There are the obvious signs that Keir Starmer won’t last. Taxes are going up. Unemployment is going up. Inflation is going up. Even sick days are going up. The only thing not going up is the economy.
But to my mind, a little-reported phone call during the reshuffle last Friday was the signal that Starmer (described by a colleague in the Spectator as a ‘’passive-aggressive Gordon Brown’’ ) definitely won’t last.
That call came between the Prime Minister and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. All had been going well. Yvette Cooper and David Lammy had taken their demotion on the chin. Starmer was buoyed up and asked to be put through to the man who struggled to eat a bacon sandwich.
As far as the voters are concerned, Miliband has been a disaster, pushing up bills higher than almost anywhere in the world to pay for the huge investment in wind farms and solar.
But strangely, he is popular among the 412 Labour MPs. They clearly love a loser, but Starmer wanted the duds out and that included Miliband.
So, according to Robert Peston, ITV’s political editor, he called Miliband and told him he was moving him from energy to Angela Rayner’s old job at housing. Miliband was having none of that.
His arguments were clear. He was only a third of the way through the job, there was so much more to do, and, in any event, he didn’t fancy housing presumably because he knew, and everybody knew, that it was a hospital pass since Labour were not going to hit 1.5million homes they had promised but would be lucky to build a million.
It took one phone call to defeat Keir Starmer. Nothing does it like a reshuffle rejection - Kelvin MacKenzie
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Starmer continued to press his case, but then Miliband played his master card by saying he would prefer to return to the back benches rather than not continue his work at energy.
That shot Starmer’s rabbit. He couldn’t afford to have Miliband wandering around, disgruntled Labour MPs becoming a natural rallying point for the soft left. The pair agreed Miliband would stay where he was.
So, just 14 months into a massive political win with a huge majority, we have a Prime Minister so weak he can’t move an old, failed Socialist warhorse from energy to housing. Just shows how weak he is.
Others will have noticed and will be flexing their muscles. My bet is you will start to see much more public criticism of Starmer from his own side.
And this is where the nation will once again suffer. This government will head further left over the next four years as a mixture of Starmer’s natural incompetence, Jeremy Corbyn’s new party, and that nutter from the Greens, cutting his polling to the mid-teens.
Voters will become more and more irritated at Starmer’s constant extolling of the virtues of his working-class colleagues. He never stopped banging on about the start in life for Angela Rayner, and yet her tax scandal led to his biggest crisis yet.
Now he’s going down the same route with Bridget Phillipson. She’s been picked by No.10 to be their runner in the race to be Deputy Labour leader.
She got the job for three reasons. 1) She’s a northerner. 2) As far as we know, she’s a woman. 3) And quite the most important, she was raised in a council house.
There was no suggestion she was the best person for the job. Most analysts think she was damned lucky to have survived the last reshuffle, but because she ticks the right boxes, she’s in.
Being ‘’working-class’’ gets you a seat at the top table nowadays.
Don't get me wrong, I admire anybody who has got on from any walk of life. I just argue it’s much tougher for the middle-class youngsters today due to all the barriers put up by employers than the working-class, who are welcomed with open arms.
Phillipson will clearly be in the Cabinet for as long as Starmer’s PM, as he has a desperate need to refer to her working classness, and she’s the best poster child. Once he’s gone, somebody might start promoting colleagues on ability.
Hold up. That might mean no Labour MP gets in their own Cabinet. They would make better decisions.