By moving his admired deputy, he risks awakening party factions and raising questions about his own abilities as leader
Keir Starmer picked a fight with his deputy Angela Rayner last weekend and lost. He sacked her as party chair and national campaign coordinator on Saturday, when the election results were still rolling in – and some of them deserved to be celebrated, unlike the wounding defeats that had emerged until that point. The timing was poor, with many wondering why the leader would not wait for the full electoral picture to be known first. The politics was controversial, too, as Rayner – despite her title – did not oversee the campaign, yet it looked like she was being blamed for the result. The word “scapegoat” cropped up everywhere, though Starmer maintains that he takes “full responsibility”. In the minds of some Labour MPs, the mishandling of the situation confirmed their fears about the leader’s political inexperience.
When elected as Labour leader last year, Keir Starmer appointed a shadow cabinet of those perceived to be the “quietly competent” of the parliamentary party. Starmer was shaping the top team in his own image: it was largely made up of those who had kept their heads down during the Jeremy Corbyn years, perhaps grumbling to sympathetic colleagues and local party members but not making their complaints heard publicly. Nick Thomas-Symonds, John Healey, Jonathan Ashworth and others promoted had all served on Corbyn’s frontbench, like the new leader.
