The Prime Minister’s remaining advisers did a good job for him on Monday. They nipped the Scottish rebellion in the bud and got statements of support from the Cabinet and others. This has bought the PM time. The Cabinet felt cornered, decided it was too early for their individual moves against the PM and so they had to come out with supportive statements. The Prime Minister had to face a worried party of MPs, and moved leftwards in his rhetoric to win them over.
Today the PM is the prisoner of the leading members of the Cabinet and Parliamentary party. Ed Miliband has been out and about, defining a leftwards lurch in government which he says is now needed to show the electors Labour is the party of change. Most Labour MPs are glad to see the back of Mandelson and will wish to explain their distaste of his policies as they distance themselves from the unfortunate events of the last year.
The markets had a little wobble on Monday as they briefly contemplated a lurch to the left under a possible new leader. For most of the time including all of the last year since Starmer and Reeves took over it has cost the UK government more to borrow longer term loans than on the one day spike up on the worst day of the Truss/LDI crisis in the bond markets. That is an understandable reaction to two Reeves budgets which put spending and borrowing up by too much. The Reeves re jig of the Treasury rules allowed the state to borrow more in the first half of this government’s term. She hoped for faster growth from extra public spending, but instead growth has slowed.
So now the country and the Labour government are in a bind. The Cabinet will try to enforce higher spending bigger public sector policies on Starmer who is their hostage. The bond markets will start to warn the government more that there are limits to how much they can spend and borrow before the lenders decide they have had enough or impose too high a price for the money needed.
It is particularly bad news if Mr Miliband gains greater influence at the head of the group of Cabinet members who become the left wing enforcers. He will want more and more extreme versions of his net zero policies as people refuse to buy heat pumps and electric cars and as renewable power waits for years to get access to enough new grid. There will be no magic green growth for the UK, with ever increasing dependence on Chinese impots of batteries, cheaper electric cars, turbines, solar panels and all the rest of the items Mr Miliband wants to impose on us.
Meanwhile Starmer will be seeking to woo the Labour audience with bigger and bigger give aways to the EU in another mistaken belief that will generate growth when it will lock us into a low and no growth zone and impose on taxpayers yet bigger bills.
February 11, 2026
So we’ll get the further leftward lurch we’d have got if Starmer had gone, because undoubtedly it would be someone from that camp who took over, but we’ll still have Starmer. He’ll be there clinging on and even more determined to ‘change Britain’ to teach us all a lesson for baying for his head on a stick.
Well, as the saying goes, it never rains.