It is often said that new political leaders have defining moments when they show their steel and stamp authority on their parties. Neil Kinnock’s epic confrontations with the Militant tendency in the 1980s were seen as the battles that won him his spurs, although he was ultimately unsuccessful in his efforts to make Labour electable. For Tony Blair, the decision to ditch clause IV in 1995 showcased New Labour as a force on the political centre ground, one that would go on to win three successive general elections. This weekend a question many MPs are asking is whether Keir Starmer’s brutal sacking on Thursday of Rebecca Long-Bailey, the standard bearer of the Corbynite left in the shadow cabinet, could go down as a defining act of his leadership. Could it be the moment when the brilliant lawyer became the ruthless potential prime minister capable of inspiring fear as well as respect, and of challenging the Tories at the next election? Or alternatively could it prove to be a moment when he split the party, angered much of the membership built up under Corbyn, and destroyed the very unity needed to take Labour forward? Starmer’s people insist that the dismissal of Long-Bailey was nothing to do with any pre-ordained strategy or desire to purge the left. Nothing could be further from the truth, they say. “It was simply a matter of her defying his authority when he had been crystal clear about his determination to root out antisemitism. He likes Becky and had worked well with her. He was not trying to get rid of her,” said one senior party source. Long-Bailey was initially at fault, Starmer’s people say, when she overhastily shared on Twitter an article by the actress Maxine Peake in which Peake said that American police officers had learned tactics used in the incident that killed George Floyd in the US, including kneeling on people’s necks, from Israeli spies. The claims, denied by Israeli police, offended many in the Jewish community who regarded them as antisemitic and offensive. But worse was Long-Bailey’s subsequent refusal to delete the tweet when asked to do so by a senior official from Starmer’s office on the explicit instructions of the leader.
Starmer was on a visit to Stevenage when an aide showed him Long-Bailey’s original tweet, to which she added the comment “Maxine Peake is an absolute diamond”. A senior Labour official said: “Keir’s reaction was that she needs to delete it and she needs to apologise. There were multiple conversations with Becky but she refused to do it. She wouldn’t delete it. She basically thought it would look worse to delete it.” Starmer regarded Peake’s claim, for which the actress later apologised, as an “antisemitic conspiracy theory”. Instead of doing as Starmer ordered, Long-Bailey merely put out a new post saying her sharing of Peake’s article “wasn’t intended to be an endorsement of all of the article”. Some on the left took to Twitter to accuse her of backtracking and friends say she then felt boxed in and was even more determined not to apologise, for fear of further angering the left. She then failed to answer her phone for four hours as Starmer’s office desperately tried to get in touch to insist again that she remove the tweet. Once back in London Starmer did manage to contact her and told her: “I am going to have to stand you down.” Some in the Labour party suspect that Long-Bailey, more than Starmer, was looking for a confrontation, though her allies strongly dispute this. One of Starmer’s supporters noted how quickly leftwing MPs and union leaders came out in a chorus of outrage and treated her as a martyr. “The [socialist] Campaign Group roared into action pretty quickly around her. That was very noticeable,” one said. Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, condemned Starmer’s action as “an unnecessary over-reaction to a confected row”, adding that “unity is too important to be risked like this”. The founder of Momentum, Jon Lansman, called the sacking “reckless”, while former shadow chancellor John McDonnell also registered his disgust and appeared to encourage the left to rally around against Starmer. While Starmer may not have wanted to be rid of Long-Bailey, plenty of Labour moderates believe the events of Thursday can only have done the new leader good. A Labour frontbencher said: “The public will see the contrast with the way Boris Johnson refused to sack Dominic Cummings and how he is hanging on to Robert Jenrick [the housing secretary accused of favouring Tory donor Richard Desmond in a planning case]. It is not a left versus right issue for Keir, it is one of leadership.” A senior Labour MP pointed out that Long-Bailey and the left had, unfortunately for them, picked a fight over a claim for which the author had gone on to apologise. “The hill that they decided to fight on and to die on has disappeared,” he said. Certainly the latest Opinium poll for the Observer – conducted on Thursday and Friday – suggests the incident has done Starmer no harm at all. For the first time since he became leader, Starmer is ahead of Johnson when people are asked who they think would make the best prime minister: 37% favour Starmer against 35% for Johnson. Starmer is also soaring ahead of Johnson in net approval ratings. The Labour leader stands on +27%, up from +22% a week ago while Johnson is on -7%, down from -5%. On Monday Labour’s new general secretary, David Evans, who worked for the party under Tony Blair between 1999 and 2001, and helped it win the 2001 election, takes the reins at party headquarters, succeeding Jennie Formby, who was a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn. His appointment will be watched very closely by all sides of the party. When he was chosen recently, a leftwing figure on the national executive committee said party members who joined under Corbyn “won’t forgive them if they allow a hard right general secretary to wage factional warfare”. One of Evans’s first tasks will be to organise Labour’s response to an investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) into antisemitism in the party, due to be published soon. Starmer has already committed to accepting its findings and setting up an independent complaints process, but how the party deals with the moment will be telling. The left fears the party will be severely criticised for failing to tackle antisemitism complaints, particularly under Corbyn’s leadership, and that he and his team will be left to take the lion’s share of the blame. As shown by the dismissal of Long-Bailey – now replaced by Kate Green – Starmer’s leadership cannot yet emerge from the shadow that antisemitism has cast over the party. But after last week, one thing is now much clearer about the way Starmer will proceed. As one Labour frontbencher put it yesterday: “What we have learned in the last 48 hours is that Keir Starmer is not just a lawyer. He is ruthless too. He will act firmly. If you pick a fight with him you will lose.”