ahead was delivered in parliament this morning by King Charles III — but minutes before he sat down, news leaked of a planned challenge to his leadership from Health Secretary Wes Streeting.
It leaves the PM trying to push through a series of bills despite more than 90 of his MPs calling for his exit and his authority draining low.
So how do you get stuff done — or more simply, cling to office — when you’ve lost the room with your own party?
POLITICO interviewed four former No. 10 staff in administrations where the hordes were at the gate — including for a special episode of the Westminster Insider podcast out this Friday — for their top tips.
1) Brief hard and fast (most of the time)
Get your spin out the door while your opponents are still putting their socks on.
Starmer’s aides did this on Tuesday by briefing the PM’s comments at Cabinet facing down a leadership challenge — while the meeting was still going on.
“Getting that line out did change things,” said Guto Harri, former communications director for ex-Tory PM Boris Johnson. “Having a head start is about as good as it gets in a difficult race.”
Harri did similar when Johnson sacked his Cabinet colleague Michael Gove in 2022, hours before his own resignation. It landed just before the BBC’s 10 O’Clock News. “I rang Chris Mason [the BBC’s political editor] and told him [Johnson] had fired Gove because he was snake and treacherous,” said Harri. “On a mad day when there was enough to say anyway, he got the icing on the cake.”
The PM’s diary can work to his advantage. Starmer refused to see Streeting on Tuesday, except setting up a brutally short meeting hours before the King’s speech on Wednesday.
News of Streeting’s intention to quit leaked moments before the king sat down, causing the leadership hopeful maximum embarrassment. One Streeting ally (without any evidence) accused the leak of coming from allies of No. 10 to force Streeting’s hand at the worst possible time.
Shutting off all briefing can work too — temporarily. Beatrice Timpson, a former senior press aide to Liz Truss and then Rishi Sunak, would sometimes engage airplane mode on her phone to avoid giving out a bad line to take. “If the line is awful, it’s better just to have the awkwardness of not being contactable and resurfacing when you have a better line and a better answer,” she said.
2) Use the trappings of office — and play for time
Sometimes it’s serious. Johnson survived for months longer as the full-scale war in Ukraine raged in 2022, and Starmer has been relying on a similar strategy by focusing on the economic fallout of the Iran war.
Sometimes it’s logistical. No. 10 aides arranged for the king’s speech to fall days after the May elections — ensuring there was a “firebreak,” in the words of one Labour official, where plotting gave way to pageantry. (In the event, it did not.)
Sometimes it involves playing for time. Gavin Barwell, the former chief of staff to Theresa May, recalled the ex-PM winning her first confidence vote by Tory MPs in 2018, months before she resigned. “The key argument we made was that if you change leader at that point, there would be a protracted process, and you would have to extend the deadline for leaving the EU,” he said. “Because there will be no time for whoever emerged as the leader at the end of that process to implement whatever policy that they had set out by the deadline.”
Sometimes it’s the No. 10 building itself. Harri let TV cameras in to record Johnson talking at the start of a Cabinet meeting, then ushered them out. “I explained to the team this is the nearest thing you get to a free hit,” he said. “As long as you are hanging on in there, you’ve got to behave like a prime minister at his height.”
And sometimes it’s silly. Harri recalled a “very senior figure in No. 10” who “suggested to me that we ask the custodians to just bolt the door and not let them in. I said there’s a word for that — it usually happens in a banana republic, it’s called a coup.”
But don’t expect much help from the civil service to weaponize the apparatus of the state, said Ross Kempsell, a former special adviser in Johnson’s government. Mandarins will “reject the idea of getting involved in anything that could look like a political project to shore up the prime minister of the day,” he said.
3) Keep your enemies close — or far away
You’ll need to decide what to do with people who have “privately” told you to go — such as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, whose chat with Starmer on Monday night soon became public knowledge.
“You cannot have somebody sitting in your cabinet who has let the world know they don’t think you’re fit to be prime minister,” argued Harri. But sack them — as Johnson did to Gove — and it can accelerate your demise.
Having a cuckoo in the nest can lead to leaks. Kempsell recalled one reshuffle week when “a minister who I will leave nameless just appeared in the reshuffle room completely uninvited. We were locking the door, [but] he managed to get in during one of the periods where the door must have been unlocked because someone needed to go to the loo or something.”
It’s not just the Cabinet. Managing unruly MPs, who will be prime voters in any leadership contest, is crucial. “Having a very political chief whip who really understands where the opposition is inside the back bench is important,” said Kempsell. “And it’s very important as well that the chief whip is on extremely good personal terms with the prime minister.”
4) Demand their alternative
Theresa May’s key strategy was to ask the warring Brexit camps if they had a viable plan — not that it mattered in the end.
Downing Street is making the same demand of Starmer’s challengers as he pursues a center-left Labour platform at a time of war and a rising cost of living, with rivals whose vision for the country does not always appear too different.
Changing the face might help. Barwell said: “Theresa herself would say the biggest challenge she had was as a communicator, so to a degree maybe there’s a bit of a parallel there.”
But Barwell argues the similarities end there — and May was always in a much weaker position than Starmer should have been.
“She was trying to deal with a kind of existential problem that the country had voted very narrowly to leave the European Union, without any kind of detail about what that might mean in a parliament that was bitterly divided,” he said. “[Starmer] is leading a government with a huge majority.
“I think nearly any observer is flabbergasted that two years after winning a landslide majority, he can find himself in this situation. Her challenge came from the parliamentary arithmetic and the Gordian knot of Brexit. Neither of those exist in this situation.”
5) Don’t go abroad
Prime ministers in peril can be tempted to project business-as-usual with a bit of international summitry — but this can cut valuable face-to-face time with persuadable MPs and allow plotters to plot.
With a leadership contest already underway, Margaret Thatcher infamously pressed ahead with attending a Paris meeting on the future of Europe. She learned that her premiership had been dealt a major blow in the contest’s first ballot while still in France.
Kempsell said: “The hard political management problems that I’ve seen under several prime ministers always occur when the prime minister is traveling. When they are out of the country, people behave differently … their loyalty can slip and they start having secret meetings.”
6) But most of all … they need a reason to back you
Ultimately many of Starmer’s MPs just aren’t enthusiastic about his vision or personality. In the end that will be his undoing, said Barwell: “You can buy yourself time with all sorts of tricks and gimmicks, but it’s not going to solve the problem. That’s why I think this is ultimately going to play out with him going.”
And it becomes a vortex as policy is swallowed in the news agenda — and government time — by leadership speculation. “The bunker itself destroys the chance to get anything meaningful done,” said Kempsell, and can leave people “disappearing into the plughole of the news cycle and just trying to survive?”
Timpson recalled Liz Truss, who lasted only 49 days, gathering her staff for a war room in the Pillared Room in Downing Street. “Frankly, it wasn’t a lack of coordination that was the problem,” she said. “It was a complete lack of substance, of a future of that administration. It was on its knees.”
